How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’re offering a content management platform that you offer as a SaaS product to these retailers?

David Karandish: Exactly. And in that content management platform, we have a couple of different options. We can provide the content from the Answers.com community. Or we can help partner for the content with top brands. So if you’re a retailer, we can work with a brand who sells products within your retail space. We can also get content from the users of your website, whether it’s feedback on your site itself, or whether it’s somebody filling out a survey and providing information on their customer experience. >>>

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the timeframe that you’re describing, there was activity in the competitive landscape. Of course Quora, with a huge amount of funding, came into the picture and has since become a very large site. How do you view Quora vis-à-vis Answers.com?

David Karandish: First of all, we like to see investment into the question and answer space in general. If you look at the areas that we sit in between, you’ve got an ex-Facebook guy at Quora, you’ve got Twitter guys at Jelly and Medium, and you’ve got an ex-Huffington Post guy at BuzzFeed. If you look at the question and answer, and social and viral article space that we’re in, some of the brightest minds of some of the biggest companies in the last 10 years are now, for their next act, going into this space. So I think we picked the right category to go into. >>>

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You brought in $20 million worth of revenue through Answers.com. What strategic reengineering did you do to the property to get it to the next level?

David Karandish: The previous team at Answers.com was doing very little optimization and split testing. For those who aren’t familiar with this, split testing is where you create a version of the page, create a duplicate version with one or two slight changes, and then you throw 1% of your traffic at that. They were doing an A/B test where they had the default version of the site; they had another version of the site that they wanted to run, and they’d run one or two, maybe three of those at a time. We came in and with our technology, we were able to vastly improve that to where now we’re running thousands of split-tests every single month, all in real-time. >>>

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you were going through this whiteboarding process of what your vision of what the company wants to be when it grows up, what was the financial situation of the company?

David Karandish: We were profitable. We were generating revenue. We were small, but we were doing each of those and we realized we were going to have to adapt and evolve. At that time, we didn’t have any registered users. We didn’t have any of our own unique content. We didn’t have any direct advertisers.

Sramana Mitra: If you could acquire something, the process would go a lot faster. That’s fully understandable. To be able to go acquire a major property, what kind of revenue levels were you going out to do that with? >>>

Entrepreneurship Does Not Equal Financing

I am terribly irritated by the pervasive and continuously fanned misperception that Entrepreneurship equals Financing.

It doesn’t.

Entrepreneurship = Customers + Revenues + Profits.

Financing is optional.

Exit is optional.

The media is reinforcing the myth. Business schools are reinforcing the myth. And hence, they’re setting up entrepreneurs for failure.
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How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A plan did not exist at that time?

David Karandish: Answers.com was not a parallel path. We acquired Answers.com in 2011. Around 2008-2009, we did a white boarding strategy session. We brought some of the key management team members in and asked them, “If we were going to build the ultimate Internet company, what would that look like?” We checked off a bunch of items. A great brand that consumers recognize and lots of high-quality content. The content would be unique, stuff you can’t find in other places. Ideally, that content would be increasingly from users and it would capture the voice of consumers. >>>

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 1)

You would think question and answer sites are hard to monetize. Read how David Karandish built Answers.com to be a profitable $200M+ company … Note, the much-hyped Quora doesn’t monetize at all yet.

Sramana Mitra: David, let’s start with your background. Where does your story begin? What is the back-story to the Answers.com story?

David Karandish: I was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri. I went to Washington University in Saint Louis and studied computer science and entrepreneurship. While I was in high school, my friend Chris and I started working together on a bunch of entrepreneurial ventures. We did that through college, graduated with a degree in Computer Science, and then ultimately started this current company. >>>

Getting Working Capital to Build Your Product and Your Business

By Guest Author Poornima Vijayashanker

As the old adage goes, “It takes money to make money.” If your goal is to eventually build a business, then you’ll need to realize that this requires capital, and I want you to have a sense of how you can get this funding. I also think there are a lot of myths about how software products are built, and I want to present you with a number of financing options so that you can choose a realistic path forward. >>>