Q&A Space: who's winning, who's losing, and why it matters

First, let me say that a picture is worth a thousand words:


Ok, that done, consider the following:
1) Sodahead = raised 4.25 million in Funding.
2) Yedda = raised 2.5 million, had 20 people on staff, and beat us out to get acquired by AOL last year for a rumored 15-20 million.
3) Wis.dm raised 5 million in funding.
4) Minti.com raised 1.5 million in funding.

So the average here is somewhere around a few million dollars to do...what, exactly? Our team is 7 people: 2 full time, 3 part time, and two "occassional" (aka, the other owners than me who help, but not on a regular, routine basis).

Is Mike Arrington listening? Nope. (and as an FYI, I did have a personal introduction email sent to him by his business parter, who copied me on it as well).

Do you here me, Pete Cashmore? Nope. And the number of times I've written (3) and commented (dozens) on their continued coverage of sites like these (above) that are doomed to failure, AND they continue to ignore us, when our business model is working & traffic, visitors, and engagement are all taking off...well, it's odd. :)

Did GigaOm want to say something? Nope, and I even had him on the phone for about a half hour. He still didn't give us the time of day in any of his write ups.

Why oh why is it that we get ignored? FunAdvice is in the top 5 Q&A sites in the world. We don't work together, all in the same office so between our virtual collaboration AND lack of investment capital, isn't it an amazing story? Yep.

Couple that with our commitment to making the world a better place, FunAdvice is a business like no other in our category. Every larger Q&A site is part of a publicly traded firm, OR larger parent co with hundreds of millions in investment capital.

Our story is unique, compelling and getting more interesting. However, if you want to read a story like this, you CAN'T read it at places like TechCrunch, Mashable, or GigaOM. G4: Attack of the Show even gave us some air time ;) A dozen or more radio stations have also given us some air time.

However, leading blogs & other print publications apparently believe we aren't press worthy. Sigh.

Welcome to 2008, Webmasterworld: adding the "quick reply"

I've been posting at Webmasterworld for nearly 8 years...wow.

And, we've been running funadvice for nearly five years. So, when I visited webmasterworld and saw the "quick reply" text box at the bottom of a discussion (something we've been doing for over a year on FunAdvice) I smiled :)

Welcome to 2008. People don't want to *work* to use a website. And WebmasterWorld is still about 3-5 times bigger than FunAdvice. However, we're growing faster. As they're run by professional webmasters with, combined, more experience than our small FunAdvice team, I must say I'm flattered that they took the concept & ran with it.

Continual improvement is hard. And, with any larger size site, you constantly find stuff that, once fixed, scratches an itch your members might not have even realized they had until you fixed the problem.

So, anything you see on FunAdvice today that bothers you? Let us know.

TechCrunch shows top 30 social networking sites

This post was interesting comscore top growing social networks. The 30 number is odd though as a cut off point, but it illustrates one key thing: Social networks are huge, and growing fast. What would the top 50 look like?

Well, most of them. My former employer (Yahoo) is shutting down it's 360 service...I couldn't get it, even when it launched, and was confused as to why my fellows hopped on the bandwagon. Lycos, Windows are both slowing or declining...well, that makes sense. It's hard for mega corps to do personal well, and it's hard for a once shining star to keep it's fires lit (lycos).

FunAdvice has had a banner year, with amazing growth (you knew last October, we had 76K visitors? unreal). This October, we should top 1 million, or be very close. The top 5 days this month were all over 34K visitors, and weekly grow is still close to 5% at this point.

Thanks to everybody - Dara, Adam, Ericson, Harish and Widhadh (especially Widhadh, as that's my wife) for putting up with me for the last year. I drive hard, I complain, I fuss, and I act like one of my children frequently.

Here's a list of what didn't happen that could have been a big deal for us:
denied to speak at a conference over allegations of "cheating"
denied to present at another conference, probably because we have a business model & a ton more traffic, so it was hard to see how we need the money (we don't).
ignored by Om Malik, even after I spent 30 min on the phone with him :(
no response when introduced to the TechCrunch guys by one of their board members

Can you believe it? All those "connections" we have, amounting to zero. Still, we realize that write ups & fame for FunAdvice aren't really where it's at. Our product is working, our model is sound, and we have a TON of cool features in the pipeline.

The people who use our site, from what I can tell, have never been happier (and that includes me). Got suggestions? Let us know, or contact me personally (thedude) on the site via fun mail. If your idea makes sense, we'll add it to our list.

Thanks everybody.

If you are a serial entrepreneur, do you buy other people's stock?

My guess is - no, if you're a serious, hard core, serial entrepreneur, you don't invest in other people's stock (eg, buy on NASDAQ or similar). Why would this be?

Here's my rationale:

1) If you build a company, the best return on investment is in that company - NOT somebody else's. You don't need to know that Larry & Sergey from Google just became tied for the 5th largest individuals in the US to understand this. However, knowing that they *are* tied for fifth place now (with 18 billion each) should give you something to think about. Of the folks ahead of them, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffet, guess what they have in common? They all made a ton of money building their own company.

2) 90% of the people in the US with a net worth more than $5 million dollars made their fortune either by building their own company, OR joining another company when it was very small, then it got huge. Think George Reyes, the soon to be retired CFO of Google. Or Eric Schmidt, the current CEO of Google. They didn't build it, but they're still worth hundreds of millions as a result of joining when it was still "small".

3) Another example: in 2004, the gross revenue from the sale of a business I co-founded topped the salary I'd made for the trailing 12 months by more than 10%. Considering that business started life with a $5K investment from my former partner (Hi Mike!), and we built it part time while we both had full time jobs...imagine the difference if we'd both been able to work on it full time. :)

4) A solid formula for the valuation of a private business with a modest rate of growth & solid prospects in a growing market is six times annual revenue. So, let's say you had a business that made $100K per year, gross. Selling it would net you $600,000 and then capital gains would take 25% tops, which then puts your post tax profit at $450,000. Plus, there are perks along the way of building your own business, however, there is a lot more paperwork & less "security". If you are willing though, the average business owner, 5 years into a business, makes $250K per year. Compare that to your day job, and then ask yourself, "do they pay me enough?".

5) By running a business, you will meet far more people in your industry than you ever would, even if you network promiscuously. These contacts will help grow your business, and you can help them & add value to their careers because of your growing network of contacts. Become a "hub" in your space, and your value will multiply, even if you sell out to a larger firm, you'll be higher up than you would have been climbing the corporate ladder.

What about you? For me, in all seriousness, the only time in my life I've owned somebody's stock was Yahoo, through an option package. Every time a new chunk vested, I sold, as if it was on fire. To date, if I'd stayed at Yahoo, my stock options would be worth 2 dollars per share less than the strike price. In other words, nearly 3.5 years later, I'd have the privilege of owning their stock for more than the fair market value. Even now, as much as I like some companies, I can't bet on that many people, where I don't know enough, that they'll win as much as I'll win, with my team, and me playing captain.

Steve Poland is AWESOME

If you read any tech related blog, you have to give techquila shots a read at some point. His content is interesting and can help give you some ideas for your technology startup, *and* he's seriously the most helpful guy I've "met" online in the past few years, outside of folks on FunAdvice :).

As I've read at least 100 blogs 3-5 times, but forget most of them, the fact that his content is consistantly quality enough to keep me reading it is food for thought. And, did I mention he's extremely helpful & nice?

(btw - if you're reading this & I'm late sending you anything, sorry! I just had to give Steve a plug b/c he's sent, on request, a bunch of helpful tips that should assist FunAdvice in getting to our two million+ visitor monthly goal by the end of the year).

SPAM from some dork

Slightly edited...read below & note the following:
1) they are spamming blogs who mention Yedda (are they spamming blogs who mention us, too?)
2) The fuckhead didn't personalize his writing
3) We don't allow swearing on funadvice.com...but, when I'm blogging & some ASSHOLE spams me, you better believe I'm going to call him an idiot.

Not to mention, an asshole. Kevin, kindly, fuck right off ;)

My name is Kevin Carey and based on your coverage of Yedda and other Q&A sites, I thought you might be interested in covering a new website I have developed.

QueryCAT () is a new search engine that has indexed FAQs from all over the web and made them searchable from a single site. Its an interesting take on the "vertical search engine" in that it is not topic specific, but instead searches a specific "format" of web page.

We have indexed over 4 million questions by crawling the web and applying our own unique question recognition technology to power the search.

We believe that a comprehensive FAQ search will be a very valuable tool for many people.

In addition to our own site, querycat.com, we plan to offer the FAQ database and question recognition technology to other companies that want to add FAQ search to their own site.

If you have any questions about the site, please let me know. I am interested to hear what you think.

Kevin Carey
Founder, QueryCAT
webmaster@querycat.com
Technorati tags: querycat, kevin carey, asshole, spammer. :)

Have you read what would machiavelli do by stanley bing?

Last year, I picked up a book on a whim called What would machiavelli do? The ends justify the means. The author was Stanley Bing, who's apparently a comedian because the book was not only engaging, but funny as well.

The author used quotes from modern day titans like Trump, Madonna, Jack Welch, and others who have done amazing things in business in their respective fields, to illustrate the teachings of Machiavelli. The excuse was that the language has changed so much, it would be easier to pass along the parables with icons we can related to, like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and other industry heroes.

What's this got to do with FunAdvice? Great question!

The long and short of it is that while we could embrace more aggressive tactices (cough, cough, previous post, etc) we firmly believe that there are some things that are aggressive and OK, while others are simply unacceptable. Hopefully, you appreciate the difference, and vote with your feet when you chose a question and answer site to participate in, or community to be a part of.

Web-kinz hired a company to do social media spam tagetting US

I'm pissed. These fuckheads at Web*kinz decided to hire some forum spammers or similar low life scum to start dropping their brand name on our site.

Give me a fucking break people! You just got written up in Gigaom for having a large virtual world, and then you try to spam somebody who, until 10 minutes ago, had a bit of respect for you b/c of your rapid growth.

Go screw yourselves, seriously. Technorati tags: webkinz, ganz, kinzcash.

Networking & learning more about who does what

We try (but fail) to keep up with who's doing what out there, both because we're passionate about the web & also because people are doing some amazing stuff.

First, I'd like to mention menuism.com - if you haven't taken a look at it, check it out. Bootstrapped, well done, and a serious competitor (imho) to the restaurant category / section of larger well funded sites like insiderpages, yelp, etc.

Second, I'd like to take the time to say if you are a blogger, drop Steve a note. It's not often you get a chance to get written up for no more than a comment, and as people know, all press is good press.