Will Startups.com Suffer from Quantity over Quality?

Written by Dana Oshiro / November 5, 2009 1:30 PM / 8 Comments

This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The channel is sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. To sign up for BizSpark, click here.

Earlier today we posted about Answers.com's rise as a revenue and page-view generator. Through user-generated Q&A posted to WikiAnswers, the company is crowdsourcing heaps of daily content, ranking high in search across a variety of subjects, subsequently seeing steady traffic and, finally, cashing in via Google ads. It's a simple business model, but from a user standpoint there remains one question: Are we seeing quality solutions?

KillerStartups hopes to ensure that entrepreneurs get quality solutions. The company launched Startups.com as a WikiAnswers-style Q&A site specific to business.

According to TechCrunch, Startups.com is built on StackOverflow's Stack Exchange and offers basic Q&A, tagging, badges for prolific experts and community voting on solutions. Users can enter questions via the site, email or through Twitter by using the tag @askstartups.

When it comes to finding out information about salaries and SEO strategy, WikiAnswers might help, or it might just open the door to a good old fashioned rant. The hope is that instead of wasting time digging through spam and fodder, that Startups.com will offer entrepreneurs the answers they need to focus on their businesses. Nevertheless, with a system that moderates in exactly the same way as WikiAnswers it's too early to tell if this community's quality users can keep spammers and sub-par experts at bay. And if quantity really is the name of the game, then does KillerStartups really want to?

For more information visit Startups.com or checkout KillerStartups for the company's own description of the service.

Microsoft BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. Click here to apply.

Comments

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Hey Dana,

Thanks a lot for your post. Startups.com is a business Q&A community site, and we aim at becoming sort of "Wikipedia for business" (kinda). People can edit questions, and answers, and also vote up or down the answers they feel are the best for the question. Today we're launching and we have high expectations to become the place where a vibrant business community go to ask business questions. Hopefully the quality gets better and better with time, and with the success of the site attracting more and more expert in different fields.

Posted by: garzuaga | November 5, 2009 1:41 PM

Just for the record, SmallBusiness.com is also a wiki. But not the Q&A kind. It runs on the mediawiki platform and is completely Creative Commons licensed.

Rex Hammock
(http://rexblog.com) (http://smallbusiness.com/user:Rex)

Posted by: rexhammock.myopenid.com | November 5, 2009 3:25 PM

It can be useful if there is good control over answer votes.

Posted by: Ahmad Barirani | November 5, 2009 3:50 PM

I for one am a big fan of just a plain simple Q&A site. I can find easy answers right away. If I see bull crap, I won't even bother with the place. More sites need to catch on to this practice if they hope to get a revenue out of it.

I found a great one here: http://ereaderquestions.com/

Posted by: Jamie | November 5, 2009 4:04 PM

There's also OnStartups.com, which is using the StackOverflow software in exactly the same space. Let the best one win! (I suppose...)

Posted by: Jamie | November 5, 2009 11:56 PM

I like this site very much as it is the simple way through which you are getting ans for your queries. On the site, people will be able to post every single question that an entrepreneur could feel like asking and have it answered by a community of passionate (and knowledgeable) individuals.

Posted by: r4 card | November 6, 2009 4:39 AM

As long as they keep things simple, I think this site will be fantastic.

Posted by: Karli | November 8, 2009 1:16 AM

How would test the functionality of a NIC (The IP address prefix reserved for loop back is required).Write down the steps required to do this.

What is the output?

What does it indicate?

Posted by: abdi | December 2, 2009 1:23 AM