Category Archives: Startups

The LOCQL Landscape

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Man, what an exciting time we are living in right now. We are starting to see another aspect if the web explode with innovation – the local landscape. Local web applications are infiltrating almost every aspect of our daily lives – searching, shopping, taking pictures, and now Questions and Answers. Question and Answer sites (Q&A as they are referred to) have been around for quite some time, but only recently have entrepreneurs started innovating on the core concept: You ask a question, someone answers it. Startups such as Quora, Hipster, Travellr, localuncle, and many others are recreating the Q&A space for the era of social connectivity.

Quora

Quora, for example, founded by former Facebook employees, aims to build THE go to application for wisdom and knowledge. The cool thing about Quora is you can follow well known people as they continue to add their knowledge to the site. Quora seems to be the emerging leader of these newly minted social Q&A sites. Thus far they have maintained their focus on the relatively smaller web tech community of Silicon Valley. Questions remain (pun intended) if Quora can uphold their quality of answers as they grow in quantity of questions.

Hipster

Then there’s Hipster. Quite frankly, no one really knows what this little Q&A startup is doing. If you go to their homepage you are greeted with a prompt to search questions and answers about SXSW, a conference held in Austin, TX every March. Isn’t it almost June? One thing is for sure, they know how to generate PR and attention. I guess we’ll just have to keep an eye on this one.

But what if you added your specific location to asking a question and receiving an answer? Location based Q&A opens doors we only dreamed of just a few short years ago. “What if I could send into the ether a specific question about the city I just landed in and BAM, one minute later I receive an answer from someone I don’t even know who lives here?”

LOCQL

Enter LOCQL, a Seattle startup some refer to as “Foursquare Meets Quora”. These guys smartly put together two basic premises; 1) everybody knows a little bit about something and 2) location information always make something more valuable. Marry those together and (at scale) you have a living, breathing repository of location relevant information based upon where you currently find yourself. Isn’t that the basis of mobile search? When I use my iphone for search, I am generally looking for a restaraunt, coffee shops, a retail store, an address, directions, and many other location based information. Additionally, what if someone infused a solid Q&A application with mobile commerce capabilities? Mark my words, I believe this space will yield a big hit.

I caught up with LOCQL co-founder Robert Mao recently and asked him a few questions about his company and where it’s going.

Describe and explain LOCQL in a few sentences.

“LOCQL is a location based question and answer site that helps people find answers to places.
LOCQL uses game mechanics to enable social power to find the missing links between the user’s queries and the places in the local landscape they are searching for. Hopefully will be able to bring the local search and location based search to a higher level”

How did you come up with the idea behind LOCQL?

“The idea for LOCQL came from our life experiences, as International travelers, we traveled to many different places, relocated our home’s several times in different countries. There are so many ‘best kept secrets’ only local people know about, those who’ve been there just know it. Unfortunately, without a service like LOCQL, you won’t be able to find it from the web, nor you can find it through search engines. We realized people are increasingly looking for answers about places, according to Bing, over 50% mobile device originated search queries are about a specific place. Google’s Marissa Mayer recently mentioned 20% of all Internet search is about places! In those queries, only around 30% can be solved with today’s information retrieval based search technology. A big pie is missing! We are aiming on make this better.”

Yahoo Q&A has been around for a while. Why attempt a new Q&A site?

“Q&A has been around for a long time, even before search engine become popular. Q&A is one of the most natural modes of communication for human beings and we believe there are still plenty of space to make it even better. As you can see, Yahoo Answer has been there for such a long time, Stackoverflow.com become the most trusted source for the developer community, and the recent rising of Quora.com illustrates how a better designed Q&A can be incredibly attractive and useful. When we began work on LOCQL, none of the Q&A site were specifically for location related questions, or most of them just treat location a name or a category. In our point of view, location answered questions are very important and since they are increasing in frequency they deserve special attention.”

With a lot of competition, besides the location aspect how do you differentiate yourself?

“We do it quite differently, we deeply believe in “Less is more” principle. We do less, so we will be able to provide a better user experiences, especially when designed for the location/place related Q&A. We try to only solve a smaller set of problems than most of the existing players, so we can be much more focused. Another very interesting angel we try to solve the problem is gamification. “Be fun” is another principle when we design our product. If you try LOCQL you will find we have many social game elements build in, in fact some part of the service are purely enjoyable games for you and your friends. No matter if you want to travel, you want to move your home, or find more interesting things around your local community, it’s FUN! We try to make the service fun, playful, and at mean time, so it can capture some value and be useful at the same time.”

What is LOCQL’s current status, and what are your immediate next steps?

“We just opened up to a wider beta. In the first phase, we only let in around 150 test users in order to verify a few of our assumptions and help us understand this space better. We are now more confident and are accepting a wider group of users to try our product, also we released our gaming mechanic in this new phase, so LOCQL will be the most enjoyable Q&A site out there. It’s not just boring questions and answers.”
Image courtesy of of Flickr user Alexanderdrachmann.

Entrepreneurs Can’t be Wishy-Washy

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“There are some people who just get what they want in the world. If you want to start a startup you have to be one of those people. You can’t be passive and wishy-washy,” – Paul Graham

During the second day of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, Paul Graham sat down for a chat with Charlie Rose.  Paul Graham is the founder of Y-Combinator, a popular incubator and launch pad for early stage startups.  One interesting tidbit any entrepreneur considering Y-combinator should take note is the current acceptance rate at YC. It’s around 3%, which may be just slightly better than traditional VC fundraising.  I assume this number to get even smaller as YC gets more popular.  Also noteworthy, here’s who they look for:

… we’re not looking for people who did what they were told in life.

Here’s the Best Way to Increase Your Company’s Value

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Have a co-founder.

On stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, prolific Angel investor Ron Conway spoke on what makes Great entrepreneurs Great.  They interviewed almost 500 CEO’s from their portfolio companies and found some interesting nuggets of wisdom.  Here is a big one: having a co-founder greatly increases your exit.  Companies with exits (or the potential of an exit) in the $25m range, single founders made up only 16%.  Even more interesting, exits of $500m+ (or the potential of an exit) , single founders only made up 11% of the group.  A full 89% of the group were companies with 2 or more founders.  This does not surprise me.   Larry and Sergey (Google).  Steve and Steve (Apple).  Bill and Paul (Microsoft).  Jerry and David (Yahoo).  David and Bill (HP).

Founders – life looks better with a friend along for the ride.

I Hear the Future

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And it’s a Daily Deal Nearby!

Loopt has partnered with Groupon to push their users notifications about nearby daily deals.  Currently, I am not sure how I feel about my phone buzzing every minute as I walk down the street to notify me about deals, regardless if I am interested or not.  This might change, but that is how I feel right now.  What do you think?

Why I Cry During Horse Racing

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I have always been a sports fan.  I like soccer, basketball, baseball, football, hockey, tennis, UFC.. you name it.  Although I was not raised around horses and the track, horse racing for some reason draws me in.  There is something about it that is so intriguing and attractive I cannot help but watch.  Today is the Preakness Stakes and I recently realized how similar horse racing and the startup ecosystem are.   Maybe now I am starting to understand why I am so attracted to this sport.

The winner is almost always a surprise

Once a year the Triple Crown tugs at the heart of the sporting community.  As sports fans, deep down we want to root for the underdog.  We want to see an upset.  When those 20 horses line up at the starting gate we have no idea which horse will actually step across the finish line before any of the other horses.  Yes, you can take the odds.  But how often do those odds actually play out accordingly?  I use this racing analogy because success as a startup is pretty much exactly the same as success on the race track.  Starting out, we have no idea who will emerge as the “winner”.  Talent, funding, product, iteration, attitude, economic climate all influence the outcome of the race.  It is always a surprise, isn’t it?   MySpace looked like the breadwinner only to have Facebook clean its shorts around the second turn of the race.   That’s incredible.  Who knew?  I guess that’s why we play the game.

The winner almost always has to adjust their tactics mid-race

If you watch any horse race, you will notice the race is actually won by the jockey, not the horse.  The jockey (the CEO) observes the dynamically changing environment, quickly calculates their options and immediately decides to direct the horse (the company and product) towards the best route for victory.   This is no small task and requires tremendous skill to perform under pressure.  They learn to Pivot at the best possible time.   The word pivot is probably used way to often to describe the transition from one strategy to another in an effort to move a business forward.  Yet I think it is such a great word and such an important tactic.  Great Leaders understand when conditions have become suboptimal, and possess the wherewithal to quickly make necessary changes in order to be successful.

The winner almost always has a storied past

One thing is for sure when I watch these events.  I will tear up.  I tear up more during “extraordinary feats of competition” than any Rom-Com (romantic comedy) that I must watch with a girlfriend.  Why would I tear up during a horse race?  I tear up because the obvious time and effort, blood, sweat and tears put in by the jockey, the breeder and the horse.  There is always a story of triumph over insurmountable circumstances.  And they didn’t quit.  I am so moved by extraordinary accomplishment, maybe because I hope I will one day experience the feeling.  And just as they put in this effort, so does the startup founder.   It is truly an amazing accomplishment to take a seemingly impossible idea and turn it into a network of over 600 million people.  Or leaving Russia as a child for the USA to eventually pursue your dream and become a successful entrepreneur.  Or, after almost 10 years of grinding away not being the darling of the internet, going public and watching your stock double the first day on the market.  For that matter, launching any product and achieving a profitability in-s0-much-as just enough to sustain your business operations.  Those are great stories worth a tear or two.

And I guess that is why I like Horse Racing.

Instapaper is a Lifesaver

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“A simple tool to save web pages for reading later.”

In these times of information overload, Instapaper is an incredible service.  Once you create an account, all you have to do is click the Read Later icon located on your bookmarks toolbar to save any article (or webpage) for later use.  Access your account anytime and you have a running list of  saved pages.  Lifesaver.  I will be using Instapaper as a daily resource for now on.  Thanks Instapaper guys.