Joel has decided to chase venture capital for StackOverflow, but I can’t exactly figure out why. He lists six benefits that just don’t compute under even light scrutiny:
1. The Answers market is in a land grab mode
Unlike eBay, where there’s a general market for goods and you get huge network effects from having a critical mass of buyers and sellers, StackOverflow is all about niches. People who are searching for “how to make sql server not go slow?” aren’t likely to bleed over to “how to make swedish meatballs?”.
This means that you’ll have to fight for every niche. Similar to how general forums would have to fight for every niche. Just because you have a forum site that’s big for gamers, you won’t have much of an edge attracting foodies.
Finally, it’s not like this is a new idea with no other entrants. Look at Yahoo Answers for a site that’s still up with a similar model and look at Google Answers for another that couldn’t be turned into a worthwhile business and closed.
2. Stack Overflow is like Starbucks
It really isn’t. Starbucks can use capital efficiently because they have big capital expenditures securing land, building out stores, and purchasing coffee machines. Where’s the capital intensity part of starting another answers site? Adding another server? Coming up with a new design?
It doesn’t seem like Stack Overflow can efficiently use big money for anything but advertising itself. Which is kinda funny when the whole business is about getting page views to sell for ad crumbs. It also rings very much like dot-com. Remember when all you had to do was get eyeballs? Oh, it’s free? Who cares, let’s make it up on volume!
3. Stack Overflow wants to get on Techcrunch
If you’re listing the publicity of “Stack Overflow raises $10M in Series A by Fancy Schmancy VC” as the 3rd pro for taking money, you’re bound to be in trouble. The Techcrunch post you’re going to get from this is going to scroll off the front page in 4 hours and nobody who’s actually going to use your service is going to care.
Do you think people looking for an answer to “how do I get the three gold rings in zelda?” is going to give a hoot who’s money you’re burning to provide that forum? Or even that the advertisers you’re hoping to attract is going to look at anything else than CPM and demographics for a clue on whether to invest? No.
4. The investor will give you advice, connections, and introductions
They may, but most of the introductions your typical investor is going to give you is how to get you out in 3-5 years. You can find a lot of advice in many places. Rarely is the quality of the advice associated with having money involved of largely superior quality.
And if you end up building something of considerable value, then the connections and introductions will come all by themselves. You usually have to work to fight them off with a stick when things are going great. And getting an intro to Mr. Very Important Person before you have anything of material value is usually not going to give you much anyway.
5. Taking money means big exit or IPO
I’d argue the opposite. When you take money, your exit is bound to be smaller unless you’re playing the Web 2.0 lottery game (where a few lucky contestants gets bought for sums completely uncorrelated to business fundamentals). Taking money means giving up equity, which means there’ll be less left over if you happen to build something that’s valuable enough for others to buy.
And I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the IPO markets aren’t all that interested in eyeball companies without the numbers to back them up any more. Doesn’t matter how many letters of the alphabet you’ve used for series whatever funding before you got there.
If you can build a great, profitable business, you’ll have all the options to sell or go IPO. Taking VC only complicates that.
6. Taking VC will make your company successful
This one is funny. So if you’re not looking to take VC and play the Web 2.0 lottery or aim for an early exit, you’re just in it for “personal aggrandizement”. If you take the money, you just want the best for your business. Spot the disconnect here.
Now even given all this, there’s actually still an argument for why Joel should take the money. It’ll probably lower the chances of Stack Overflow ultimately succeeding as a long-term sustainable business, but if he has eyed that he has a hot property right now, it’ll be a good time to take some money off the table.
A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else. If Joel and co. can negotiate a deal with Sand Hill road to give them a nice payout as part of the deal, this might well be even better than trying to shop around Stack Overflow for a sale that it’s probably premature for.
Much better to take a small slice of the proceeds from a “if this just get 1% of the billion dollar advertising market” than to take the slice from “how much money did you make for the past 12 months?” of a strictly look-at-the-books sale.
Go cherries, go!
Bryan H
on 16 Feb 10David,
Your points are well made. I agree with most of what you say in general in regard to venture capital. I wonder, however, if there is ever a circumstance when you feel VC would be a good play?
rvr
on 16 Feb 10“a fool and his money will soon be parted” is how the expression goes. i like your version a lot, though…
great post. i just ready joel’s post and it didn’t ring true. stack overflow doesn’t feel right as a vc-backed company shooting for scale and big valuation. you crystallized some of it here.
DHH
on 16 Feb 10Bryan, I think the Starbucks example is a great one. If you have big capital expenses up front and a proven, reproducible model that can benefit from land grab, I can see an argument for it.
But usually that should be much later in the game. First you want to be sure that the thing works before applying the rocket fuel. That means already having a profitable business where the numbers work. Adding capital just accelerates that.
Spending VC to fund unproven R&D / market development in software/services seems to almost always a bad idea.
rvr
on 16 Feb 10@bryan h, he mentioned ebay, starbucks, and amazon. it seems that companies that will actually benefit from massive scale, that can use the capital efficiently, because what they’re doing is replicable across many, many units, make sense for vc. it gives them the ability to build out quickly, and economies of scale allow them to reach profitability faster. some models only work well at a large size. others suffer from a large size, or don’t make sense because they can’t take advantage of the benefits of scale.
DGentry
on 16 Feb 10From what I know of stackoverflow, they’ve been bootstrapping it along with their own funds and have really not been able to pay the programmers working on it a salary. They see an opportunity to customize it for a number of different niches, but no money for even a modest staff to work on it so progress is slow.
I suspect the amount of money they’d be looking to raise is small, in the high hundreds of thousands to low single digit millions to pay a team for 2 years. They might be better off looking to angels than to VC funds.
Anthony Smith
on 16 Feb 10I have to agree with most of these comments. After listening to the stack overflow podcast for many months, the VC route seems to be in direct contrast to Jeff Atwoods view on how this should be done, and he’s the other partner in stack overflow. Joel is also discontinuing his Joel on Software blog from today too, probably in anticipation of the backlash he will be getting from the Busines of Software guys over this new tack. I enjoy using stackoverflow almost daily to help me out in my job, but I don’t really see how going the VC route will make it, or Stack Exchange a better product or service.
Dharmesh Shah
on 16 Feb 10You make some good points and I’m the last guy that’s ever going to argue for raising VC unless absolutely necessary (and I’ve been prolific and vocal on the matter).
But, a few points:
1. What Joel is looking to build is more about StackExchange (the Q&A platform) not StackOverflow (the site for developers). StackOverflow is the leading example of what can be done with StackExchange.
2. StackExchange is not about advertising—it’s a SaaS model, charging a monthly subscription fee. So, they don’t have to live on “advertising crumbs”.
3. Seems unlikely that Joel will be able to take money off of the table from this venture around. That’s usually reserved for companies that are further along (i.e. making significant revenues) as a way to help entrepreneurs take some “comfort cash” off the table.
4. There’s no law that says that Joel has to take a lot of money. He might strike a deal that brings in just a little bit of capital so he can invest in the business.
Joel’s a smart guy and has good business instincts, so it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.
DHH
on 16 Feb 10DGentry, when was going off in to the woods for 2 years to build The Master Site ever a good idea? Fog Creek has 34 employees. Why not fund Stack Overflow development through that if you believe in the idea?
DHH
on 16 Feb 10Dharmesh, if this is about building a service company, why the need for funds? What are those funds going to do? If you get people to actually pay for using StackExchange, you should be profitable almost from the get-go. If this is the case, there’s even less reason to VC.
Also, if all they need is a small amount for a couple of guys, why not self-fund? Surely running a software company with 34-developers should be enough to get something like this off the ground.
Bryan H
on 16 Feb 10David, What about advertising/marketing costs? I can’t quit my job until my thing has customers, but I can’t get customers unless I market my product. I have a very niche market that doesn’t spend much time online looking for my service, even though my service is online. Where am I supposed to get the marketing budget?
Fred
on 16 Feb 10Maybe you can hook him up with some Bezos cash instead?
DHH
on 16 Feb 10Fred, great deals when you can find them. But there aren’t many sources available that’ll allow you to take money off the table without requiring 3-5 yr exits, board seats/control, or other typical VC strings.
Also, these deals typically require that you already have a well-oiled business that’s profitable and sustainable. Rarely available for just Big Idea stuff.
Fred
on 16 Feb 10Gotcha. For the record, I completely agree with this post.
Tom Leys
on 16 Feb 10Bryan – Until you can sell directly to a few customers, you probably shouldn’t launch an on-line campaign. Once you have identified and satisfied a few key customers, you will know what they need, where they hang out, why they want / don’t want your product and you will have some money.
Get out of your business and talk to people.
Also, I’m in the same position – no money to quit, no time to sell. See my blog – http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time-entrepreneur.html
Random
on 16 Feb 10“re: Dharmesh, if this is about building a service company, why the need for funds? What are those funds going to do? If you get people to actually pay for using StackExchange, you should be profitable almost from the get-go. If this is the case, there’s even less reason to VC.”
Ill tell you why
They are not charging for SE at the moment, there is a constant threat that they will start charging in the next 45 days, but the 45 days hasn’t started, of the communities listed here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/list-of-stackexchange-sites only the top 20 have a remote chance of being able to afford the 129 bucks a month (which usually will come from advertising revenue) at the bottom of the 20 list are sites with 100 users, which have no chance to afford the premium from ads alone.
Meanwhile they are burning 3 * full time programmer expenses + office expenses and server expenses, which must run at MUCH more than the 20*129usd mark.
So for SE to sustain its current burn rate, they need cash.
StackOverflow.com is another beast though, as far as I know it is profitable as is.
The bottom line is that building communities is HARD and no magical piece of software will suddenly make it easy.
It seems kind of mad that they are looking for VC before charging a dime for their product.
Portman
on 16 Feb 10“They may, but most of the introductions your typical investor is going to give you is how to get you out in 3-5 years. ... Rarely is the quality of the advice associated with having money involved of largely superior quality.”
What are your sources for this statement? Because in my experience - working at three different VC-backed startups in the last 7 years - the quality of the VC advice is astronomical.
Maybe I’ve just been really lucky in my limited experience, but the kind of investors I’ve seen firsthand are the kind of people who ask cause you to think about your product in a different way, who identify problem areas long before they manifest themselves, who tease out new markets for your existing products, and who generally make your business an order of magnitude more successful.
Andrew
on 16 Feb 10Yeah I agree that it’s a recipe for a disaster, I threw up my comments here:
http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/391922539/stackoverflow-getting-vc-funding-is-a-recipe-for
JoeQ
on 16 Feb 10It seems like Joel’s having a mid-life crisis or something. Awhile ago he talked about needing to grow at 100% a year to be successful, and how in order to achieve that they were going to add lots of checkmark features into their product. Now it’s off to Sand Hill Road with StackOverflow. It kind of makes me wonder if Fog Creek is still doing ok. Like DHH said, if Fog Creek is as profitable as Joel always bragged, it shouldn’t be that hard for him to fund StackOverflow’s A round.
Ricardo
on 16 Feb 10I would agree with your comments only if Joel was referring to StackOverflow in his post. He is clearly talking about StackExchange, this is his answer about why looking for VC money:
“Now we’re biting off the bigger goal of changing the way everyone gets answers to their questions on the Internet, and that’s something we can’t do alone”
sean
on 16 Feb 10What is the point of telling other people what they should do with their business. If Joel wants to raise money and David doesn’t, great! That’s why you are entrepreneurs, to make your own decisions.
There are clearly disadvantages and advantages for raising outside money. It works out well for some people/businesses/situations and poorly for others.
Joel has already done one really great bootstrapped business. Maybe he just wants to try something new, a different approach this time.
Joel Spolsky
on 16 Feb 10First of all I should say that the idea of raising VC in order to “take money off the table” is silly. Although there are investors who are looking for steady, solid businesses and they are happy to buy them from founders, and although in some odd situations founders can sell a small number of their own shares during a funding round, this is generally seen as a bad sign. Founders who believe in their companies aren’t trying to take money off the table. I haven’t taken a cent from Stack Overflow since the beginning and don’t plan to start now.
David, I agree in principle that raising arbitrary money from unhelpful 3rd tier VCs is a waste of time. We don’t honestly need the money that much. StackOverflow is paying its team handsomely thank you very much and is running at 50% profit margins. If we needed more money Fog Creek’s got plenty available to invest.
We’re raising money for the same reason you took an investment from Jeff Bezos four years ago: because there ARE investors out there who are smart and can help build a business. Most of them aren’t in this category, but some are.
There ARE great CEOs out there whom you are more likely to be able to hire if you have the pedigree of a top-tier VC firm, and who will have big plans and those plans will take money.
There ARE successful, VC-funded companies. I, too, used to be idealistic and thought that any company can bootstrap itself. I learned to recognize that there’s a certain, rare, unusual pattern to a company that can actually do amazing things if it can get to scale quickly, and right now I’m willing to bet that StackOverflow is in that category.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Scott Semple
on 16 Feb 10@dhh: I agree that VC money should be avoided and it’s often a lottery mentality that leads to the Win Big temptation of taking it regardless of how rare that reality is.
However…
Isn’t #4 (investor advice) why you took money from Bezos? You say that, ”...if you end up building something of considerable value, then the connections and introductions will come all by themselves.” And in a podcast, Jason said something about teaming up with Bezos “took some risk off the table”.
I think at some point you guys are going to have to do a blog post titled, “Never take on outside investors unless…” and then list your reasons for teaming up with Bezos.
To repeat, I agree that unproductive partnerships purely for money (whether VC or otherwise) are unwise. However, 37signals too often criticizes taking on outside investors while not sufficiently explaining why they did exactly that themselves.
Seems like a built-in contradiction to me.
Toast
on 16 Feb 1037chuztpah.com
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Feb 10Scott: The Bezos investment was explained.
Jimmy Chan
on 16 Feb 10Niche? Face-to-face http://www.experts-exchange.com/.
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Feb 10@David / 37signals
Did you ever think that Joel is simply using this as a publicity stunt to get more attention … with no real intention of taking VC money.
It’s brilliant, just think about it. Joel goes and talks to all of these VCs. It’s get’s lots of publicity, like it already is right now.
Then he posts this long article on why VC’s sucks and how they won’t take an investment from anyone. Which then in turn get’s everyone on their side saying “yeah Joel/Jeff, you’re awesome. Keep rocking”.
This is PR 101 at it’s best.
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Feb 10@37signals
Why criticize Joel at all. You all do in fact have Jeff Bezos as an investor in 37signals don’t you.
jd
on 16 Feb 10Interesting timing because StackOverflow has started flowing downhill in my opinion. Increasing numbers of questions are being asked by new users who haven’t contributed and who haven’t bothered to learn the subject or search before posting. I used to contribute regularly but I’m cutting back.
Srini
on 16 Feb 10@DDH Except #1, I am with you on Joel.
Starbucks? Common… what is software company got to do with coffee serving company? It is totally out of wack. May be spending time in Starbucks makes you code faster.
On #1, ever since Aardvark got acquired, he could be feeling the pain/pinch.
Nlawnal
on 16 Feb 10I’ve been an article on TechCrunch. It’s nice – certainly worth bragging rights with friends – but it’s not the lottery win Joel seems to think it is. It’s still just one small step in building a company (or brand, whatever) – and certainly one that a solid company can survive without.
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Feb 10+1 for Srini
Joel is freak’d out right now that Google acquired Aardvark. (though, in my opinion, vark is too wild an doesn’t promote interaction like SO does)
fface
on 16 Feb 10Joel’s post in 2003 was an accurate assessment of life in 2003.
Joel’s post in 2010 is an accurate assessment of life in 2010.
Meanwhile, this article reads like something out of “Mothers Who Think” from salon.com circa 1998.
Services and VC
on 16 Feb 10There are many examples of how companies can use VC money to grow SaaS businesses. Take a look here for the list of public SaaS companies and how much they raised before the IPO: http://www.interwest.com/software-as-a-service/investment/the-capital-needed-to-create-a-saas-company/
37Signals may have the right funding approach for its business, customer base and owners. That doesn’t mean it’s the right model for every company, even ones that are ostensibly similar. There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to most technology challenges—why would you assume there is one correct way to finance a business?
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Feb 10Joel is not even listed as a equity “member” for StackOverflow LLC
For proof, go to: http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/cbs.aspx
Entity # 200820410103
You see that only Jeff Atwood is listed.
So if Joel is not an equity member of Stackoverflow LLC per the State of California, and as stated above by Joel himself that has never taken a salary … how does Joel plan to benefit from Stackoverflow financially since he’s not a legal equity owner or employee?
Ho Nam
on 16 Feb 10Even Starbucks wasn’t exactly a “land grab” fueled by huge VC funding. The company was profitable for many years and had 6 stores before it even raised VC funding. Once the concept was out, there were many, many competitors that went for it; some grew faster than Starbucks in the early days. Pepsico was a real threat and could have easily acquired the company (back then Pepsico had Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, etc which were doing great). Rather than going for the land grab, Starbucks grew at a controlled pace. It’s actually very hard to scale a business which needs great service, store locations, build outs, lots of people, training, supply chain/logistics, processes. They built their brand one coffee and one customer at a time. They passed on many opportunities to grow faster. For example, they passed on a partnership with a major grocery chain due to concerns about losing control over labor (labor unions). It was only much later on that Starbucks did a deal with Safeway. Same for the United Airlines deal. Investment bankers like Goldman Sachs wanted to take them public years before they went out. They were $100mm company when they did their IPO when they could have easily gone out when they reached $40-50mm. I think they hit $800mm market cap the first day, then went onto $20B+ at its peak over the next 10 years. It takes relentless hard work and patience to build a great company (I was at the lead VC that invested in Starbucks in the early 90s). IPO was in 1992 with just 500 stores. Hardly a land grab given the overall potential (by 1999, they had over 10,000 stores).
Chintan Patel
on 16 Feb 10I agree on the every-niche-is-different argument. IT does takes time, energy and effort to build any community.
StackExchange is a white label product that might show successes in a few instances but I don’t see all of them becoming another StackOverflow. I and other average Joe’s (not to be confused with Joel) are happy with phpBB’s and vBulletin’s, Thank you very much.
That said, both Joel and David have a tendency to make strong statements and hence they’ve garnered a loyal following in dev community. But as “leaders”, your “people” will hold you up against your past statements. So this is going to be interesting to watch – Good Luck both of you! /* grabs his Doritos */
Yenonimous
on 16 Feb 10Some businesses should not change (at least, not by a great extent). Stackoverflow is one of them. In the past I’ve seen many businesses loosing their ‘core’ for ‘progressing’.
When something’s alright, don’t change. Please. We love stackoverflow the way it is right now, and if so called ‘progress’ ruins the current feeling, that’s it!
Reply to AC
on 16 Feb 10Anonymous,
That listing only shows the registered agent for service of process—e.g., if you want to sue StackOverflow.com LLC in CA, you should notify Jeff Atwood. While the underlying LLC membership documents may confirm your claim (you’d need to order them from the CA Sec of State to find out), it’s moot anyway. It is almost certain that they’ll convert it to a C-Corp to raise VC money.
Bob Samson
on 16 Feb 10I think the Q&A model behind StackExchange/Overflow/et al is really interesting and might be a great leap forward for the Internet.
But there are already a bunch of clones that sites can install for themselves, and it’s inevitable that one of the PHP/MySQL ones will go mainstream, like WordPress or Drupal.
Once that happens, a whole bunch of cheap hosting services will pop up for that platform (like today’s WordPress hosting or phpBB hosting niches), and there’s no reason in the world why a website would pay Spolsky Inc. to host their Q&A on StackExchange, when they can host it anywhere else much cheaper.
Bottom line: the Stacks might have made a big contribution to the web. But they’re unlikely to turn into great businesses. It’s a shame they weren’t built on PHP/MySQL themselves, instead of the proprietary Microsoft stack – that way at least they could have open sourced their doodad and got the glory, if not the ca$h.
rwc9u
on 16 Feb 10There are other companies that have went public doing similar “land grabs” with community forums. I was a partner of car forum site that sold to Internet Brands http://www.internetbrands.com/ in 2008. It seems like StackExchange could be a combination of Internet Brands and VBulletin.
I think Jeff and Joel were brilliant for starting StackExchange, and executing in that area, but I think it will be harder to expand to other areas and be as successful. For forum and question/answer sites, it’s more about finding a niche and managing people than having a great technology… hence the continued success of vBulletin.
Berserk
on 16 Feb 10Interestingly, Joel speaks only about StackOverflow. Neither his original blog post or his comment here mentions StackExchange once. I guess it’s probably due to the unnecessarily similar names and the predictable confusion that follows.
It seems that the sort of funding Joel is looking for is the kind that is announced when the deal is done and everyone can see how smart it is. Posting up front appears a little like it is begging for funds.
Berislav Lopac
on 16 Feb 10This is one of the few rare cases where I actually agree with DHH. While I still think that Joel is correct that there are some companies (even in software business) that can benefit from VC money, StackOverflow (or even StackExchange) is one of them.
Michael
on 16 Feb 10Good response, Joel. I don’t know why DHH thinks he’s the only person who can take money for the right reasons.
Eden
on 16 Feb 10I love reading both sides of this. I buy Joel’s arguments more so than Davids, but as I obviously have no skin in the game I’m happy to sit back, follow along, and learn what I can.
J
on 16 Feb 10I’m really hoping that Bezos invests in SO. The deception!
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Feb 10+1 Bezos should invest in StackOverflow
Sam Hasler
on 16 Feb 10Your land grab analogy is wrong. They’re not land grabbing for customers, they’re land grabbing for franchisees. They want to sell the franchise, not fight for every niche themselves.
Allen Shi
on 16 Feb 10I really like you and Joel both. But this time I am on your side though Joel will may figure out some smart way to burn the VC money with Getting Real style. :-)
I also posted a note of this issue in chinese on here.
Matt Henderson
on 16 Feb 10@Allen Shi, I think there’s a misspelling in your number #4.
John A Davis
on 16 Feb 10I rarely go to Stack Overflow first, not even second. If I am really hurting I go to Experts Exchange but that involves loging in, putting up with the clunky banners and speed. Normally, I just google the question first.
Pies
on 16 Feb 10I didn’t believe his explanation either, though I’m not sure why would he lie. My guess is that either he just wants to cash out because in his view the site has reached its full audience and still doesn’t make a dime, or the money is actually to develop StackExchange (the SaaS model), which would probably make sense financially, but from what I know SE is developed by Fog Creek, not Jeff and his crew.
Rudiger
on 16 Feb 10@John A Davis: More and more, google is taking me to stackoverflow… And I’ve had some rather complex questions answered very well on the site.
@MichaelNozbe
on 17 Feb 10Recently I’ve had a pleasure of spending quite a few moments talking to VCs and also talking to companies who seek VC founding.
Seriously, most of the companies that want VCs are not amazon.com-like and should focus their energy on making revenues and seeking profits and not seeking VCs.
VCs don’t care about profits, they want eyeballs and later sell the thing at a ridiculous price to a bigger company which is happy to buy the eyeballs for some reason I can’t comprehend (to increase their valuation with more eyeballs?)
VCs don’t care about your business, so if you care about it (Joel, do you care?) you shouldn’t go the VC route.
One last thing – why oh why people expect that when they get VC money something great is going to happen? Some miracle and their company will suddenly have millions of users and billions of dollars in revenue? It’s not, you’re going to burn truckloads of cash and build a company not worth working for, but only worth selling… if you find a buyer with loads of cash and no brains.
My 2 cents.
Richard
on 17 Feb 10My friend Tim O’Shea founded blurtit.com a while ago and after several months’ of work has just launched www.qhub.com which allows anyone to build their own Q&A site. He’s built the service with his cofounder Christopher Lee with his cofounder using profits from his other interests. It’ll be fascinating to see how this all works out.
@MichaelNozbe
on 17 Feb 10Just posted a new blog post regarding VCs and the fact that I believe Joel (a person I very highly respect) is trying to re-invent the wheel with his VC-Stackoverflow move:
Why are so many smart people re-inventing the wheel?
Charlotte
on 17 Feb 10Unfortunately, the stackoverflow business model is (I think) too expensive. There is more competition out there for Q&A sites now, such as www.Qhub.com which offers a much cheaper, easier to use Q&A system that anyone can create, with or without coding knowledge.
People want something that is easy to understand and use.
Qhub hasn’t received any VC, and it remains to be seen if their model works, but it is great to see new options available.
Josh Walsh
on 17 Feb 10This is VC for the sake of publicity, and you are right when you say the publicity is short lived.
Hell, they got this article. They’ll get on TechCrunch too. They must have reason to believe that that short publicity will be worth the millions they take in investment. Of course, that’s the absurd silicon valley mentality at it’s finest.
Michael
on 17 Feb 10Charlotte, thanks for promoting your company here. I was seriously thinking about paying SE’s outrageous price. You’ve built a nice platform.
Rudiger
on 17 Feb 10I have to agree; Stack Overflow is awesome, but Stack Exchange’s pricing is ridiculous ($129 / month minimum)...
I’m glad there’s competition like Qhub, but my advice would be to establish a large “reference implementation” (ala Stack Overflow); it makes the best advertising!
Abdu
on 19 Feb 10I have been saying this for a long time, Stackoverflow clones will start popping up pretty soon. qhub.com is one. Watch out for more. SO is just a web application. This what happened with forum software. There are tons of them now like phpBB, vBulletin, ..etc. It’s not rocket surgery to build Q&A apps where pretty soon all those commodity web hosting companies ($5/month) will offer a Q&A app in their control panel and have one installed in your site with a single click.
Jack
on 20 Feb 10“It’s not rocket surgery to build Q&A apps where pretty soon all those commodity web hosting companies ($5/month) will offer a Q&A app in their control panel and have one installed in your site with a single click.”
It’s an race to the bottom!
This discussion is closed.