yes.no - Ask people you admire things you’ve always wanted to know
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First off, congrats on the launch and on getting some great names on board already.
I've thought about the current knowledge sharing services out there and definitely see room for innovation in this area, but I don't know it well enough to say whether this is what's needed or not. There does seem to be a feature gap, between AMA's and Quora's ask everyone style functionality, to instead ask an individual a question. One thing that would worry me here, is how else is this better than Quora? If Quora add this one feature, allowing users to ask other specific users questions, how else would yes.no differentiate?
Either way, congrats on getting this far, and love the domain 👌
@fredrivett Thanks for the honest feedback and nice words :) we believe it is quite hard for Quora to just develop such a feature, because it's a whole new shift in core value of a product rather than a feature development. Thus, changing Quora's core value proposition from "crowdsourcing questions to anyone who would like to answer" to what we do - getting answers from the people you admire.
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@jodoron Fair play. All the best with this Yonatan, hope it works out! 👌
tl,dr: My first 30 seconds did not wow me or provide me with any value that would prompt me to come back.
I get the idea of this but based on my first 30 seconds on here I'm not sure I'd spend any more time here.
Here's why:
I picked from one of the celebs - Dan Ariely because I like his work.
This is what I saw: https://yes.no/dan-ariely
His profile even says "My name is Dan Ariely and I study how people make decisions -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. "
As a first experience the Q&As I saw came across as frivolous - especially given the weight of the name in question. Seeing the kinds of interactions on his page that I did was like a huge cognitive dissonance for me.
Right there, my motivation to check out anything else or spend any more time went to zero because this offered me nothing of value.
My expectation going in perhaps was different (and maybe thats a messaging thing to look into) but in the "why" part of the response by one of the founders it says:
"We focus on the person, rather than the question. Sites like Quora help you find the best answer to your question, by sharing it with the community. On yes.no however, we want to connect you with a specific person that you have a question for"
If the initial impression itself is of random questions and answers vs those that the person has expertise in then there's little chance of me coming back.
#1 to solve for imo:
Focus what a new user will see/experience (maybe its personas or question categories) vs the plethora of options so that you can predictably guide them to a wow moment (high quality Q&As) in as little time as possible.
I hope this comes across as constructive criticism.
@anujadhiya Thanks Anuj for your valuable feedback.
We can totally appreciate what you're saying, and we recognize this issue itself. It is to do with this being early days for the network, where the surfacing and trending of quality content is a lot more difficult.
At the moment we are working on bringing interesting people to answer, as well as their audiences. It is an ongoing process that we are refining. We are also working on the onboarding, to make those first 30 seconds magical!
@orliesaurus Not yet, but we're working on it! We've created a page for people to ask him the questions they'd love for him to answer (see https://yes.no/elon-musk), and we aim to build up support, identify the most popular questions, and use them to bring him to the site! Feel free to ask there the questions of your wildest dreams...
Kudos for the great work. One thing I think that it could be improved is the Discover page. It will awesome if I can read the full description of the person, three columns per row will be perfect.
How did you guys get the initial traction?
@ossamaweb Hey Ossama, thank you for the lovely words and support :)
Thank you for the awesome idea about the discovery, we are actually brainstorming about it, as from experiments that we have conducted with our users: some people preferred a discover page with a name / title and that's it, while other like you preferred a more elaborate profile bubblicons in the discovery page.
We are testing it out and will do what most of our users would prefer eventually!
About traction - there is no replacement for hard, manual working of reaching out, following up and convincing people to try your product. It get's smoother in time, when you of course manage to recruit interesting people your product.
I like the idea and love the design. Nice work guys.
Do you also plan to have a community interview? Like a certain time for AMA where everyone/invited people can join?
@erez_z Thanks for the feedback Erez, Live AMA sessions are fast becoming a sensation all over. We recognized it, but we think there is a big downside as we see it - the temporariness and the volatility of the answers, we try to make a place where questions and answers "get the respect they deserve" and serve them in an appropriate way.
We try to make a friction less, time less, experience of AMA's.
Great product!
One feature I'd like to see iד connecting social networks and following the contacts on yes.no if they're already registered.
Twitter is especially well suited for this because of the unidirectional following (and the ability to follow influencers who usually won't be on your FB friend list). Facebook and Linkedin would also be nice.
@yprez Thanks so much Yuri! and I love your suggestion, it is actually something I suggested a while ago and we are totally aiming to bring that to our users! spot on Yuri.
I just learned about this site yesterday and played around with it for a bit. I like the format of it being ongoing. I also like that it seems most people with expertise can participate and answer questions not just the anointed ones.
Of course, the real question will come in the development of the community and having the people asking and answering questions.
A site I definitely plan on exploring a bit more.
@robertwilliger Thanks loads Rob! the ongoing part is exactly what we think could provide extra value for our users!
We realized very fast other that the "mega-celebs" there are a lot smaller scale celebs that we call "local-hero's", the purpose of yes.no's entire existence is to give a stage for any community leader or influencer to take on Q&A in a respectful manner.
Would love to have you exploring yes.no and hear your ideas and feedback also in the future :)
As long as I can ask Dan Ariely whatever I want, and have a chance to get a direct answer - this is 1000x better than Twitter, Facebook and Email alltogher.
A very hard promise to make, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they can live up to it.
Good luck yo!
@hamutsi We're glad you found some interesting people to follow and read answers of in yes.no :), What other people would you expect us to bring to keep you intrigued?
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