Why 🐳 Whale Q & A reminds me of Quora

Recently, I started contributing to 🐳 Whale Q & A app (thanks to Justin Kan, Ranidu Lankage, Leo Chen, Vicc Alexander, and James Zhang) and have been really enjoying using it. When I saw Justin’s onboarding video while signing up on the app, I got excited and it immediately reminded me of Quora. In many ways, I think Whale is an interesting use case of Quora on video. I believe Justin got the following tagline:

Whale is Quora for the Snapchat generation.

Let’s dive into the details on why this is a compelling product now, why it is a great platform for influencers, and how can you take advantage of being an early adopter.

Whale and Quora

I don’t think it is fair to compare the two products since they belong to a very different era, genre, and have a different target audience. I will try to highlight the use case for both apps and try to list ways Quora and Whale can complement each other.

1. Timing — As mobile video is becoming increasingly popular with great contributions to Snapchat from tech celebrities like Mark Suster, Justin Kan; music kings like DJ Khaled; and pop culture queens like Kylie Jenner, video influencers are looking for more ways they can make connect directly with their fans and community. The founding team of Whale was smart in launching it timely on ProductHunt the day after Vine shutdown announcement by Twitter. While apps like Musical.ly, Instagram, Periscope, Snapchat, and Facebook double down on personal video as a platform, the millennials may have been looking for something easier than Quora (a web and now mobile app which provides written answers to questions; launched in 2009) to feed their limited attention span. Whale was the answer !
2. Monetizing strategy — I believe this is still being experimented with, but launching with a 💲 making plan is a refreshing change for Silicon Valley tech products. Interestingly, I enjoyed making my biggest in-app purchase yet to buy Whale coins. Creating a new currency as a means to drive engagement is not new for apps, but the fear of missing out (fomo) on interesting answers (costs 0.33 to unlock answers, but they recently started making some of them free) from my favorite influencers made me an instant buyer. Also, I found it really compelling to pay influencers to answer my question because I can see them putting a value to those 60 seconds (as I value my time too !). Now, looking at the flip side this cost may prove to be a barrier to entry for many curious people. Quora, on the other side is absolutely free for all the users.
3. Crowdsourcing of information — There are both advantages and disadvantages of open forum marketplaces. Quora is a site built by the community for the community, and while many top answers to questions are upvoted based on the credential of the author, you will find that there are equal number of top answers from relatively unknown authors. In fact, I know many previously unknown people who have gained a lot of experience and influence based on their writing on Quora. On the other hand, Whale’s premise is to provide a platform to connect “influencers with their fans” to have a Q & A dialogue. So while Whale provides this one to many information flow by crowdsourcing a question by being influencer-centric, it is not as powerful as Quora providing a democratic way of choosing the best answer to a question regardless of whoever answers it.
4. Discovering things — It is really easy to discover questions and answers on Quora while Whale’s version 1.0 may have some issues in discovering the influencers based on their Q & A. There is, however, a way of discovering influencers of Whale by name, username (same as Twitter handles in most cases), and words in their bio. So while Whale’s goal is to catalog answers by influencers in order to avoid repetition (which is happening for them on Snapchat / FB / Instagram), it is currently far from it since it is becoming increasingly hard to find a specific question or an answer with rising number of users on it.
5. Sourcing influencers — I believe that a few people (including myself) have already asked this question from the founders of Whale on Whale, but I can summarize it for my readers here. There are two issues, one that this platform could stay limited to the tech industry (while I do see some other industry professionals joining Whale lately), and other that many influencers may not be video-friendly. This is not a problem on Quora, as folks who may be camera shy and not comfortable with recording video can still write an answer with or without their name attached to it. Here is a growth strategy as well as solution to part of this problem:

Get influencers (verified accounts, top contributors) from Quora to Whale

Therefore, Whale has launched a great way to consolidate the fleeting information shared by influencers in form of short text questions and video answers (60 seconds maximum). There may be many other ways of having fun with vertical video, feel free to get in touch with my friends Russell Barnard and Paul Wong about their projects. Also saw Michael Cho’s comment on Whale’s PH launch page about his Q & A app called You and Me.

What do you think about Whale Q & A ? Have you used it ? I would love to know your thoughts about it. Feel free to comment below or highlight relevant sections of this article.

Initial impressions

Here are my first thoughts on using Whale (⬅click here to download if you are using an iPhone) on Product Hunt and after almost two weeks of being a Daily Active User (DAU 😜), I am still enjoying it. The user experience and monetizing strategy could be somewhat better, but I am a harsh critic and according to Justin Kan, this is still the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

For now, if you have questions that are relevant to more than 5 people (that is my benchmark), Whale would be a good way to get in touch with me as it allows me to broadcast my knowledge and make the best use of my time !

Loic Le Meur, who is a San Francisco based Angel Investor and founder of The Leade.rs Team also gave his initial impressions on his Facebook page:

How to connect with me when you don’t have Whale

Well, then you need to wait for an app called Seal… just kidding 😁. You can connect with me on Instagram where I post photos from my life in Silicon Valley about startups, venture capital and cybersecurity in random intervals, here’s a snapshot of the same:

My Instagram Page Nipun On Startups

For those who wish to stay in touch on a daily basis, Snapchat is the best way to get in touch (my fastest response time on Snapchat is one second) and here is my Snapcode:

My Snapchat account d33wana

At some point in the near future, I will be writing a lot more on my very own personal blog www.nipunonstartups.com but more on that later !