A ridiculous idea (or is it?)
Peter Thiel once asked a great question: “Tell me something that’s true, that almost nobody agrees with you on?”
For a while, the best smart-ass answer I’ve heard (from a buddy) is that he’s “really, really, ridiculously good looking.”
The reality is that it’s incredibly hard to come up with a good, defensible answer to this question because a reasonable answer in this case must appear inherently unreasonable for most people.
Many smart people have since attempted to respond to this question, and here’s my current best shot at it:
“I believe that people will love a service where they get to answer their own questions.”
Hopefully, you should be frowning profusely at what I just said, because the opposite (i.e. asking someone else questions and getting their answers) seems like a much more reasonable proposal.
Indeed, there’s no shortage of services that cater to just that scenario; Reddit AMA (big fan here!), Quora, Stack Overflow and a slew of other Q&A apps (Jelly, Ask.fm, Kiwi and our own humble attempt: PIF). Heck, if you think about it, Google is very much a Q&A service too; you put in some queries (even if they may not be fully-formed questions) and Google comes back with a long list of possible answers.
Rethinking Q&A as a “self-publishing” medium
So why do we now believe this “ridiculous” idea that people will actually want to raise a question and then proceed to give an answer for that question themselves?
See, for the last 2 months, my cofounder, Kenneth, and I had been playing around with our app PIF, which is essentially a “Video Ask Me Anything” (think “ask someone in text & they answer in short videos”). We worked at seeding interesting users and video content for the app, but traction was low.
As a relatively prolific content creator myself, I wished that more users would ask me questions, so that I would be able to share my thoughts and ideas with the world. We then made a seemingly (to us) logical, but rather ridiculous sounding, leap — why not build a feature that allows users to ask themselves questions, and then proceed to answer them in video?
To us, this effectively turned traditional Q&A on its head, and created a single-player utility for the app, where it would actually become a publishing tool — like a video blog, but in a Q&A format, which would be great for learning and sharing.
What questions would I ask myself?
Here’s a short list of questions that I’d like to respond to:
a) Are you afraid of flying after the plane crash?
b) What’s life like living/working in Abu Dhabi?
c) How does it feel when your family first migrated to Singapore?
d) Why no one should vote for Donald Trump?
e) What happens when a baby meets a chicken drumstick for the first time?
f) How are vulcanized sneakers made?
These can be categorised into 3 groups:
- Questions I often get asked; think “personal FAQ” (Qn a & b)
- Questions I hope more people would ask me (Qn c & d)
- Questions relating to stuff I’ve learnt or observed recently (Qn e & f)
While the 1st category (FAQ) has a more limited one-time utility, we think the 2nd and 3rd category provide more longevity in their use cases, especially for the segment of the population who are predisposed to creating/sharing content.
Can’t I already do this today on A, B, C, etc?
Even for people who see the genius in the ability to “answer your own questions” on a mobile app, the argument could be made that this is easily replicable on existing platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Why not just post your video answer on YouTube and make the video title a question? In fact, lots of videos on YouTube are structured this way, like this TED talk:
Our belief is that a consumer/social networking app that enforces specific limitations on its usage can sometimes lead to surprising use-case in the aggregate.
Think 140 character limit for Twitter or self-deleting feature of Snapchat; these limitations can arguably be replicated in other services since they are not technical limitations by any means. But by building in such “arcane” restrictions, they created refreshing ways to create and view content generated by their respective user communities.
Maybe, just maybe, a homefeed full of short videos of folks answering their own questions could also make for an interesting user experience?
ridiQ — “Answer your own Qs”
And so with great hope and equally high self-doubt, Kenneth and I decided to give this idea a shot. And we’re calling this app “ridiQ”, because the idea seemed so “ridiculous” to us when we first started thinking about it seriously.
Of course, all the above remains a conjecture on our part. It could well have been the case that we’re just forcing through the use-case. Let’s see how this plays out when the app goes live!
