On competition (and Opzi, and Techcrunch)

When you woke up in the morning and you find no less than 5 emails asking you to have a look at a link, you usually have to be worried. That's the link Opzi: A Quora for the Enterprise. (btw, thanks for sending me the link!)

So, as of today, it seems that Mindquilt has an official competitor. And a powerful one! for many reasons

• it's backed by Ron Conway (through SV Angel), arguably the most successful angel all-time
• ... and by many other angels (also Paul Bucheit of Gmail's fame, the closest thing to my-personal-hero), for a 1M$ total seed round
• it's a YCombinator company
• they managed to go on Techcrunch and Disrupt even before launching

So should I be worried? That was my shower time question.

Certainly Opzi is going to jump in the market aggressively. They have a lot of connections in the industry, and they managed to have such a big press release without revealing the product to the general public. That's something that we haven't been able to do that well, even if our product is out since months and we already have customers.

However, the more I think about it, the more I realise that it's actually a good thing.

The reality is, even if there is really a small number of "Enterprise Q&A" platforms out there, there's a lot of competition.

Pretty much every knowledge management software (consider also wikis, collaboration tools, forums, ...) offers a solution to the knowledge transfer problem. The problem is, how do you convince/educate customers that a Q&A platform is better than a wiki/forum/anytool to solve this problem?

That's hard. There's a lot of effort there. Talking to each and every (potential or real) customer, getting their feedbacks and doubts, improving/clarifying/simplifying the software. I'm glad Opzi will start to work on that with us.

Than there's the advantage of having another player to compare us with. So far, besides the obvious Quora, Aardvark and Stackoverflow (all consumer products), we haven't had any similar enterprise Q&A player to compare with.

We've found our answers to all these problems, and coded them in Mindquilt. But they're not necessarily the best answers; there's a lot of trial and error there. It will be interesting to learn about Opzi's answers.

Finally, that's a validation of the idea Daniel and I had almost a year ago. There're a lot of solutions to the knowledge transfer problem out there, but they're all sub-optimal. You can have all the documentation, wiki pages, knowledge base in your company, but the most natural way for people to access this knowledge is by asking questions. And the most straightforward way to solve the problem, is to answer those questions.