What's New: Quora's new ways to monetize
(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Quora is launching two new subscription services:
- Quora+ and Quora Spaces will allow creators to earn money for the knowledge that they share. Quora receives more than 300 million unique visitors per month.
- 21% of startups fail in the first year, and 50% in the fifth year. Here's how to be okay with failure as a founder.
- Founder Pieter Levels' Nomad List is in the top three products in the IH directory in terms of revenue. His advice? Don't forget the value in curating niche information.
Want to share something with nearly 85,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
🧠 You Can Now Monetize Your Knowledge on Quora
from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
Quora is launching two new subscription services, Quora+ and Quora Spaces, that will allow creators to earn money for the knowledge they share. For founders, this is a new opportunity to build an audience, share expertise, and get paid for doing so.
Quora quorum
What’s happening: Quora, a social question-and-answer website known for its helpful (but sometimes random) threads, is launching two new subscription services. Quora+ and Quora Spaces will allow creators to earn money for the knowledge that they share on the platform:
By allowing creators to earn from the knowledge they share, we enable them to create more and better quality content for everyone, whether they are a member or not. Advertising has been very successful, and the next stage of Quora's business will include both ads and premium content.
How they work: Each of the two new subscription features works a bit differently (more below). Both features, however, use Quora’s machine learning tech to distribute your content to the company’s 300M+ users.
Quora Spaces: Quora Spaces will allow people to subscribe to your content at a price that you set. The feature is currently available today in 25 countries. Quora will take a 5% cut from creators’ Space subscription earnings, and creators can choose what content to make available for free. A Space can focus on a specific niche, or can be a place to engage communities of any size.
Quora+: With this option, creators can choose to include their content in a subscription bundle called Quora+. Subscribers will pay Quora $5 each month to access Quora+ premium content, and the revenue generated will be distributed to creators in proportion to the amount that each subscriber is consuming their content. More of a subscriber’s contribution will go to writers and Spaces that the subscriber follows.
Payout policy: If your earnings balance is $10 or more at the end of a cycle, the full amount will be paid to your Stripe account. If it's less than $10, the balance will roll over and continue accumulating until you reach $10. Learn more about the monetization features here.
Money model
The shift: To date, Quora’s business has depended entirely on ad revenue. That model, however, doesn’t accommodate the burgeoning creator economy whose 50M+ members are looking to monetize their skills, insights, and influence. While creators already have a host of competitor platforms to choose from, Quora now wants in.
Why it matters: Now valued at $1.8B, Quora receives more than 300M unique visitors per month, offering indie hackers a channel to reach new customers. Quora’s move also represents the latest example of a widely popular platform launching tools for members of the creator economy to earn revenue.
Indie hackers rejoice: Quora is a gold mine of SEO content, and functions similarly to Reddit. If your product or expertise is linked to a helpful Quora post, you'll almost certainly rank higher for that organic keyword.
Do you plan to monetize with Quora? Share your thoughts below.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.
📰 In the News
📝 Apple keeps shutting down employee-run surveys on pay equity.
😣 Fake COVID-19 vaccination cards worry college officials.
🏛 Amazon and GoPro are suing Chinese sellers.
🚘 President Biden is speeding up America's shift to electric vehicles.
💻 A bad Glassdoor review could cost $1M.
💪 Do You Have What it Takes to be a Founder?
21% of startups fail in the first year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in the tenth year. Are you okay with possible failure? As a founder, it's important to get comfortable with both winning and losing.
Should I become a founder?
Here's a flowchart that walks you through all the questions that you need to ask yourself when deciding whether you're ready to take the leap:
Breaking it down
-
Why do you want to start a business?
Your "why" is just as important as the "what" and the "how." You have to know why you're doing it, and let that reason fuel you to the degree that starting your own business doesn't even feel optional anymore. -
What do you want to achieve?
If you’re a goal-oriented person, it’s incredibly valuable to have a long-term vision with SMART goals. -
Will you shout your idea from the rooftops?
It’s pretty difficult to start a successful business if you’re unwilling to spread the word. Many founders really struggle with marketing. If talking about your product isn’t for you, then you’ll need to find a vocal cofounder, hire a freelancer to do it for you, or push yourself to do it. -
Are you okay with failing? How about succeeding?
21% of startups fail in the first year, 50% in the fifth year, and 70% in the tenth year. And that's including companies with lots of investment and resources. Are you okay with that? While you're at it, check in about succeeding too. It might seem odd, but a lot of us are afraid to succeed; we end up sabotaging ourselves. It's important to get comfortable with both winning and losing. -
Do you have a strong support system?
Whether it's family, friends, cofounders, acquaintances online (I see you, IH community), or others, it's incredibly helpful to have people there to support you. If you don't have that yet, try to find it where you can. Reach out to people.
Try taking a page from the book of Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) and set things up so that even when you fail, you win. The easiest way to do that is to start a project that will help you learn what you need to know, regardless of the outcome.
If you make it through the flow chart, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your idea is ready. It means that you (probably) have what it takes. Before you actually start, you’ll want to validate your idea. That’s a whole other ball of wax! For more on that, check out my post on validation.
What's your best advice for new founders? Please share in the comments!
Discuss this story.
📰 Title Tip: Use Your Experience
Your experience with a complex problem has the unique ability to build connections because it places you inside the story.
Discuss this story.
🌏 Pieter Levels Talks Nomad List
from the Listen Up! IH newsletter by Ayush Chaturvedi
Pieter Levels is the founder of Nomad List, RemoteOk, and several other solo companies. His Twitter bio lists 10 startups that he is running right now, and two of them are in the top three products in terms of revenue on the Indie Hackers product directory. He's also been Product Hunt's Maker of the Year multiple times.
Pieter sat down with Indie Hackers to share more about his journey!
12 startups in 12 months
Back in 2013, Pieter was traveling the world as a digital nomad, hitting Bali, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Seoul, Chiang Mai, and Singapore. At the time, he was running a network of YouTube channels called PandaMix, which featured electronic music. To scratch his own itch, he built a platform to pull in analytics from all of his YouTube channels in one place.
The platform took him a year to build, turned out to not be very efficient, and he didn't make any money from it. By 2014, he was back in his hometown (Amsterdam), living with his parents, and trying to figure out a way to build a profitable solo startup.
During this time, he wrote a blog post entitled "12 startups in 12 months." The 12 startups challenge was inspired by Jennifer Dewalt’s "180 websites in 180 days" project. Pieter's thesis was that most startups fail anyway, so might as well build many of them and see what sticks. He wanted to build and ship one project every month for the whole year.
Here is a list of his startup launch posts:
- Play My Inbox: A tool to collect music recommendations from your inbox and add them to a playlist.
- Go F*cking Do it: A tool where users pledge money to achieve their goals. If they fail, the money goes to Pieter!
- Tubelytics: A dashboard for YouTube channel analytics. (He relaunched this platform as part of the challenge, but still couldn't monetize it.)
- Nomad List: A live index of over 1K cities to live and work remotely.
Nomad List was Pieter's breakout startup. It was number one on both Product Hunt and Hacker News. Nomad List was going viral.
Nomad List
It started as a simple crowdsourced database of cities and some information on each. Pieter was looking for advice on the best cities in the world to live and work in for digital nomads.
He tweeted out the Google Sheet link and made it editable, and it started to blow up. As people began adding cities and broadening the parameters of the cities, Pieter realized that he could actually build a successful business from this.
Pieter set up a basic PHP-based website and copied the layout from Product Hunt. The data came from his crowdsourced Google Sheet.
This is what the site looked like back in 2014:
It was on top of Hacker News and ProductHunt.
Soon, Pieter started getting sponsorship offers. Automattic (the company behind WordPress) bought sponsorship slots for $5K a month on the site, and he was in business. He realized that he needed something to keep people coming back to the site:
I knew I needed social features because I read something: If you want to keep people coming to your website, you need to make the site sticky. So you need to either ask them for their email, or you need to have social features.
So he started a Slack group! He connected a Typeform to his site to invite people to the Slack group, and within a month he had more than 1K people there. To avoid spam, he charged a $5 entry fee; this eventually increased to $10, and later to $100. Currently, the price to be a part of the Nomad List Slack group is $159.99, and there are more than 28K members enrolled.
Advice for indie hackers
- You don't need a fancy tech stack for a profitable business.
- There is value in curating niche information.
- You can build Nomad List for "X." Find your X.
- Openly share controversial opinions on Twitter. You will get some hate, but you will be able to build a more loyal audience that can help you achieve virality.
Check out the full episode on the Indie Hackers Podcast here.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Listen Up! IH for more.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:
🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, James Fleischmann, Ivan Romanovich, and Ayush Chaturvedi for contributing posts. —Channing
