This is a guest post written by Jeremy Goodrich, the Co-founder and President of FunAdvice, a social asking and answering platform which enables users to ask questions, share advice, photos and make new friends all in one place. It’s mostly made up of teens and it’s currently the 5th largest Q&A site in the United States. According to comScore, it had grown by 138% from 952,000 unique visitors in May 2008 to an amazing 2.269 million in May 2009.
In this post, he talks about FunAdvice’s accomplishments and why it is a more social platform as compared to Yahoo Answers and Answers.com.
Everybody knows that Twitter is the fastest growing social network: what about #2?
Back in June, comScore released a report that’s yet to be picked up by most media outlets. We all know that Twitter is the media darling of the moment, having raised more money than most, received an incredible amount of ongoing free press and more, but, what about the second fastest growing social network in the US? Are they also a VC funded shooting star, destined for glory because of Anderson Cooper, Oprah and countless tech rags?
Nope, this startup is nothing like that. FunAdvice is six and a half years old…nearly as old as Facebook. Having raised zero outside investment and relying on creative marketing, word of mouth and volunteers they call “advisors” this site has grown from 2 million unique visitors in August, 2008 to 5.98 million unique visitors in July, 2009.
What’s driving the growth? It’s the personal touch. I ask members…when was the last time they talked to Ev, personally? Or Mark Zuckerberg, or Tom of MySpace? Invariably, they don’t know what to say. Clearly this personal touch isn’t going to scale to the level of Twitter or Facebook, however for the moment, it seems to be working.
So what can you do on FunAdvice? Aside from the obvious ask questions and post answers, you can share, tag & rate photos, start or join groups and search for other members who share your interests. The site also launched an online photo booth last week so that members can share photos more easily, something that Facebook has had for a while but, along with customizable profiles, is what makes FunAdvice more social than the market leaders Yahoo and Answers.com.