New moderators and flair on Answers OnStartups

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Jason

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answers-logoThe startup community over at Answers OnStartups has really taken off! Dharmesh and I started it just a few months ago and it’s already helped thousands of people. And vice-versa: For every question I’ve answered, there’s another where I’ve learned something too.

It’s a total blast — you should come check it out.  It’s like being in a room with 200 people in various stages of doing startups, all eager to listen to your problems and questions and ready with experience and advice.

Wait no, it’s not like that, it is that!

Actually it’s 2,000 people, with about 200 active daily. So you get a lot of viewpoints, and you get it quickly.

Recently two new developments have made the site even more fun:

Four new moderators

It takes love and devotion to curate a community like this, not only to delete spam but to help new members get involved, ask the right questions, and continue the spirit of constructive, respectful debate.

It’s a lot of work for Dharmesh and I to do alone, so we’ve recruited four users to help out. These folks were already putting a lot of time into the website, were already proactively helping new folks, and were promoting the site externally, so they were all natural choices.

Please welcome:

Promote yourself with flair

Get one step closer to 37 pieces of flair!

You can embed a widget in your blog which shows off your (live) Answers reputation, like I’m doing now in the sidebar:

jason-flair

There’s a few styles to choose from, or you can style it yourself, or you can really go nuts and use a web API to extract the live data programmatically.

Find instructions for all this using the “got flair?” link on your user profile page:

screenshot-flair-link

I hope to see you there! Join the fun.

8 responses to “New moderators and flair on Answers OnStartups”

  1. Jason – Congratulations on this. I met Dharmesh through your blog and the work you are doing here and there are excellent. Keep in mind the advice you are giving, while targeted at startups, is not just helping that community. I work in a corporate environment and am applying the lessons here and other places to make my company more innovative. Hopefully that doesn’t distract from the conversation.
    .-= Marc Winitz’s latest blog post: Are You a Player or Coach? A Way to Teach =-.

    • Heck no it doesn’t distract! It’s welcome, encouraged, and fantastic. “Startup” is more of a mental state than anything — a state of willing to try new things, caring about what you’re doing, and being honest about things like so-called failure.

      Thanks for bringing in new perspectives.

  2. Jason, Congrats on the success and growth of Answers OnStartups. I joined after reading an early post about it last year. I’ve have really enjoyed the interaction of the community.

    How I wish there’d been a group like Answers OnStartups back in the 90’s when we were first starting up!

  3. Jason, do you mind sharing Answers OnStartups statistics with the public? If not absolute numbers, then perhaps just the dynamics. I am under impression that the site had a huge start and very strong activity, but it decreased recently. Maybe it’s in a “stable growth” phase now.
    Overall, it’s a great idea to gather startup community together!

    • “Stable growth” is right. We’re trying to pick it up a bit with some new activity.

      You’re right that there was a big burst at first. We didn’t know when/if it would subside or how it would grow after, so we really didn’t do anything in the way of promotion after the launch.

      Now we’re doing things like posting bi-weekly on VentureBeat and possibly even taking out a little advertising in targeted spots.

  4. The software you used to create/run OnStartups Answers is open source? How can I use the same software to create a different answers website (about agriculture in Brazil)? Your blog is great! Tks a lot, Miguel, from Brazil

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