Interview with Salil Agrawal, Co-Founder - QueryHome
QueryHome is a Bangalore based question - answer platform that provides apt answers and solutions to technical questions and problems of the users. QueryHome was started by Salil Agarwal and his co-founder Avantika Agarwal in May 2013.
In an exclusive interview with CrazyEngineers, Salil talks about QueryHome, the journey of QueryHome in the initial phase, his co-founder Avantika, problems faced by all startups in the initial years, his definition of an Entrepreneur and a lot more.
1. Could you please tell our readers about QueryHome platform?
Salil: QueryHome (Knowledge Social Network - QueryHome) is a question-answer platform, which helps you to get answers of your technical problems in a social setup. We started with IT and Telecom Q&A but over the period of time it got extended to puzzles (#-Link-Snipped-#), jobs and articles publishing. Our idea is by helping others people should able to expose his/her expertise to the world or possible recruiters.
2. Tell us about your growing up years. Who were your role models and how did you choose to become an entrepreneur?
Salil: At a concept level we started about 2 years back with maturing the concept, examining the other products, their workings, strong points and most important is how to build with minimum resources.
My role models are Flipkart founders (Ashish and Binny) who left the job just after 2 years of working at Amazon to realize their own dreams of providing online shopping experience and the same reason I left the lucrative corporate job to build a technical social network where people can help each other.
3. QueryHome was launched in 2013. The most difficult time for any startup is the initial year. How has the journey been for QueryHome?
Salil: As a startup (mostly at the initial years) the most difficult part is to build the trust as no one takes you seriously neither users nor potential employees or investors, people do see the upside but not willing to take risks to grow. We even face this problem now and I hope that once we started having the good stories of EXIT in the start-up space this problem will come down substantially.
4. What genre of user's questions are answered by QueryHome? Is there any specific domain? What are the various other services offered by QueryHome?
Salil: QueryHome (Knowledge Social Network - QueryHome) is targeting IT and Telecom based Q&A as of now and users can publish the articles too (IT Q&A is served by many websites i.e. Stackoverflow etc but telecom is served by hardly anyone and we serve people in social setup so that quality of answer is great). Recruiter can post their requirement so that they can attract right talent and can also look at the peoples profile to get a feel what type of Q&A is being participated to get the sense of their depth.
We have a dedicated sub domain for puzzles (#-Link-Snipped-#) to do some brain exercise. And plan to have similar concept in finance and healthcare sector in partnership mode. If someone is interested to start similar concept finance/healthcare or any other areas of professional life, they can contact us at #-Link-Snipped-#.
5. How did you get in touch with Avantika Agrawal, Co-Founder at QueryHome? What was the driving force behind this initiative?
Salil: We exchanged the rings about 10 years back and since then we are together. And yes she was big driving force and great emotional support.
6. What was the biggest challenge for QueryHome and how did you overcome it?
Salil: Biggest challenge for us was the hiring in the initial phase but very early we realized that this is going to be the biggest challenge so decided to do the development by myself with the help of few friends. We always have one motto that work should not stop because of people or because of cash and it should have zero dependency on an individual (except on me which we are slowly overcoming now).
7. How many people strong is the QueryHome team? How do you manage the workload?
Salil: QueryHome is fun based environment where you cannot get tired because of work. We are three people team who takes care of product, operations and marketing, where each one is supposed to take care of one function and participate in all three areas of business.
8. What kind of marketing initiatives are undertaken for QueryHome? Has social media helped your user base grow?
Salil: We have not really started big marketing as of now despite that we are having 1600+ user base, we are waiting for couple of features to get completed before we start marketing in a big way and yes social media is helpful & biggest advantage is that it is cheapest medium where you can connect to your target users with minimum cost of connect.
9. What according to you are the essential qualities one must possess to become an entrepreneur?
Salil: Fearlessness, believe in self and willing to take risk.
10. Thank you for your time. Any message for our CEans?
Salil: Starting a company is a journey which teaches you a lot and worth to try.
In an exclusive interview with CrazyEngineers, Salil talks about QueryHome, the journey of QueryHome in the initial phase, his co-founder Avantika, problems faced by all startups in the initial years, his definition of an Entrepreneur and a lot more.
Salil: QueryHome (Knowledge Social Network - QueryHome) is a question-answer platform, which helps you to get answers of your technical problems in a social setup. We started with IT and Telecom Q&A but over the period of time it got extended to puzzles (#-Link-Snipped-#), jobs and articles publishing. Our idea is by helping others people should able to expose his/her expertise to the world or possible recruiters.
2. Tell us about your growing up years. Who were your role models and how did you choose to become an entrepreneur?
Salil: At a concept level we started about 2 years back with maturing the concept, examining the other products, their workings, strong points and most important is how to build with minimum resources.
My role models are Flipkart founders (Ashish and Binny) who left the job just after 2 years of working at Amazon to realize their own dreams of providing online shopping experience and the same reason I left the lucrative corporate job to build a technical social network where people can help each other.
3. QueryHome was launched in 2013. The most difficult time for any startup is the initial year. How has the journey been for QueryHome?
Salil: As a startup (mostly at the initial years) the most difficult part is to build the trust as no one takes you seriously neither users nor potential employees or investors, people do see the upside but not willing to take risks to grow. We even face this problem now and I hope that once we started having the good stories of EXIT in the start-up space this problem will come down substantially.
4. What genre of user's questions are answered by QueryHome? Is there any specific domain? What are the various other services offered by QueryHome?
Salil: QueryHome (Knowledge Social Network - QueryHome) is targeting IT and Telecom based Q&A as of now and users can publish the articles too (IT Q&A is served by many websites i.e. Stackoverflow etc but telecom is served by hardly anyone and we serve people in social setup so that quality of answer is great). Recruiter can post their requirement so that they can attract right talent and can also look at the peoples profile to get a feel what type of Q&A is being participated to get the sense of their depth.
We have a dedicated sub domain for puzzles (#-Link-Snipped-#) to do some brain exercise. And plan to have similar concept in finance and healthcare sector in partnership mode. If someone is interested to start similar concept finance/healthcare or any other areas of professional life, they can contact us at #-Link-Snipped-#.
5. How did you get in touch with Avantika Agrawal, Co-Founder at QueryHome? What was the driving force behind this initiative?
Salil: We exchanged the rings about 10 years back and since then we are together. And yes she was big driving force and great emotional support.
6. What was the biggest challenge for QueryHome and how did you overcome it?
Salil: Biggest challenge for us was the hiring in the initial phase but very early we realized that this is going to be the biggest challenge so decided to do the development by myself with the help of few friends. We always have one motto that work should not stop because of people or because of cash and it should have zero dependency on an individual (except on me which we are slowly overcoming now).
7. How many people strong is the QueryHome team? How do you manage the workload?
Salil: QueryHome is fun based environment where you cannot get tired because of work. We are three people team who takes care of product, operations and marketing, where each one is supposed to take care of one function and participate in all three areas of business.
8. What kind of marketing initiatives are undertaken for QueryHome? Has social media helped your user base grow?
Salil: We have not really started big marketing as of now despite that we are having 1600+ user base, we are waiting for couple of features to get completed before we start marketing in a big way and yes social media is helpful & biggest advantage is that it is cheapest medium where you can connect to your target users with minimum cost of connect.
9. What according to you are the essential qualities one must possess to become an entrepreneur?
Salil: Fearlessness, believe in self and willing to take risk.
10. Thank you for your time. Any message for our CEans?
Salil: Starting a company is a journey which teaches you a lot and worth to try.
Replies
-
Satya Swaroop DashTechnical Q&A websites have now went to a newer level with QueryHome. As compared to other websites like StackOverFlow QueryHome seems well organised and since they concentrate on specific needs they are much more useful for engineers world wide. Although their Q&A database might not be as big as other websites the simple design makes it quite alluring.
Their success story like others on the "Founders Circuit" has taught us to keep on trying even when hope seems to be scarce. -
Kaustubh KatdareI just checked their website and it seems to be built on the Question2Answer platform. I've tried setting up that platform on my local setup and it turns out that it's got poor spam prevention. I guess one of the major headaches these guys would have is to keep check on Spam.
There are spam prevention tools available though. Not sure how effective they are. -
aarav sharmanice one really helpful for technical guys.
-
Salil AgrawalThanks Guys for good feedback...Feel free to contact me in case you want to start one under the umbrella of QH. We already have technology (IT + Telecom) and Puzzles sites, we want to expand to other areas also feel free to contact us in case interested.
Yes we started with Question2Answer but we found missing piece is social connect so decided to rewrite and eventually we have rewritten most of the part. -
Ankita KatdareAmazing read. Thanks for your time #-Link-Snipped-#
We wish you the best of luck in building your dreams starting with QueryHome.
Just one more question - What are your plans for expansion hereafter? -
Salil Agrawal
QueryHome has enormous potential, the need of queryhome type software is in every technical area and we want to start finance.queryhome.com, healthcare.queryhome.com etc etc in partnership mode where we will handle backend and someone from these sector will handle frontend. Another opportunity is Enterprise which is money minting, we already have more features then StackOverflow or Quora and despite being a startup software queryhome is extremely stable and Hack Safe. Let me know if you have some suggestions...Ankita KatdareAmazing read. Thanks for your time #-Link-Snipped-#
We wish you the best of luck in building your dreams starting with QueryHome.
Just one more question - What are your plans for expansion hereafter? -
Salil Agrawal#-Link-Snipped-# We are dependent on users for the spam protection, four flags question/answer/article will automatically hidden from system...A user after achieving some target can edit others question and answer. And till now it seems to be working...
-
Kaustubh Katdare
That's good. We face the same issue on CrazyEngineers as well. It's become a great challenge to ban the human spammers. Especially the ones who register and fill up their profile with junk. I think Q2A too has the same problem. If a user registers on the site and fills up profile with junk; it's very difficult to spot them and ban them.Salil Agrawal#-Link-Snipped-# We are dependent on users for the spam protection, four flags question/answer/article will automatically hidden from system...A user after achieving some target can edit others question and answer. And till now it seems to be working...
But I like what you've been doing at QueryHome. Wishing you all the best! 😀 -
Salil Agrawal#-Link-Snipped-# As of now we have provided the option of flagging only on Question, Answers, Articles and Jobs but not on the profiles of the users. We have very few instances where people are filling junk in their profile but we have the problem of people not filling the profile despite knowing that the same can be seen by possible recruiter. Slowly we are trying to make it more attractive...
-
Salil Agrawal#-Link-Snipped-# Will you like to register at Knowledge Social Network - QueryHome or #-Link-Snipped-# and drop me your feedback...
You are reading an archived discussion.
Related Posts
Sky, TalkTalk and CityFibre have announced that they're joining hands to launch a new company that will deliver ultra-fast broadband connection to UK homes and businesses. The new company, yet...
Samsung Electronics has updated its instant messaging platform - the not-so-popular Samsung ChatON service to version 3.5. In the latest update of the ChatON app (for Android, iOS, Windows and...
A mechanical engineering researcher from University of Washington has developed a new device called the "Micro Phone Lens" that can turn your smartphone's camera into a microscope. Yep. It is...
Mahindra India is all set to launch their electric scooter, GenZe in the United States in the next few weeks. The GenZe was unveiled in September last year and the...
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Delhi) is all set to exhibit its annual event 'OPEN HOUSE 2014' scheduled on Saturday,April 19 2014 in IIT Delhi premises.This is its 10th Edition.
Its...