If Jelly, Clarity, and Path Talk had a baby, it would be Fountain (ok, maybe that's a stretch). They just announced $4M in funding from Shasta and First Round, starting with a focus on home and garden but you can imagine this expanding to other categories like health/fitness, sports, art, etc. They're taking registrations for early access now.
h/t @sarahbuhr via her TC write-up this morning.
@libovness@rrhoover that's a pretty sweet idea for a collection, tech babies. Products that fit the ______+_______. Just gonna drop the Doublie=messenger+photoshop :)
Really neat concept. Pricing also sounds low enough for anyone to give it a try. Look forward to giving it a try.
Wondering how these guys will vet experts in so many different areas of expertise? Also, are the experts insured through fountain so if they give advise and something gets ruin or explodes that no one gets sued? Just thinking of questions about water heaters and leaking gas, toilets and flooding, lawn mowers and engines, fitness and bad form, that kinda stuff.
This looks really well thought through and the execution seems to be spot on.
There's a ton of noise in the 'Answers On Demand' space so their positioning makes sense right away.
@abhic Thanks Abhi! Michael Ernst @BeingErnst is responsible for the logo, look and feel, and much of the design. He was the first Creative Director for Yelp (Yelps first 5 years).
Glad to be spotted on Product Hunt. We've been working for almost a year on the deep natural language processing to understand questions, the skills implicit in solving those questions, and how those skills connect to various experts.
@apatzer This is Key!
You gotta talk more about this. Most Q&A startups seem to forget the core competencies needed to solve this problem. Obviously, each approach will require a different set of core tech, but it seems most products end up assuming that traction + liquidity + moderation will be enough.
Just a reminder that the beta opens up Saturday at 9:00am ET. You can play around with the app before then (unless you're wait listed), but there may not be any experts online until Saturday. Still fun to mess around with the NLP.
@apatzer How accurate is "Uber for experts" metaphor?
What are you planning to do to create this new behavior of fountaining an expert every time we need help?
Be among the first 200 to hit https://www.fountain.com/?ref=pr... and bypass the waitlist! Keep in mind Fountain experts are slated to come online at 6am Pacific this Saturday, Oct. 25, 2014.
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