Aaron Strout:   
I'd like to introduce today's special guest.  We have Brad Bostic.  Brad is the president and cofounder of a very innovative company called ChaCha we mentioned in our We Are Smarter than Me book.  Welcome, Brad.

Brad Bostic:                                                          

Thank you for having me, Aaron.

Aaron Strout:                             

It's our pleasure.  So, it's funny that we crossed paths.  As I mentioned, you guys are featured in our book as one of the case studies of companies that use community to really sort of help your product offering or help with your marketing.  Then you and I very serendipitously met over Twitter.  So, folks listening in on this I'm sure will know what Twitter is because I talk about it incessantly, but talk a little bit about who you are.  You and I had a conversation the other day.  You're a serial entrepreneur in the truest sense, and you've worked at a lot of different startups.  So, give us a little bit of that history in terms of what led you up to cofounding ChaCha.

Brad Bostic:                                  

Sure.  I'd be happy to do that, Aaron, and it is funny that we ended up connecting on Twitter because in full disclosure we actually had some conversations going way before it was really uncovered that we had this connection where ChaCha is covered in We Are Smarter and you're involved with that business.  So, it is great to see this kind of social media at work making those connections, like the one that it made here.

My background goes back to really in terms of my professional career the mid-'90s when I started my first company, which was a college textbook company on the web and just a small business out of Indiana University.  Built that up for a little while and decided to move on from that project to being a consultant at Ernst & Young doing IT consulting.  This is in about '97, and from there decided to really start my own IT consultancy, built that up and got very involved with the web while I was doing that were there were a lot of these older technologies that needed to be connected up into web technologies. 

So, we were doing a lot of those interfacing type of projects and actually evolved that into more of a company that had a product for facilitating different connections between the web world and older technologies, which that company is called Bostech Corporation.  I'm still the chairman of the board there.  Ultimately just kept – continued to build companies over time, and ChaCha has become sort of the most exciting for me because it's just really right in the middle of this big, social media movement that's taking place and this evolution from – some would see it more as a revolution from just kind of cold, hard algorithmic technology shifting over to more of a human experience on the web.  It's something that's really exciting and something that we're actually leveraging to take people much more into mobile so that they can very easily get access to answers while they're on the go, and we'll get more into that I know.  But that's just a very quick recap of my background. 

One pretty I left out was I was attending Indiana University when I started the college textbook company and studied business management and computer science there.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, Brad, I have another question for you.  We talked about the fact that you and I connected on Twitter in addition to being connected through the We Are Smarter book.  One of the ways that I actually first interacted with ChaCha was using Twitter.  Why don’t you talk a little bit about the role that you see Twitter playing in the future of ChaCha and what you've seen so far and how you see that playing out over the next several months?

Brad Bostic:                                  

Yeah.  One really nice thing about ChaCha is we are able to connect in to social networks in a very complimentary fashion.  So, within Twitter what we've done is we've made it so that you can actually follow ChaCha on Twitter.  Currently, you can send direct messages, send direct questions and direct messages in ChaCha, and the answer will come back to you right on Twitter.  So, you could do that from your mobile phone if you're just ready to send out a Tweet you can basically send it right into ChaCha with a direct message, and then the answer comes right back to you.

We're also opening that up so you'll be able to ask ChaCha so that we can identify you're asking that question and send the answer back to you that way as well in more of a publicly viewable manner.  The reason we think that's really powerful is you do have this community of very front edge sort of early adopters on Twitter that are very active, and they can give us outstanding feedback on how to improve the service, and they can also gain a great deal of value.  Whenever there's a conversation happening on Twitter now and there's any question people need answered they can just add ChaCha into that conversation by asking their question and it comes right back to them.  Expect to see similar features from us on Facebook and in other places coming very soon as well.

Aaron Strout:                             

Great.  So, for those listening in, if you're not familiar with ChaCha I'd love to have Brad actually tell us a little more about it.  But the way I like to look at it is in some ways it's sort of like an online Sherpa, and you guys are doing a great job at blasting it out into different channels, and I think you have some exciting news to share with the folks listening in.

The way I've experienced it has been either through text messaging on the phone and recently on Twitter, and so, am I getting that right?  Is there something that I'm missing in terms of the ability to ask a question really and have one of your guides answer the question and get back to you really in a timely fashion.

Brad Bostic:                                  

Yeah.  The idea that was the genesis for ChaCha my partner, Scott Jones, and I were having lunch back in December 2005, and we started talking about the problem of relevance in search and that on the web with information exploding more and more it has been getting tougher and tougher to really provide highly relevant results to a broad range of queries that people input.  And really, though, what we honed in on in that lunch is that that problem is compounded by many orders of magnitude when you shift away from a computer and onto a mobile phone.

So, what we kind of theorized was that the experience would be much, much better for a mobile users, for somebody who was on the go if they could ask a question and instantly get connected to someone with knowledge on that topic the question was on and get their answer back and have all of that happen in a very short kind of predictable timeframe.  So, that was the original idea.

To fast-forward through the work that we've done, we're now to the point where you can literally ask any question on your mobile phone by sending a text message to us, and if you spell ChaCha on a mobile phone it's 242242.  So, you just literally create a text message, send that message with a question in it to 242242.  It's kind of like you're asking a really smart friend a question, and within a couple of minutes the answer will come back.  This gives you this power of access to information while you're on the go.  It is literally the easiest way to access information while you're on the go.  And in addition to providing that answer, for those people who do have the ability to browse the web on their phones, you also get a short link that comes with the answer where you can click on that and go see the source website that supports what the answer was.  So, it brings the power of any answer you'd want to get to to you phone.

The way we're accomplishing that, Aaron, is we have about 30,000 human guides that have come to and registered in our community, and we put those folks through training and testing, and we have a very sophisticated method for getting to the point where only the best guides who come into our system are able to actually help the people who come to ask the questions, and they're connected to questions based on their specific areas of knowledge. 

So, when you ask a question and it's routed to a guide our system is, in a split second, finding these best guide to answer you, and then they're providing that answer back to you in the form of a text message as well.  There's a lot more to it in terms of the automation that's taking place and the depth of the technology, which we can get into as well if you like, but that's a high level how it works.  We also have a big announcement coming on April 1^st, which I had somebody on Twitter the other day ask me if that was a joke because April 1^st is April Fool's Day, and actually, it's not.  We do have a big announcement coming on April 1^st that is real that will further allow people – even more people to have access to this mobile answer service really anywhere they are so that on the go they can have access to these answers.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, I could make you a deal.  I know it's not April 1^st right now, but care to share some of that news and we could postpone putting this up until you give me the go-ahead, and that way when this goes live you'll be sharing the news after the embargo lifts?

Brad Bostic:                                  

Yeah, absolutely, Aaron.  I'd be happy to do that, and later on in the conversation we could also touch on our Twitter integration project and how that works.  Certainly, that portion would be fair game to get up as soon as possible.  On the announcement that we have coming that will really revolutionize the way people access information it will actually become the only real easy way on your phone where you could actually call 1-800-2-ChaCha, ask the question with your own voice and the answer will come back to you in a text message.  When I say ask your question, those questions can range dramatically, not just basic things like what's the weather – which you can certainly ask that.  But something like where is maroon 5 playing next in Utah, and the answer could come back to you, "Maroon 5 will be playing at the Rice Eccles Stadium in Salt Lake City Utah on April 18, 2008.  Those are the kind of answers you can actually get from ChaCha. 

Today you can get those by sending a text with your question.  On April 1^st you'll be able to call 1-800-2-ChaCha, which if you make that into the numbers it's 1-800-2-242242, which is 1-800-2-ChaCha.  Literally ask your question with your own voice.  It will recognize what that question is, send you a confirmation of the question and also send you the answer back to your phone.  Generally it's about two minutes on questions that you ask, but it's a very powerful way now that when you're on the go you don’t have to wait to get back to your computer to get answers.  You can get them right there by asking it with your own voice.

Aaron Strout:                             

That sounds fantastic, and I've heard a lot recently about the power of making the mobile web much smarter and really putting useful search tools, etc. on them.  So, kudos to you guys for doing this.  I have two follow-up questions, one which ties into We Are Smarter.  So, you guys really are truly I think doing what we like to call crowdsourcing, and we've interviewed a number of folks that do that.  Talk a little bit about how you recruit your guides or your sherpas and these are folks that are truly out there working on their own, correct?  You don’t hire 30,000 people that are all under ChaCha's roof and working for you guys full time.

Brad Bostic:                                  

So, basically, Aaron, what we're able to do with our community is create this environment where people with knowledge on specific topics are able to share that knowledge with others.  Naturally, the core appeal, these are folks who want to help other people, and it's really an exclusive sort of setup where you do have to go through some testing.  Generally you do actually get referred by another guide who is already successful at guiding.  So, the system scales in a way that reinforces in a very Darwinian manner that it pays off to be good at this to actually deliver quality answers which we have mechanisms for checking that, and then we give you the opportunity as a guide to invite other people who are like you.  And their performance kind of reflects back on you as well.

So, it's very kind of self-reinforcing that we want high-quality guides who are interested in sharing their knowledge, and the primary reasons that they do it are for the fulfillment and the rewards of connecting with others.  They meet a lot of other people like themselves that are inside the community.  Also, as they're connecting up with our customers who are asking the questions they're able to continually hone their knowledge on the topics they're interested in. 

So, those are some of the core things that really make our community structure much different than others.  Really, it's been scaling up incredibly well.  That's another question people always ask is how – if you do have human intelligence involved, how can you possibly scale that?  The beautiful thing is we are able to, based on a combination of very sophisticated technology and this ability for our top quality guides to recruit new guides into the system and the automation we have under the testing and the training that takes place and the leverage of the top guides to help us kind of manage the overall community we have the benefits of what would be traditionally thought of as crowdsourcing, but we also are able to impose a certain amount of coordination and structure into this environment so that we can ensure our customers that within a matter of a couple minutes with predictability they will get an answer that is quality and they're able to continuously depend on us. 

In a mobile environment or a phone-based environment people expect dial tone level quality, and I don't believe that you can succeed with a mobile service where it's just purely based on the hope that the crowd is going to answer you and further the hope that the answer's going to be accurate.  So, we leverage this massive community approach but put in place mechanisms that allow us to ensure the quality and that you're going to receive these answers in a timely manner.  That's really the big, big difference.  This isn't just a kind of loose community of folks who don’t really have incentive to deliver high quality to our users.  This is actually a vast sea of people who are actually accountable to deliver quality answers to our users. 

And we're also really in that community learning through every single answer that we provide so that in the future when the same answers get asked we're able to provide – I'm sorry – the same questions get asked we're able to provide answers in an automated fashion as well, but it's a very human experience.  It makes you feel like you're talking to a smart friend that's helping you versus just a computer that half the time tells you it doesn’t understand what you mean and forces you to put some kind of specific syntax in.  We don’t like that.  We want our guides to be in the mix so that they can facilitate this very conversational, very human experience, which is fulfilling for them as guides and also very rewarding and fun and useful for the customers.

Aaron Strout:                             

Great.  So, the second part of my question, which I think dovetails nicely in with this, this sounds fantastic.  I've used the service myself and have found the results have been excellent.  How do you make money with this?  Is it through sponsorships?  Is it through advertising?  Obviously, you and Scott are smart guys.  What's your plan?

Brad Bostic:                                  

It's not just for the philanthropy of it.  The plan is really ultimately that people prefer a sort of targeted, offer-based scenario to a subscription-type model.  So, we're definitely going with the free model so that people can access the service and its value without having to pay a specific amount, and we will be wiring in, as you'll see over time here, specific offers that tie into the subject at hand.

So, in the case that I'm looking to find out if there are any earlier flights on Southwest Airlines to Las Vegas tomorrow we could actually facilitate the handoff to go book that travel, for example.  So, that's the way we'll really monetize is to provide value-added services to our users, to our customers that also have a commercial value to the folks who would be willing to pay for that transactional handoff. 

In every case we're looking to do things that are very sensitive to the trust that we have with people for being able to connect with them on their mobile phone and also we're very mindful of the fact that there needs to be an outstanding user experience that is value-added for our customers.  So, we will not be sending text messages that are irrelevant or are outside the context of a given question or interaction that people are having with us.  Also, when you get into the voice-based service you can imagine how you extend that ability to connect with different services that could help enhance your experience that would also have commercial value.

In addition to that, we have ChaCha.com, which you'll see on April 1^st we'll have a full, new version of that as well that allows you to get into your profile and see your saved answers, to ask more questions, to tie in what we call different palettes to do things.  Ultimately you'll be able to interact with your Twitter account right from within your profile on ChaCha.  In that context, it's a very targeted sponsored result sort of scenario that people have their own accustomed to on the web.  In addition to that, we're experimenting with some different display options to monetize online, but overall, we have multiple places that we have the opportunity to monetize, and that will really span both handheld and with text and voice as well as desktop opportunities in a very targeted, tasteful way that is all aimed around being value added for both our customers and the advertiser or the commercial entity that would be partnering with us.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, you touched on community before, and you and I started by talking a little bit about Twitter.  One of the things I like to ask the folks that I'm interviewing.  We at Mzinga and certainly with the We Are Smarter project our goal is to help teach companies how they can harness the power of community, really embed it and partner with their customers, employees and/or partners.  Two or three recommendations on how a company could get started.  You guys have done a great job at harnessing your community both of your customers and of your guides, as you spoke about.  A couple of quick tips on how people could get started.

Brad Bostic:                                  

Well, the key thing is to appeal to some kind of a need that people have that kind of bring them together, and that sounds probably straightforward, but I think it's really important to try to identify the why would people want to be part of your community.  In our case it's really that people want a way to share their knowledge, so for the most part there are social communities that are oriented to different social activities.  Our guides that come into our community are much more oriented toward very productive exercises that help them stimulate their minds and learn new things and help other people.  So, we found this common thread, and then we were able to kind of start with a nucleus of a few thousand of those folks and continue to build it out by reinforcing the most important behaviors. 

So, whatever it is that your company is involved with I'd really recommend taking the time to talk to your customers to – or if you're trying to build something new talk to the target for your community and understand what their needs are and what they share interest with other people around, and then how you kind of create this ground swell of a core group of influencers that can get into that community and help you really build it up.  We think in terms of kind of sort of an inverted pyramid where at the tip of that pyramid, which would be sort of the bottom of it in this case, you've got the authentic type folks who are really the ones that don’t necessarily worry that much about what people think of them, but they're the people that set the trends, and they're really into a given passion for the reasons that drive them to just be immersed in that passion.

If you can identify those key people to be involved with your community that appeals to their passion, they'll help drive the activity of other people getting involved with it as well.  Then, obviously, there are vast opportunities online to have folks blog about what you're doing and help you recruit others.  And then I also think if you have something that's a generally a consumer-focused offering that's community-oriented and you're trying to build it out with more national recognition I just think it's more really key to have a very strong story from a PR standpoint so that you end up getting even the traditional media covering what your community is all about and what that unique need is that it serves.  That just helps to kind of take you to the next level.

For us, we had a big, good PR hit when we first launched our community when we were featured on Good Morning, America.  And the feature was really around this community of knowledge sharing folks, and through that we had just a massive surge of people who expressed interest in that.  That helped us to really get started in addition to just online activities that we did to try to go recruit the initial guides.

Now, our situation is a little bit different because it's not just a pure crowdsource model or a pure social network.  It's more of a you're coming here to have a specific focus and perform a specific set of tasks.  Then while you're at it you get to learn things and connect with other people.  Those are some real key principles, and I can't stress enough just how important it is to really be honest with yourself about what that need is.  Why will people come to your community?  Like the We Are Smarter scenario, there's this common thread of people that want to know about social communities and online social networking and that sort of thing, and that's where you bring everybody together.  It's that sort of appeal that you need to identify with whatever you're doing.

Aaron Strout:                             

Very helpful stuff.  So, I have one final question for you, and hopefully, this is not too hard a question.  I also like to ask everyone for the sake of our readers to be able to get some insight into what the smart people, the savvy business folks look at and inspires them.  If there was one blog and one blog only that you could read for the rest of your life whose would it be and why?

Brad Bostic:                                  

Wow.  The addition of that for the rest of your life stipulation that adds a whole new level of importance.

Aaron Strout:                             

Assuming they continue to write good content and your life never changes, which we know will be the case, right.

Brad Bostic:                                  

All right.  Good deal.  There certainly are a variety of different blogs that I try to keep up with, and I have my own blog at blog.bradbostic.com, which I list a number of those – my blogroll along the side.  Given my focus on the search world right now and how important that is to me, I do try to check in on John Battelle's Searchblog.  That's certainly one that I try to check out because he seems to be actively reporting on a lot of things that tend to be interesting and germane to the sorts of activities that I'm involved with. 

And I also do try to – it's not necessarily just a blog, per se, but try to pop on the Wall Street Journal's main page and see all the summaries of the high-level things that are going on and do follow some of the blogs with some of the writers from there as well.  But as you and I talked about the other day, Aaron, it really does take a conscious effort to make sure you are getting out there and connecting with folks and staying up with the blogs and also really participating with the conversation that's taking place there.  That's something that myself included, also requires a great deal of commitment and pays off big I think if you do it.

I'd have to say right at this moment John Battelle's blog is the one I check into most frequently.

Aaron Strout:                             

That's great.  So, folks listening in.  We're talking to Brad Bostic.  Brad is the president and cofounder of ChaCha.  Great talking to you, and we're very excited about your new news.  Thank you for joining us today.

Brad Bostic:                                  

Thanks a lot, Aaron.  It was great chatting with you, and look forward to continuing to connect up with you on Twitter and otherwise here as we go forward.

Aaron Strout:

Absolutely.