StackOverflow getting VC funding is a recipe for disaster
So we find out today that StackOverflow is going to start looking for VC funding in order to expand the StackOverflow business.
Basically they are going to do a land grab, put out a ton of StackOverflow like sites, and grab the market before it’s too late. So in essence, they are going to do what StackExchange users have been trying to do for like 4 months.
The whole idea here is that they’ll put out a ton of content via Q&A sites and rank well in Google. Pretty much try to duplicate the success they had with StackOverflow.
Now as a SE owner, let me tell you why this will never work.
- community - the only reason StackOverflow grew like it did, was because Joel/Jeff had something like 50,000 fans. You can’t jump start a community. So no VC money will help here.
- lack of focus - if your entire company is focused on one thing, you can do it well; if you don’t have focus, and try to do a dozen sites at the same time, none of them will ever get anywhere. Just look at the trilogy, the sites built after SO’s success aren’t doing as well because they aren’t the true passion, and are just a way to land grab a space:
- StackOverflow: Alexa 540
- ServerFault: Alexa 10,485
- SuperUser: Alexa 13,685
- SEO, StackOverflow ranks well in Google, because there is no real competition in the Programmer Q&A space(forums don’t count). But if you go for anything mainstream, you’ll be crushed by the big HowTo sites or hell even Yahoo Answers. Q&A sites by default suck at getting linked to, that’s why StackOverflow is only a PR6, while eHow is a PR8. An original content site, will almost always outrank Q&A.
- Little mainstream appeal - the StackOverflow design is fine and dandy for the programmer niche. But it is fugly for anything mainstream.
- Answers are a commodity - there are a hundred Q&A sites that have been at it for years, that have all the simple questions answered already(and indexed in Google), the only reason StackOverflow works, is because it was a niche that didn’t have the hard questions answered. There are few niches out there, that have the same parameters, that you see in the programmer niche. And if they do exist(law, finance, medicine), there is no real sense of community like you have with programmers.
Stackoverflow and StackExchange are great platforms. The problem is that they have razor thin margins. It’s not a VC business, it’s a small 2 person team company making enough to pay the bills business.
VC funding makes no sense for a StackOverflow network, they’ll never make enough money to justify the million dollar+ investment. And it’s gotta be a big investment, because these guys have plenty of money to cover the costs otherwise.
