WPQuestions A Paid Problem Solving Site For WordPress
WPQuestions a Paid Problem solving site for wordpress launched this week and is a project by Darren Hoyt, Adii co-founder of WooThemes is also sponsoring and helping to market the site for the first few months. The function of WPQuestions is that members pay to ask wordpress related urgent emergency or help related questions and other members get paid for answering those questions.
Members on WPQuestions are classed as either Askers who ask for help or Experts who reply to these posted questions and earn money for doing so, if there question is selected as the best answer. All submitted questions run for a period of 3 days but end as soon as the best answer is selected by the Asker or the 3 day time limit expires. If an Askers Questions ins’t answered sufficiently within the 3day time frame the Asker receives a refund, minus a listing fee of (9%) around $1.80.
One of the things I noticed is currently the minimum price you need to set when asking for help is $20 (£12 UK) which seems a little on the high side to me. I know $20 isn’t necessarily a huge sum of money but it may be high enough to deter many from using this service, after all your only asking a question which could be available with a search on Google for free, right?. Alternatively you could ask for free help on any wordpress related support forum and probably receive the correct answer or be pointed in the right direction if you don’t mind waiting a few hours. On the flip side of this you do need to make the service worthwhile for people to participate and answer the questions in the first instance, a kind of catch 22 balancing act I suppose.
Personally WPQuestions isn’t a site that I would use but I can see it’s benefits especially for newcomers, novices or wordpress users who are completely stuck with trying to code a feature. I wish Darren success for the future with the project and go check WPQuestions out, although it’s not for me it maybe just what you’ve been looking for.
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WPQuestions A Paid Problem Solving Site For WordPress
Thanks, Stuart, we really appreciate your feedback. I think you raise a good issue about the minimum pricing, and Darren and I are going to consider that carefully.
Hey Lawrence,
Thanks for the comment I feel if you could get the entry price down a little this project could really take off for you guys, but hey that’s just my opinion and I completely understand how hard it is to achieve a balance that appeals to both Askers and Experts. It’s good you guys are taking pricing into consideration though, thanks again for taking the time to comment and good luck with the project..
While $20 would deter many, if the quality of the answers is really sufficient to demand that price, I’d be willing to pay it.
While I’m certainly a more advanced WordPress developer, there are certain questions that sometimes I cannot answer with Google searches and Codex documentation. Also consider offering a true support service for WordPress, rather than a per-question fee. I’d happily pay $5-$10 per month to a rock-solid support team as sort of a disaster insurance policy for if/when a client’s site goes down.
Phillip, you make some good points. I’d like to respond and clarify what Darren Hoyt and I are trying to do.
You wrote “there are certain questions that sometimes I cannot answer with Google searches and Codex documentation”.
We feel that our site is mostly for those who face a deadline. When a person has the luxury of time, then of course they can rely on Google to track down the information they need. But if they are suppose to meet with their deadline early tomorrow morning and it is already 11 PM, then they might be willing to pay to get fast, good answers. There are a lot of free forums out there. We are different from them, mostly in that the use of money allows more urgency and speed.
You wrote “I’d happily pay $5-$10 per month to a rock-solid support team as sort of a disaster insurance policy for if/when a client’s site goes down.”
That model is tricky. For one thing, it is similar to the pricing that Experts Exchange is already offering. But more important, the question comes up, how does the money get divided among the experts who are trying to help? That is a problem that we largely avoid by leaving it to the asker to choose the winners (most of the time, with a few exceptions).
But, truly, we appreciate your feedback.
Our business model seems have had some small, modest success, so we are now ready to start rolling out new sites, targeting other technologies. Starting this Monday, we will be rolling out similar sites for CSS, Drupal, Symfony, MySql, and Javascript. If they do well, then we will go after a much wider range of technologies.
Actually, we’d be interested in advertising the site here on your site. I see that you have some ads. But I don’t see any contact information for those ads. How do we sign up? I tried to ping you on Twitter but didn’t get a response.