Jig

My friend Joshua Schachter was in NYC yesterday. We braved the cool weather and went to our favorite – the Shake Shack. Over burgers and fries, Joshua gave me an update on Jig.com, his startup that USV is an investor in.

The idea behind Jig is that people have needs they want resolved. Jig is trying to be the service where you post the needs and others help you resolve them.

After lunch, we went to our conference room, fired up the computer, and posted a need on Jig. I'm trying to figure out how to ship a bunch of wine from NYC to Utah. So I posted that need on Jig. Then I tweeted it out.

A number of people @replied answers to that need on Twitter. But even more clicked through and gave me answers on Jig. Turns out that it is illegal to ship wine to Utah. That's good to know.

I plan to use Jig when I want to ask a question on Twitter. It databases the answers in a clean and organized way. Give it a try. It might be a useful way for you all to do the same.

#Web/Tech

Comments (Archived):

  1. Paolo

    I figured you knew it was illegal to ship to Utah, and that’s why you were asking! =)

  2. Dale Allyn

    Fun project. I hadn’t seen Jig before. I remembered the name, but didn’t recall what they did. Correction: I had visited the site when you posted something about it earlier this year. I forgot the mission of the site, so I guess the name just didn’t click with me yet.

  3. Eric Leebow

    Interesting. I’ve used Jig, find it interesting, yet haven’t really tweeted anything. What if you drive it in a private car? If you purchased the wine in one state, then moved to Utah, I’m wondering if you could ship it that way.

  4. awaldstein

    Yeah, saw the question and responded and checked out Jig yesterday.Is Jig’s value in organizing the information and making it easier to respond (‘thank yous’) or are they doing something to gather populations in unique ways or around sweet spots of information types?

  5. Rob Sobers

    Seems very much like Yahoo Answers or Quora to me.  How is this any different save for leading with “I need”?  Do you worry that leaving the range of questions so wide open that it’ll end up being a wasteland like Yahoo Answers?  I think the Stack Overflow guys found early on that unless you put parameters on the conversation, Q&A sites turn quickly into unproductive chatrooms.

    1. testtest

      the stack exchange folks have good podcasts, where they talk about community building.i was going to say, they should use game mechanics — create a skinner box. but not sure laying game mechanics on top of something is the answer to anything. it should be baked in.i’ve got the domain knowledgeful.com. i could create a game out of that. where players only get a question once in their chosen subject, and only for a set period of time so they can’t look up the answer. then, once a certain number of people have answered, it goes to a vote to see who gave the best answer. who’s the most knowledgeful.but i’m too busy at the moment……posting comments on blogs;) 

    2. joshua schachter

      We are trying to make a sort of marketplace. Right now we have needs but some day there will be offers and other things.

      1. LE

        “there will be offers ” good idea.Don’t make me think:The search box needs to be re-labeled and moved in the area of the “I need”  box. It’s not immediately clear when  you go to the site how you find or answer questions that others have asked.

        1. joshua schachter

          I agree totally.

  6. William Mougayar

    I found that the more unusual and unique the questions are, the more pick-up they get. That request was interesting. But I see “want to find a restaurant in NY” or a “place to stay in Paris”, is Jig the best place to get these answers? So, what I’m struggling with- what are the types of questions that seem to get the most pick-up? Maybe Joshua knows. 

    1. Dale Allyn

      I agree, William. As @twitter-16255551:disqus mentioned, it seems to me that topics of interest must be filtered and parameters in place for a proper user experience. Perhaps it’s in place, as I’m not up to speed on Jig, but I think it will be critical.Edit: I visited the landing page (I had only seen the detail pages before) and see some filters at right. I think this will need some refinement.

    2. awaldstein

      Value of the nitch at play here:http://awe.sm/5bX1bAnd the best SEO strategy as well.

      1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

        IT GOOD ARTICLE.WHAT IS JIG SOCIAL NICHE?NICHE MORE THAN TECH, MORE THAN ACTION. NO SOCIAL HOOK TO BUILD COMMUNITY AROUND AT JIG.JIG HAVE NO PERSONALITY.

        1. awaldstein

          We agree on this one FG!

    3. markslater

      i have to believe that this type of service will be for questions that have an ontology that is too complex for machine understanding. (how big is that market?? and whats the business model??) As you say William – the types of questions you mention i just don’t see being answered by this service.  

      1. William Mougayar

        I used these 2 examples because they are there. So i’m saying that these mundane questions arent the best for Jig. I think we agree.

        1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

          PROBLEM IS MOST NEEDS MUNDANE.TURN JIG INTO SITE FOR ONLY WEIRDEST REQUESTS EVER INTERESTING, MAYBE COULD MONETIZE ON ADS AGAINST BE EQUIVALENT OF WORLD WEEKLY NEWS FOR NEEDS.IF PLAN IS SCALE UP FOR MUNDANE USERS, NEED TO BE GOOD FOR MUNDANE NEEDS.

  7. Nate Kidwell

    Looks cool, I think their success hinges on SEO.  So far I have to add a “jig” keyword to searches to get jig discussions to rise to the top of the results.As a developer StackOverflow entered my field of vision by consistently being the first couple of hits on google.So did BleacherReport, as a sports fan.  Look up an athlete/event on google news and a BR article is one of the first hits.  This is even more impressive considering that most of the BR articles suck and are beating out legit news outlets…

    1. testtest

      i just wrote a rely. i think it got caught by the spam filters because of the links etc?

      1. ShanaC

        Yes, I brought it back in.  Sorry about that!we’re also undergoing a very heavy spam day(apparently spam likes to come in waves), so things are getting lost in the fray.If anyone here notices a comment that is supposed to be there going missing, shoot me an email – shana dot carp at gmail.  Also, if you flag spam if I or anyone else is away from the computer, the people who actually do the spam killing would appreciate it. (really)

    2. testtest

      jig’s backlink profile is weak. i did a quick comparison with another company in usv’s portfolio and it didn’t look great (see image on my other reply. for some reason). the other company is http://www.targetspot.com/. they’re not a consumer brand, so you’d expect their backlink profile etc to be weak.i also, set up a google alert on jig.com when fred first mentioned them. there wasn’t many mentions on the web.i would have put the blog in a directory, as in jig.com/blog, rather than a subdoamin — link equity flows better that way.and little things like starting the title tag with “jig.com” on inner pages, rather than putting it at the end (the front of the title tag is weighted more heavily).and having the categories on inner pages would help link equity flow back to more important pages.  the site architecture is basically fucked. everything is set up as https://www.jig.com/ need/ my-need, rather than https://www.jig.com/ unique-category/ my-need.if it was https://www.jig.com/ unique-category/ my-need then the category pages would get link equity and then distribute it to the new “needs”. the ones on the first page of each category page.

      1. ShanaC

        what tools are you using for backlink measurements?

        1. testtest

          http://www.opensiteexplorer… for that image. gives a quick over view. http://www.majesticseo.com/ are also good.and raven tools. they pull in majestic data and have a ton of other tools.you can also use http://www.advancedlinkmana…

          1. ShanaC

            Thank you!

      2. Nate Kidwell

        Fascinating insights.  Really breaks down SEO in a lucid way.

      3. markslater

        great stuff

      4. Dave Pinsen

        Maybe Fred should have bought you a burger too.

      5. Prokofy

        It’s terrible that everything has to be driven by this awful fake SEO crap.Couldn’t somebody just have a good idea for a site and it float to the top fairly?

        1. testtest

          seo isn’t about manipulation of search results. it’s about setting up your site correctly (onsite seo) and marketing (offsite seo) — the best marketing being having a great product. that’s a loose definition. the point i want to make: it’s not about link buying or comment spam or any other such practices — “black hat” seo. not that there really is “black hat” or “white hat” seo.google even produces guidelines:http://support.google.com/w…and have a youtube channel for the subject:http://www.youtube.com/user…it’s a common misconception that seo = snake oil salesman. that’s not the case. ultimately it’s making your site more crawlable, and your content more discoverable for search engines (what’s good for people is normally good for engines). and promoting your business; just like any business, small or large, does.

          1. Prokofy

            Are you in the SEO business?No, it’s about snakeoil. I’m forced to spend a lot of time doing all those things you linked to at different jobs I have and it is utterly fake.But the snakeoil starts with Google itself.

          2. testtest

            i concentrate on startup stuff now. did a few years of internet marketing, “SEO”, PPC, lead gen, etci know what you mean about google. they’re not an ultimate power and the results are fairly arbitrary; maybe (probably) even to google’s advantage.  

        2. markslater

          couldn’t agree more. but there is $200 billion spent attempting to get your attention online per year. I hate the model

  8. Mark Zohar

    I tried Jig a few times and it just feels too unfocused and undifferentiated from the plethora of available services and options for Q&A (e.g., Quora, Yahoo Answers, Twitter, FB, StackOverflow, Foursquare, Localmind, etc.). Without a clear focus and differentiated value prop, Jig may be too much overhead for most users. It’s the same reason that I don’t engage on Google+; too undifferentiated, too much effort to manage, too little value delivered. I’d be interested in your investment thesis and where you see Jig headed.

  9. JWD

    it needs a consolidation feature.  You type your question, it searches its database and asks you if your question is close enough to one that has already been answered.  If you look at it now, there are hundreds of unanswered questions.  Kind of the quora problem but worse.

    1. fredwilson

      Great point

    2. joshua schachter

      I agree. It’s something we want to do.

  10. LE

    I was a little surprised at the question actually since it takes only a second to search “utah restriction on wine shipments” and bring up the definitive answer on this http://abc.utah.gov/events/… which states unequivocally that you can’t do what you want to do legally. Of all the answers on jig only one highlighted the link with the answer to what *appeared* to be your questions.But maybe the question was written more as a gauge of how people answer questions and of course to highlight jig and to start a discussion here, right? To that end (gauge) people took the obvious route in their answers saying to essentially game the packaging and just do it.  So that is what the public thinks.I’m sure if it was phrased as a survey the answers would be different.An interesting test would be to ship an empty package marked liquor and see if it was flagged at all at any point in the shipping route portal to portal. (Using a private UPS outlet I’m sure the post office would flag right away.)It’s not a crime to mark a package as liquor that’s not liquor.Taking it one step further no question you are breaking laws doing this. But in reality the chance of being prosecuted and something happening because you are shipping a few bottles into Utah is slim to none. Of course since you’ve made your intentions publicly known you can’t do anything now. So in reality the act of simply asking a question like this in a public forum has created a problem for the person asking. Which leads to the question of maybe there should be a “anonymous” feature to jig without signing up for a new account that would at least provide a basic level of protection for sensitive questions “how do I turn the football coach in that I noticed doing something wrong to a child?”One of the things I think people are missing in any answer site or web advice is that while some of it is very helpful there is plenty of information passed from person to person that would never be passed on the internet.There might be something that I want you to know that I wouldn’t want everyone to know. I can give you a business trick but I might not want that trick to become common knowledge. I might trust you with how I can creatively game the tax system but I’m not going to give that advice to others. Etc.In fact in writing the above I just changed some wording and thoughts to allow for public consumption.Edit: Also the fact that there is the internet also makes me less likely to share in person anyway. It is now trivial for someone to get the attention of others or for information to be passed. So now more than ever once you say something you are no longer the owner of the information. I mean in the past if someone stole something of value they would have to get it accepted by the gatekeeper of a major news organization to get disseminated to the public in most cases. That situation no longer exists.

    1. ShanaC

      The what to do about sensitive questions on the internet is a passion of mine.  I have yet to see a good advice columnist on the subject (the closest being coke talk, but she isn’t internet exclusive).I’ve even thought about turning this into a hobby, but, I’m not sure I have the “right” answers for this.  Not just in a confidence way, more in a “this is a bunch of really new behaviors and I don’t want to screw up emergent behaviors sort of way”

      1. LE

        Just took a look at that “coke talk”.  And of course that is the point of view of coquetter (one person) so my opinion of just one of the things someone had asked was completely different (which is what is actually needed, right?) People make comments but that is to much to read. And the more popular, the more comments,so it doesn’t scale. But what does scale is the following:If I understand your concern above “don’t want to screw up emergent behaviors” the answer is to design the hobby (site?) into some kind of hybrid NY Times “room for debate” model:http://www.nytimes.com/room…Where multiple people are brought in to opine about different subjects.  And those people could be anonymous or not. Or maybe they could make their comments non-anon but then there would be a mash up of all the anonymous comments (from the same people) together as well.

        1. ShanaC

          I happen to like room for debate.I do think that debating among the manners crowd never goes well.  Emily Post had dominance for a very long time by being Emily Post.Do you think that the Room for Debate model would work in practice for those sensitive questions?

          1. LE

            “Do you think that the Room for Debate model would work in practice for those sensitive questions”I think it would. You could have a mix of both expert and non-experts in areas (where expert is someone who had their “ticket punched” and non-expert is someone who has the ability to add to the dialogue in some meaningful way that isn’t, say, the head of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School).  The non-expert voices allow more out of the box thinking since they aren’t jaded. Both voices balance each other (NYT has only ticket punched types of course in room for debate at least.).As far as “sensitive questions” it would work with the modification that I suggested. That is a feature whereby a viewpoint could be a) 100% anon b) Part anon and part non anon from the same person.  That way you could have controversial views that would invite criticism if not anonymous. Like Shockley:http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

  11. David Petersen

    Amazing domain name.

  12. leigh

    Did they have Facebook login before? I used my two email addy’s and it said i didn’t have an account (which i’m pretty sure i did/do).  Was going to login and see if they had evolved the user base from earlier on…..

  13. testtest

    @wmoug:disqus i haven’t received the invite for engagio. hope my email address got through ok. didn’t want to put it in the comment just in case of spam-bots, even though it would have been easier. 

    1. William Mougayar

      I just sent you an invite. Pls send me feedback later.

      1. testtest

        cool; thanks.

  14. jason wright

    Seems a bit ‘me too’. Who’s on the board of Jig? That information might be more ‘killer’ than the site itself as far as the road map and end game strategies leading to ‘success’.  

  15. David Semeria

    Jig.com? Only one period? Where’s the challenge in typing that, Joshua?Dis.app.oint.ed

    1. David Semeria

      BTW, Joshua, I was obviously kidding with the above.I remember in a previous post here regarding Jig, you shared some very interesting details on the purchase of the name.That was very generous of you.

  16. ShanaC

    I found it only somewhat helpful when I had to look for emergency plans during the (non) hurricane.  

  17. Matt Straz

    I’ve been interviewing a lot of New York-area developers lately and it’s rather surprising to me how many talented people are working on projects with limited potential for commercial success. Some seem to be taking stock of the 2-3 year old startup they work for and what chances it really has for success.Obviously not a scientific sample but there is something happening out there.

    1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

      BUILD A THING LOTS EASIER THAN BUILD A THING SOMEONE WANT. #TAKESMORETHANCODE

  18. markslater

    so this is somewhere between Quora and Zaarly. I am not sure i get the business.check out insidr. its Q & A with an obvious business model baked in. (at least they think so).i dont see how people will use this regularly. there are just too many other ways to get answers that are more enjoyable than typing a question. 

    1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

      IF STARTUP NOT MAKE $ FROM DAY 1, IT JUST THROW SPAGHETTI AT WALL, HOPE MONEY FALL OUT.

      1. Josh Haas

        Which, to be fair, sometimes happens…Weird spaghetti.

        1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

          LUCK IS ALWAYS PART OF SUCCESS OF STARTUP. SHOULD NOT BE MAIN PART.

  19. laurie kalmanson

    i posted this: i want a 40 inch screen that rolls up like cloth, which i can unfurl when i get someplace and plug into my macbook

      1. Rohan

        hahahaha

  20. Travis Russi

    Fred identified both a core weakness of Q&A sites and identified a great solution for Jig.com to differentiate itself in the crowded Q&A space.Read More:  How Jig.com can differentiate itself in the crowded Q&A spaceFollow Me: @travisdoes:twitter

  21. Cody Robbins

    Shake Shack—yes!!!J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is a really awesome food blogger here in NYC and he shares my obsession with Shake Shack burgers, and he has a great recipe for duplicating them if you like to cook: http://aht.seriouseats.com/….I just tried it the other night and I have to say it’s pretty incredibly spot-on. And making it at home only takes slightly longer than waiting in the line!

    1. Dave Pinsen

      I was really impressed the couple of times I went to the original Shake Shack in Madison Square park. But when I went to the one on the UWS a couple of times, the burgers didn’t seem as good. The current reigning best burger for me is this place on the mainland, BUCU.

    2. fredwilson

      thanksjoshua says he’s basically reverse engineered the shack burger too

  22. Brad

    I live in Utah and think this is weird. If you need to get the wine to a friend contact me. I can help you get it to your friend.

    1. fredwilson

      i want to send it from my house in NY to my ski house in Utah

      1. Brad

        I am just baffled by this issue. You can send it to my parents in Idaho, and they are coming down here. I would be happy to take it to you (I assume Park City?). Just thinking outside the box (and a little embarrassed that you can not ship wine to Utah).Have you ever skied Snowbasin?All out of towners head straight to Park City and never look to Snowbasin. By far the best resort and snow in Utah.

        1. fredwilson

          I like snowbasin. Also solitude. We are in park city for the night life and the CanyonsOn Dec 10, 2011 6:32 PM, “Disqus” <>

          1. Brad

            There is no night life at Snowbasin and staying Park City is definitely the better choice. The restaraunts at the Canyons have come a long way. The best Prime Rib in Utah is just up the road in Heber at the Zermatt resort (http://zermattresort.com/). If you are a scuba diver, there is something just awesome about diving in the Homestead’s volcano crater in the middle of winter http://www.homesteadresort….. Especially after a day of skiing. An experience few ever enjoy.Spent the last 15 minutes reading in to this issue of wine and Utah, I am completely baffled…..

          2. LE

            This is what I could have used a jig for.  travel.jig.comI recently planned a trip to an Island and spent many many hours finding a place that had hobie cats that were on premise so I could sail from the beach anytime I wanted to.  I had to look at several islands and finally ended up somewhere that met all the criteria that I was looking for (including the cats).Doesn’t lend itself to a simple search. Here’s the place – Turks and Caicos West Bay Club.   http://www.tripadvisor.com/…

          3. RichardF

            I like Deere Valley for the fact that snowboarders are banned and Snowbird because it’s like stepping back in time,  love the 70’s restaurant at the base.

          4. fredwilson

            any mountain that bans snowboarders bans meand i don’t snowboardi hate snobbery and elitism

          5. RichardF

            any resort that separates boarders from skiers gets my vote.nothing to do with snobbery or elitism, pure safety. I’ve seen too many people being wiped out by snowboarders out of control on piste, including my wife.

          6. Brad

            A lot of people feel this way. I could not reply to your comment below, but there are a lot of snowboarders that give the good ones bad names.

          7. RichardF

            Yep the problem is that beginner boarders get onto the main slopes faster than those learning to ski and travel faster down the slopes (out of control).There also seems to be a lack of learning slope etiquette, like not sitting in the middle of the piste to take in the view (I could tell you a really gruesome story of what happened to one boarder who was sat in the middle of the piste whilst we were staying in a French resort) or that you are responsible for the person’s safety in front of you. I’ve come across some boarders who think they are surfing and people in front of them are on their wave…. yeh right because I’ve got eyes in the back of my head! rant over 🙂

        2. DanielHorowitz

          What you are offering may be a crime so you might want to consider not discussing it publicly. Edit: My understanding is you can’t bring alcohol into the state unless you get special approval.

          1. Brad

            In studying this issue, I learned that this is not okay as well. I have talked to a lot of people about this, and almost none of them knew that this law existed and most were shocked at how strange and regulated it is (you have to send the wine to the state liquor board). I would be interested to know if any other states have similar issues.

  23. William Mougayar

    Where is Joshua in this discussion? It would have been great to engage with him & help out a bit that way.There’s part in Jig that reminds me of crowd sourced mechanical turking, where those answerin are saving you the trouble to Google yourself (or DDG). But that’s not where the highest value is. There were great answers in there that aren’t Googleable. That’s the good part. If Jig can train us to provide answers in the latter camp, there would be more unique value.

    1. joshua schachter

      Good insight. In some sense jig postings are restricted turk tasks that get routed to your neighborhood or friends or organization.

      1. William Mougayar

        Yeah. Mechanical Turk Knowledge vs. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Doing.

    2. joshua schachter

      Sorry – the other relevant thing here is that Jig seems to do well when the need has no good answer. Instead, you want a variety of opinions. I think this is one of the places that search tends to fall down.Additionally, people tend to trust answers from people they know. Stories over statistics; if you asked a friend from Minneapolis for a good restaurant, you’d probably just go without much further research (or even likely to discount a bad yelp rating…)

      1. William Mougayar

        I’m with you on the first one definitely- that’s a great segmentation target. But on the second point, it’s tougher because there are well known forums for foodies where they trust each others. Your scenario would work if a lot of your friends know about food. I would rather ask a stranger foodie about a great restaurant than a dear friend who isn’t a foodie.

  24. FAKE GRIMLOCK

    ME, GRIMLOCK, NOT BIG FAN OF STARTUP THAT JUST ONE TWEAK OF TWITTER AWAY FROM DEATH. 

    1. joshua schachter

      That seems a bit facile. What’s that one tweak?

      1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

        ONCE TWITTER FIX SEARCH AND DISCOVERY, NO LONGER NEED EXTERNAL SITE THAT JUST TWITTER FILTERED BY ONE TOPIC.SOLUTION FOR JIG IS MUCH DEEPER VALUE THAN TWITTER + MUCH BETTER VIRAL ENGINE FOR PULL IN USE (NOT JUST USERS).

        1. Nick Molnar

          There’s power to a highly focused and structured interaction like Jig, though. They can tweak and shape the site like crazy to optimize for answer quality; Twitter has to optimize for thousands of possible use-cases at once.

          1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

            USER-DRIVEN CATEGORIZATION OF THOUSANDS OF FILTERS IS ONE USE CASE, NOT THOUSANDS.ME NOT SAY IT EASY. BUT IT LIKELY TWITTER GO THERE. JIG NEED BULWARK AGAINST THAT DAY. OTHERWISE BUSINESS PLAN BASED ON HOPE OF STAY LUCKY.

          2. legendarymoves

            You kind of remind me of Kevin from the Office when he pretends to be retarded so people stop asking him questions.  

          3. Jon Michael Miles

            If memory services USV is an investor in both products. Your question could be the synergy they are after – extending Twitter with more useful tools. 

        2. joshua schachter

          but jig isn’t twitter filtered by topic? where do you get that idea?

          1. FAKE GRIMLOCK

            ADD “NEED” FILTER TO TWITTER.TWITTER WILL ADD TAXONOMY. ALREADY HAVE INFRASTRUCTURE IN PLACE WITH UNUSED TWEET METADATA. MOSTLY LACK GOOD UI FOR IT.JIG NEED BE MORE THAN JUST A TWITTER TAXA TO SURVIVE WHEN THAT HAPPEN.

          2. joshua schachter

            The vast majority of stuff on jig isn’t on twitter (although of course that vast majority isn’t very major.)There’s a few issues with twitter just adding categorization being competition:a) We want to build a two-sided market (that means offers to be the other side of needs) and a routing layer on top of itb) people tend to trust social, geographical, and organizational structures for advice.The routing problem is a hard one. Not sure Twitter will “just” do that.

  25. Rohan

    Interesting, Fred. Thanks..Main question – What’s your vision for Jig.com?I guess the rest of my questions are similar to @twitter-16255551:disqus . What do you see in Jig that Quora and Y! Answers don’t have?

  26. Semil Shah

    There are two opportunities for Jig, in slightly different contexts – on the web, they should be able to capture a sliver of Twitter conversations that are meant for capturing communications and helping each other out, as Twitter is inefficient for that; and on mobile, Jig should allow users to simply text what they need (or link through Twitter) and receive suggestions/tips on the go. The current use case — shipping wine to Utah — is pretty much covered on the 1st page of Google results or a Quora thread.

  27. RacerRick

    They’ve done a good job making it very easy to use.  The community is small.  Which is probably bad for Fred, but good for me.  I can get answers from mostly coder-type people.  I’ve used it for numerous software recommendations.Once it gets bigger, it will likely be less interesting to me.

  28. DanielHorowitz

    What I like about Jig is that they emphasize the social sharing aspect by leveraging existing platforms (facebook/twitter) Jig correctly includes the social sharing options as one of the few core aspects of creating a need/question. This may seem subtle, but I think it’s key. Similar sites do not emphasize twitter/facebook sharing at the need/question creation level, and some don’t emphasize twitter at all.Jig allowed Fred to more effectively use twitter as all the responses were consolidated in one place. Can twitter replicate this, Yes. Can twitter buy this, Yes. I like that they are building a service on twitter, it’s a valuable platform/network/medium upon which many successful businesses will be built. I’ll assume Jig is platform agnostic but it sure works nicely with twitter. To those who think it’s the same as Quora it’s not. Quora doesn’t even provide functionality to share on twitter. If you want to share a Quora question on twitter, you have to do it manually. And, as I mentioned before, it is more work on Quora to share on FB than with Jig. It’s at a different place in the process. To me, this seems like a big deal. edit: You may be able to aggregate purchasing power as well. (I need a toaster) p2p marketplace yes, but also one to many. (10 people need toasters, what deal can you offer us)

  29. awaldstein

    @wmoug:disqus  did but i saw it early.Utah is a problem. They do have powder though.

  30. awaldstein

    Talking wine, did you see this?http://bit.ly/rtubrzNot a fan of Lot18 at all. But $2M/month at what 20 points without holding inventory is a bit. Really high last round valuations as well.

  31. awaldstein

    Charlie…to below.Yes I agree but you have to pay attention. Growth has doubled within a year.And of course, parent to them and parent to Snooth are the same. They are monetizing editorial with a one-step removed Groupon deal strategy.Deals and selection and old-school numerical scale marketing are all really poor IMO but they are figuring out remainder wine sales direct from winery to customers it appears.

  32. ShanaC

    In truth, coke is the only hard drug with a separate designation as schedule 2 rather than schedule 1: Apparently it is the best topical anesthetic for eyes during ductal surgery.  So it is legal to ship (if you’re shipping to a doctor doing eye and nose surgeries)

  33. Dale Allyn

    Notice that the numbers indicate ~$278K in revenue per employee for the year. That’s ~$23K per month per employee. I know they’re new and expanding, but there’s some work to do in those numbers. 

  34. leigh

    answers as a service is a great idea….

  35. ShanaC

    How do we measure who gets to answer.  I like wine, so does @Arnold but neither of us are sommeliers.  Should we start answering questions about wine as a service….

  36. leigh

    lots of ways to do that – community driven (kudos, gamification engines) – could be network related (sign in and see who knows me answers) could have editors (best answer put to the top as aggregated by experts)

  37. Miljenko Hatlak

    When it comes about wines, it’s OK to follow recommendations from sommeliers and experts, but you should always try to give trust to your own taste.Generally speaking, bad wine doesn’t exist. Wine is a wine or it’s a product of some sort of “chemical experiment”. Wine is a product of mother nature. On year all pieces in a production process come together perfectly, the other year they don’t. Wine production isn’t like a production of glamorous (and usually good) cognacs or whiskey, where producers mix together products from various years (up to 100 years old) to retain recognizable taste.So yes, there is no reason why you should not answer questions about wines. You should do that on a basis of your personal expeiriance i.e. how many times you’ve tasted some wine, and not on a basis of a single testing. Also, you should never talk about some wine, when your answer is a product of some kind of filtering of a  “A friend of mine has told me that this wine is (fill the gap) ” recommendation.

  38. ShanaC

    you’re welcome.  Just doing my job.

  39. testtest

    and a good job as well:)

  40. matthughes

    Amen on the powder.

  41. awaldstein

    First skiing for me is mid January in Aspen. Super envious of those who get on the slopes earlier.

  42. matthughes

    Mid January might actually be a great time to kick off the season with a general lack of snow in the West so far.Have fun.