Friday, March 30, 2007
Interview with Ashish Pandey, CEO and Founder of MegaBuzz
MegaBuzz (www.megabuzz.com) is a new, Seattle-based social media and community web site that launched last week, that allows people to post and answer questions and win rewards for participation. Northwest Innovation spoke with Ashish Pandey, CEO and Founder of the firm about the idea behind the service.
Northwest Innovation: Thanks for the interview. What's the story behind the service?
Ashish Pandey: There are thousands of community sites popping up, and a community of people who end up creating content on these sites--whether that is for entertainment or information value--but what is really lacking is a way for the community to get rewarded for creating that content. That's what MegaBuzz is trying to do, which is basically to help the community create content, but at the same time, reward them for creating content. On our site, anyone can author a question, and if more than 500 people end up participating, they get a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate. Right now it's just $20, because we're still trying to find financing, but the thinking is that the rewards will be more significant in the future. Each time people take sides on a question, they get points, and one lucky winner each week gets U.S. dollars. equal to the number of points they have. For example, if you have 600 points, and you are selected, you get $600 dollars. We're logging all the data and we have the models ready, and we are also looking toward the end of April to make a decision whether to also to allow people to redeem points for merchandise. So that's the story behind the company, which is we are going after rewarding people for creating this community. On the site, anyone can post a questions about anything, get their points, and earn points for cash prizes.
Northwest Innovation: Do you earn points for just questions, or also for answers?
Ashish Pandey: Both. If you post a question, you get a point for every answer on your topic. That incents people to create topics that people are interested in. On the other hand, each time you participate, you earn a point as well.
Northwest Innovatoin: What's your background, and how did you start MegaBuzz?
Ashish Pandey: I was with Expedia for about six years. My main accomplishment there is that I was instrumental in building Expedia's offline business--that was Expedia's telephone sales. Joe Wild is our VP of Technology, and he was the first developer at Travelscape, which is a company out of Nevada which was acquired by Expedia in the year 2000. He was lead in developing Expedia's hotel platform. We were just having lunch one day, talking about the idea and said--you know what, this seems like a pretty good thing. We were pretty excited about it, and decided to pursue it. On the team we now have six people, four of which are ex-Expedia.
Northwest Innovation: How's the business funded now?
Ashish Pandey: We are angel funded at this stage. We've raised about $225,000 in financing to date, and we are in discussions with venture capitalists.
Northwest Innovation: How do you fit into this market, for example, how do you compare with a site like Yahoo Answers?
Ashish Pandey: There are two distinct routes that we intend to take, depending on how the community develops over the next few months. The first is the spin on Yahoo Answers. What happens on Yahoo Answers is that people are asking questions like--who will win the World Series--polling style. On the other hand, you might also see questions on Yahoo Answers about "who is was the sixth king of Spain?" Those kinds of questions you'd search for on a search engine, rather than Yahoo Answers. Our unique spin on Yahoo Answers is we'll have more interesting questions. The other route which we are getting more data on, is becoming more of a "prediction market", though I end up comparing ourselves to Publisher's Clearing House. On Publisher's Clearing House, each time you play, you get a chance to win $10M dollars. Your chance to win is 1 in 500 million, whereas on our site, it's a "daily challenge". On the daily challenge, there are three questions that MegaBuzz posts, and the results are known the next day. If you get all three questions right, three days in a row, you end up winning the jackpot. That's what we're working on our financing for.
Northwest Innovation: Thanks and good luck!