Pitchdeck for Cluefly.com, a startup submitted by Jeff Yang to the 2011 New U Unity Journalists Entrepreneurship challenge. Watch a live video pitch here and vote for Jeff Yang / Cluefly: http://unityjournalists.org/newu/newu2011/newu11videos/aaja-video-pitches/ For more details, visit http://www.cluefly.com

2. What’s the problem

3. The Internet is a pretty
good place to get answers.

4. But it runs into trouble with topics that are
Debatable
Ambiguous
Nuanced
Complex
& Evolving

5. Sample DANCE Questions
How can Islam call itself a Why are women
“religion of peace”? such bad drivers?
How come
Asians are all Are people really Why
good at math? “born” gay? are black
athletes
better than
It’s the 21st century. Why do white
minorities still obsess over race? athletes?

6. What are the hottest hot-button issues about?
Race
Gender
Sexuality
Ethnicity
Culture
Identity

7. Questions about these topics are
the most frequently asked — and
furiously argued — on the Internet.
And the same points, often based
on misconceptions, are made
again and again.

8. Example: Yahoo! Answers
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091010220811AA4S9mT
No.

9. A search for “blacks extra ligament” gets 349,000 results.
And most of the top results are misinformed.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=blacks+extra+ligament&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

10. There are people trying to tackle the problem
online — with insight and often, humor

11. But there’s no single site that brings credible answers to
these hot-button questions together in one place.
Academic Texts Wikipedia entry Books
on race and sports and Documentaries
?

12. Factchecking sites are
now a central voice in
political conversation
— why not in other
debates as well?

13. is the factcheck desk for the Internet
— an online platform for curating,
aggregating and sharing authoritative
answers to hotly debated, frequently
asked questions.

14. How it works

15. Open Access
Anyone can
submit questions
Registered users
can uprank,
respond to and
comment on
questions and
responses

16. Logically Organized
Questions are put into categories as they are submitted,
ensuring that questions are grouped into topics and
reducing duplicate submissions

17. Expert Verified
Topic categories
supervised by Experts
Experts provide
and update Verified
Answers, informed
by the crowd
Active users can be
promoted to Expert
status

18. THIRD-
VERIFIED
PARTY
ANSWER
LINKS
RESPONSES
FROM THE
CROWD

19. Modular Structure
Users can select and assemble questions to create
their own customized FAQ pages on the site

20. Modular Structure
These Custom FAQ pages can easily be linked
to by or embedded in external websites.

21. Publicly Embeddable
<embed>

22. Publicly Shareable
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091010220811AA4S9mT
Uh…maybe you should check out this: http://cluef.ly/31747
<cluef.ly>
Custom FAQ pages or individual answers can also be
linked to in online conversations via the Cluef.ly
“shortlink” service.

23. Business model

24. NOW YEAR ONE YEAR TWO
BETA
Race, identity, Expand focus to Roll out FAQtbase
culture focus broader range of platform for enterprise
topics; build out
FAQtbase platform
ADVERTISING ADVERTISING PLATFORM LICENSING
CONSUMER INSIGHTS
EXPERT REFERRAL

25. Revenue Sources
§ Advertising, expert referral, insights
§ Intranet: Proprietary licensing of
Cluefly’s FAQtbase platform for use in
internal knowledge sharing
§ Extranet: Licensing of Cluefly as a white-
label, external-facing ExpertNet

26. ENTERPRISE
INTRANET

27. EMBEDDED
EXPERTNET

28. Opportunity and competition

29. Market Size
$100 billion
Wikipedia now has over 17 million articles in 270
languages, receives over 400 million visitors per
month, and — based on 2010 estimates from Business
Insider — would be valued at over $5 billion if it took
paid advertising. Pearson PLC estimates that
Wikipedia gets approximately 20% of all online
reference user traffic

30. Competition
Revenue Advertising TBA Donations Subscription
model (Cluefly.com);
subscription
(FAQtbase)
Content source Crowd + experts Crowd Crowd Published
commercial
sources
Content Expert verified None None Trusted content
validation (author identity (author identity creators
transparent) hidden)
Distribution Public site; Public site Public site Proprietary
model partner sites; intranets
proprietary
intranets

31. Summary
§ Central repository for authoritative answers to hotly
debated, frequently asked questions — initially
focused on race, culture and identity.
§ Crowdsourcing to generate hot-button questions and
current, relevant responses. Experts to validate and
update “certified” answers
§ Ideal solution for a intranet-based knowledge system
§ Powerful tool for identifying what users/customers
want to know — and for turning staff into public
experts on those topics

32. The factcheck desk for the Internet