If you are a programmer, you've visited Stack Overflow. It's a profitable company with more than 500 employees, dealing with millions of visits a week. If you have a question, it's probably already been answered on one of their forums,
Stack Overflow saves programmers time and effort, and it's also a passion project for thousands of volunteers who contribute content.
How did its founder Joel Spolsky make better happen?
Section 01The Experts Exchange model, and why it worked on frustration
In the early days of the 2000s, There was a programming forum called Experts Exchange. Their model was simple and obvious: They hosted answers to common programming questions, and you had to pay to read them. A subscription cost three hundred dollars per year.
In order to build the business, they came at it from a place of scarcity. The questions were free to read, but the answers cost money.
To get traffic, they tricked the primitive Google robots that search the web by showing them the answers (which got them good search engine traffic), but when people showed up they scrambled the information, hiding the answers until people subscribed.
Experts Exchange created profit via frustration.
Section 02What Joel Spolsky built instead
Joel worked with his cofounder, programmer Jeff Atwood, to come up with a different approach: make the questions visible, make the answers visible, and pay for the whole thing with a job advertising. After all, what better place to find great programmers than a website where great programmers come to ask questions and give answers?
Along the way, Joel discovered that creating a better product meant treating different people differently, telling stories to each constituency that matched its worldview and needs.
Section 03Treating different people differently
For programmers in a hurry, he made it easy to find a question and the best answer for it. The answers are ranked by quality, so programmers don't waste time.
He realized that for every person who answered a question, a thousand people wanted an answer. Instead of trying to frustrate questioners, he got out of their way and gave them what they needed.
But the answerers were different. For them, he built a community, a ranking system, and a series of levels that would enable them to build a reputation and be rewarded with power over the community.
And job board posters were different as well. They wanted a fast, efficient, self-service method to find the best people. No hard sell, no distractions.
Section 04Why he kept himself out of it
Joel didn't want to put his personal stamp on a personal site. He set out to be of service, to make things more efficient, and to tell people a story that they wanted and needed to hear.
He built something better, and he let the core audience not only spread the word but do the thing that an outsider might have thought of as work.
Section 05FAQ: how Stack Overflow beat Experts Exchange
What was wrong with the Experts Exchange model?
It monetised frustration. The questions were free to read and the answers cost money, which is a business built on scarcity of the one thing visitors came for. To get traffic it showed the answers to Google's crawlers, earning good search rankings, then scrambled the information for the humans who arrived. Every successful search delivered a person to a page that deliberately withheld what they had just been promised.
What did Stack Overflow do differently?
Made the questions visible, made the answers visible, and paid for the whole thing with job advertising. Joel Spolsky built it with his cofounder Jeff Atwood on the premise that the content should not be the toll gate. That decision moves the business model off the user's back and onto a third party who genuinely benefits from the audience being there.
What does treating different people differently mean?
Serving each constituency the thing it actually wants, rather than one experience for everyone. Programmers in a hurry get a question and the best answer fast, with answers ranked by quality so nobody wastes time. Answerers get something else entirely: a community, a ranking system and levels that build reputation and earn power over the community. Job board posters get a fast, self-service way to find people with no hard sell.
Why does the ratio of askers to answerers matter?
Because it tells you who to optimise for and how. For every person who answered a question, a thousand people wanted an answer. That asymmetry is why getting out of the questioner's way was the right call, and why the small group doing the work needed a completely different set of incentives. Designing one experience for both would have underserved the many and under-motivated the few.
Rishikesh Ranjan
I reverse-engineer how the fastest-growing companies actually grow, then run the same plays for a living. First growth hire at ngram, growth at StreamAlive, Spaceonova, CloutFlow, and Airbook. Teardowns, playbooks, and field notes for people already in the trenches.
