Illustration by Polly Becker
They called it Project Snuggie. The goal: Dispatch an army of interns to contact 40,000 businesses. And so the interns went forth, sitting in cubicles, dialing many numbers and sending many emails. And as they feverishly phoned and typed, they evolved into Team Snuggie, “because we wanted to have full coverage,” says design manager Mike Hunigan, whose goal was to boost offerings for Coupons by Answers from 3,000 retailers to tens of thousands. So at the end of the fall 2011 semester, after the team had prevailed, the interns were rewarded with Snuggies.
They were blue Snuggies, to be exact. Specifically, Answers Blue—a sort of friendly, Cookie Monster hue used for the logo at answers.com. It’s a Q&A site that draws 10 million visits a day, more than The New York Times. The company has satellite offices in New York, California, and Beijing, but it’s based in University City.
At the local office, Hunigan stands in a huge, sunlit room full of desks. It’s quiet, the only sounds typing and mouse-clicking. It feels ministerial, the digital version of hyperfocused 13th-century monks illuminating manuscripts. Hunigan points out tiny rooms equipped with just a desk and phone, where people can make personal calls without disturbing the hush of the main room.
Yet the environment is anything but all-work-and-no-play. Elsewhere in the office are foosball and ping-pong tables; a Segway; a gorilla suit with a horned Brunhilde helmet; a Lego room with an Answers.com logo made of Legos on one wall; and the newest acquisition, a full-size, blindingly chrome Terminator statue (a T-800 endoskeleton, that is).
“We act like big kids,” Hunigan says. “It’s like a San Francisco office was transplanted here in St. Louis.”
So how did this little piece of Silicon Valley land in St. Louis?
Answer: David Karandish, the company’s 29-year-old CEO. A Maplewood native and Washington University grad, he was the youngest contestant to appear on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, at age 21.
“I finished my last exam, which was in competitive strategy, and then jumped on a plane and did the TV show,” Karandish recalls. “I would have liked to have won the show, but right afterwards was when I helped to incubate this business. I think everything ended up working out for the best.”
In fact, the domain has existed since the ’90s. A search on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at archive.org, a digital library of Internet sites, reveals answers.com’s various iterations during the past 15 years. In 1997, it tried a model similar to the now-defunct Google Answers, where users paid a small fee to have a question answered. By 1999, it was a long, micro-fonted list of questions in various categories. (For instance, the question “How many wings does a flea have?” was under the category “Interesting.”) It was then sold to Jerusalem-based GuruNet. By 2004, Answers Blue had made its appearance in the logo; the site had billed itself as “The Answer Engine” and assumed a Google-like minimalism. By February 2011, when the domain was acquired by AFCV Holdings, founded by Karandish and business partner Chris Sims, it had become a sprawling Q&A site with a robust community of users.
Today, Answers claims to draw visitors am- ounting to about a third of all U.S. Web users every month and boasts 200 million registered users, says Karandish. Questions on the site are broken into categories: Entertainment, Technology, Animals, Sports… They range from technical inquiries about Excel spreadsheets to offbeat queries like “How do you know if your parrot is pregnant?” To a casual visitor, it might seem like the point is just questions and answers—but as Team Snuggie demonstrated, the site’s willing to expand its mission.
“One thing we focus on is how to make a product viable—we use this philosophy called MVP, which stands for minimum viable product. Whenever we create a product, we don’t want to spend months and months building this spaceship,” Hunigan says. “We build the framework with the simplest implementation of it, then take those metrics back and find out what we’ve learned: Are people interested in the content? Do people use it? Is it a great way to grow our traffic?”
In the case of coupons, Answers got its answer: Yes. The Coupons by Answers subsite went from approximately a thousand visitors a day to a quarter million a day from Black Friday to Cyber Monday alone, Hunigan says.
Part of Karandish’s approach has been not just embracing the Q&A format, but also making an entire mental shift, from old-fashioned, declarative mission statements (“If you build it, they will come”) to questions (“If we build it, will they come? And if not, what do we build next?”).
“Ultimately, we had people who were looking for products or local shopping services online, and we wanted to create a content type that would add value to our user, our brands, and search engines,” Karandish says of the site’s overall approach. “We think questions and answers provides a triumvirate of values between those three: The consumer comes out with an answer to their question; the brand gets a more informed consumer, who is more likely to make a purchase; and the search engines get unique content to rank.”
The company’s vision for the future goes beyond online coupons, though. “We want to take Answers and migrate it from being a website to a platform. We’ve already started doing that,” Karandish says. “Fast-forward a couple of years from now. Whenever you are at one of the major branded sites, if you have a question—and you should be able to answer it right then and there—that experience will be powered by answers.com.”
If it sounds like Karandish has his eye on World Wide Web domination—or at least turning Answers into its own sort of ubiquitous Googlenaut—well, that could be.
“David’s very competitive,” Hunigan grins, adding that he’s seen his boss play basketball during employee get-togethers during the summer.
So here’s another question: Will Answers keep its headquarters in St. Louis, regardless of how successful it becomes?
For the foreseeable future, yes, Karandish re- plies: “We like to take a Midwestern approach to building an Internet company.”
“People here are really open and friendly,” says content manager Nicole Wilson, who was recruited here from San Diego. “That helps when you are working with someone on projects—you want to help out your teammate, to figure out a solution.”
Though the bulk of the team works here, there is a large group in California. The teams communicate regularly via videophone. “Every conference room has videophones: There’s a camera in this boardroom, a camera over there,” Hunigan says. “We get a chance to work with people on a face-to-face basis, whether they’re in the next building or in California or in New York.”
That sometimes manifests as real face-to-face time. The company recently held an internal programming contest dubbed “The Apprentice,” playing off of Karandish’s TV appearance, in which all employees flew to St. Louis, then broke into teams and created Facebook apps that were judged by the company’s executive team.
“We didn’t necessarily launch all of the apps that we created during that time,” Hunigan says, “but a lot of those ideas were implemented in some fashion.”
Late last year, Answers mounted a sign—in Answers Blue, of course—on the exterior of its tucked-away Delmar Boulevard headquarters. Perhaps it was a concrete signal that the company is staying in St. Louis?
There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur here, says Karandish. St. Louis is filled with talented developers and IT gurus, and the cost of living is lower than in Silicon Valley. Square co-founder Jim McKelvey, for instance, has remained in St. Louis and helped launch Arch Grants, a nonprofit luring startups here. Other initiatives, such as Cultivation Capital, a St. Louis–based venture-capital firm, are also encouraging local entrepreneurship.
“I think St. Louis is really turning a corner,” Karandish says. “There is an entrepreneurial ecosystem that is being built up right now that didn’t exist 10 years ago. I would love to continue to help that ecosystem change.”
