What Can You Do on Startups.com?
Ask Questions. You can ask any business question you have. Keep in mind this is not a forum to promote your business; you can say anything you want about you and your company in your profile page, not in your answers. This is not a discussion board, so please be detailed and specific when you submit your question. Also make sure you check your question hasn’t been asked nor answered before you submit your question. Let’s keep Startups.com a place free of spam, trolls and other contaminating agents. We believe out there might be millions of people around the world that want to grow their business and would willingly accept to participate in a positive community.
Answer Questions. Answering questions is very easy. You don’t need to log in order to answer a question, you can even format the text, linking to websites, and adding pictures. Beware that anyone can edit your answer, but that’s the best part of the Startups.com community: at the end of the day we all pitch in to give you the best answer for our questions.
Vote. Vote up the right answer. You get a bunch of answers, and naturally the best one will get voted up. If you find that one particular answer is the best, check it (the green check-mark), so we can all know where to look.
Edit. Consider Startups.com like a Wikipedia for business. Anyone can come in and edit, the answers or the questions. You can fix any answer, and you can also edit the questions to make them better. Our goal is to have the answers getting better and better with time.
Participate. Other participants in the community can vote your questions or answers up or down, or even edit them. Don’t worry, this is for the good of the community coming up with the best answer for any business question. Reputation points are to be earned (by your participation on the site, meaning your questions and answers, your votes, your comments, etc). The Admins can’t give you karma points, you’re on your own on this. You’ll realize soon enough that you need at least a few points (15) to start participating actively. You’ll thanks us later because this feature will keep idiots away.
How To Get the Most out of Startups.com
Badges. To motivate you, we throw badges as a sign of an achievement within Startups.com. Badges are automatic, the site does it based on a pre-programmed algorithm.
Participation Points. We know we can’t pay people to answer, so we have participation points. You earn points by answering questions, voting things up, commenting, and basically by actively participating in the community. The more points you get, the more privileges you get on the site. As an example, once you get to 200 points, you’ll see no ads on Startups.com.
Tags. Tag your question based on what perspective you are asking it so people will get a better grip at your question. Beware you can ignore tags so you never get to see questions with that tag again on Startups.com. We also know what tags you’re good at answering, so you can expect more questions tagged with your favorite topics.
Pre-search. Whenever you ask a question, at the bottom of the title, as you write, you’ll see pre-populated questions come up underneath. This will help you see if the question you’re about to ask has already been asked, and maybe even answered.
Logging in. You don’t need to sign up in order to ask a question, because we ask you for your Google Account (or others related with OpenID) to make it easier to log in. In case you liked how your question was answered you could later claim the answers you had as a “free spirit.” If you stick around long enough you’ll realize that logging in has got many advantages, and we’re confident that you’ll come around and become an active member of the Startups.com community.
Canonical questions and answers. This is not a forum to ask the same question over and over again. If your exact question was already asked, please don’t ask it again, just go to see what’s the answer to that question is.
Target. We want to invite a broad range of people that might have business questions. That includes business people, entrepreneurs, investors, small business owners, corporate employees, work-at-home people, university professors and students of business, marketing and all the related fields, etc. The important thing here is what brings us together: our love, passion, and interest for BUSINESS.
Remember This:
We’re not focusing on “owning” the content that constitutes the answers, we focus much more in getting you the best possible answer. That’s why we allow people in the community to edit the content (like Wikipedia), vote things up or down (to give more or less relevance among the bunch of answers). By participating you get Badges, that you can display on your site or blog, and you get Points that give you reputation for the next time you ask or answer something. You reputation within the community will grow along with your participation.