MIT students centralize 'answers'

Most college freshmen or transfer students, thrust into a new environment, have many questions regarding their campus and social norms, which can cause them to become overwhelmed and uncertain. Now, there is a centralized place where they can ask their questions and voice their uncertainties - www.AnswerU.com.

"What we have realized is that there exists a hierarchy of information on college campuses," said Anil Dharni, co-founded of AnswerU, in a recent phone interview with The Heights.

This hierarchy develops and transforms each year as seniors graduate and incoming freshman enter. Seniors possess the highest degree of knowledge, followed by juniors, then sophomores, then freshmen. The latter always ask questions pertaining to their new environment. It takes months of exploration and trial and error to develop the knowledge possessed by older students. Anil Dharni and Brad Galle, the founders of AnswerU, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year and just received business degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.

They conceived the idea for AnswerU after noticing the "hierarchy of information." "Brad moved from New Jersey to go to business school and I moved from California," said Dharni. "One of the first things that struck us after going back to campus was that a lot of people are like us. They come from different parts of the world and are placed in a new location - Cambridge, in Boston. We don't know anything about it. Undergraduates are beginning a new four year chapter and for graduate students it's two years and for postgraduate students it's five to six years. One is kind of shoved into this new environment and you have to figure out your academic life, your social life. You have to make new friends."

Students who are unfamiliar with the area surrounding their new schools always ask the same questions, albeit in different ways, said Dharni.

"Where's the closet ATM? Where should I open a bank account? Where are the cool parties? What fraternity should I join?" Many methods exist by which one can answer these questions - for instance, universities' Web sites, organization listservs, etc. Nevertheless, the source of the answers is not centralized.

"This flow of information is really fragmented," said Dharni. "What we want to do is change that game a little bit by being the one stop for all your questions." Thus, Dharni and Galle aim for their site to house any and every question a new student would ask. The benefits of a service like this are easily discernible. "Instead of e-mailing a 200 person e-mail listerv, you can now ask 8,000 people on our Web site."

Because AnswerU is open to every student, the probability that one is going to get an answer is very high. In addition, one of the more interesting features of AnswerU.com is that it can be synced with one's Facebook profile. This allows us to refer specific questions to be directed to people who are interested in the respective area.

"If I'm a student at Boston College and I'm looking for close golf courses, then AnswerU would forward the questions to someone from BC who is interested in golf," said Dharni. "We match people to content." Therefore, the difference between Facebook and AnswerU is that the former helps people discover other people and manage their social network while the latter helps people discover content that is relevant to them.

"We really like the college market because there is no single existing solution that solves the problem," said Dharni. "If I say I like something and tell five of my friends, they'll go try it. The word of mouth and system of recommendation is very strong."

A pilot test of AnswerU was conducted during the fall at MIT.

"What we did was have an intern on the campus helping us out," said Dharni. "We put up Facebook fliers and posters across the campus. In month's time, we had about 15 percent of MIT undergraduates on the site."

The support for the pilot dwindled due to final exams and winter break.

Now, the Web site is only working at a handful of universities, including BC, MIT, Stanford University, Cornell University, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Harvard University.

Concerning development, Dharni and Galle used a programming platform call Ruby on Rails.

"It's a very cutting-edge platform," he said. "It gives the ability to very rapidly develop and modify things like AnswerU - with just two people you can build a lot and very fast."

They also use HTML and JavaScript.

Dharni and Galle are the company's only full-time employees, but altogether they have a solid team: one doctorate student from Berkley, three doctorate students from MIT, and a team of programmers working in India.

"A lot of student entrepreneurs just put stuff out there and then they get busy with academics and then their site just dies," said Dharni. "Ours has a little different approach because we really want to make this happen with spending as little money as possible. We are really careful with who we bring on the team and where we go and stuff like that."

The company is currently completely bootstrapped. "We have a couple of investors who've written two small checks - people who like the idea," said Dharni. The way we think of revenue is that we want to offer a product that offers a service before we start showing any ads."

The Web site, however, will ultimately be primarily ad-based. "At this stage, we really have no plans to put ads on the site. We want students to come in and get the feeling that this is extremely invaluable."

As of now, it is hard to gauge their success.

"Our www.Alexa.com ranking is about 45,000 right now," said Dharni. "What's really important to know is that that ranking is based on our current addressable market, which is well below 100,000 students."

Naturally, as their business spreads to more schools and garners the attention of more students, their Alexa.com ranking will decrease.

"We hope to be in about 300 schools by the end of the year."

All in all, Dharni hopes students will think of AnswerU not as a competitor to Facebook, but a complement.

"Facebook does a great job. It's all about your profile - you update it and it's displayed in the news feed and that engages people more and the activity increases. One big gap that Facebook left was the ability to express yourself and find out what's going on at your campus. The only reason people go to Facebook is to manage their network. AnswerU allows people to see what's going on at campus."