FixYa, a product Q&A site, took a look at its own holiday stats to collect some facts about many major cell phones and tablets including iOS and Android devices. The conclusion? iPhone owners tend to be most interested in fixing battery and call quality problems on Android users found a number of screen issues including freezing and problematic interfaces.
They also found that the iPad had far fewer support questions than the aggregate number of Android tablets. Obviously the cohort they surveyed isn’t very statistically useful, but they were able to grab quite a few percentages based on page views of various support questions.
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We first covered FixYa, the Q&A site for products, back in 2007, after the startup demoed at the TechCrunch40 DemoPit. Over the course of the next year, FixYa went on to raise $8 million in two rounds from Mayfield Fund and Pitango Venture Capital, with Chamath Palihapitiya joining the board of directors.
It’s been a few years since we’ve tapped into the startup’s progress, but Founder & CEO Yaniv Bensadon told us that the company is now seeing 20 million unique visitors a month, with 650K users having answered questions from the 10 million product problems and solutions currently live on the site. And, since 2009, the company has been cash-flow positive. → Read More
Ask your average Israeli venture capitalist to name a few companies they’re keeping tabs on and Fixya usually makes the short list—so do Benchmark’s Conduit and Sequoia’s Kenshoo. If you haven’t heard of Fixya, the concept is real simple: It’s a post-sale tech support site. On the one side you have users who ask product support questions, and on the other are users who respond and help resolve said problems. In short, Fixya has managed to build itself up as a UGC powerhouse and is systematically milking the cow for all she’s worth. And now it’s adding yet another udder to milk—Product Recommendations and with that it’s delving into new territory, that of pre-purchase support. Not blown away are you? Understandable. That’s because you need to step back to appreciate just how big this here cow can grow and why VC’s are enamored with it.
Fixya’s site content now spans a staggering one million products, covering everything from electronics to baby strollers. The site is seeing 15M unique users (mostly English speaking) that generate 60M monthly page views. (ComScore shows half that, with 7.7M uniques visitors a month—see chart). 250,000 questions are asked and answered per month—75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting. Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones. → Read More
Companies hate providing good tech support for their products because it is expensive. And consumers hate calling up tech support when they can’t get a gadget to work properly because they usually get the run-around. The idea for Fixya is quite simple: Let consumers help fix each other’s gadgets. The startup, which was in the DemoPit at TechCrunch40, announced a $6 million B round from existing investors Mayfield and Pitango. (It had previously raised $2 million in January, 2007). Fixya already has information on 800,000 consumer products, ranging from electronics to appliances. It also stores a lot of owners manuals in digital form. The site has been growing at a respectable clip. In the U.S., comScore measured 1.5 million unique visitors in February, up 107 percent from the year before (see chart below). Worldwide, comScore estimates 3.7 million unique visitors in January (the company claims 6 million uniques). CrunchBase Information FixYa Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
How do we get tech support? Well, you can RTFM or call the help-line. That usually results in a 25% chance of fixing the problem. Then you can do a search, find a forum mentioning your problem, post (“HEY GUYZ MY IPOD BROKED SCREEN WHATTF? HELP!!!!”) or pay a fee at Experts Exchange, a site that seems to have an answer to every question but is so hard to navigate that you eventually stop going back. → Read More
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