Justin Kan, YC Partner, serial entrepreneur and one of the internet’s most-loved reality stars, has started another venture in the form of Whale, a video Q&A app.
Whale lets users post questions and enter into a one-to-one video conversation with an influencer or expert who can offer up the perfect answer. Those videos answers are then recorded and added to a library of existing content, letting users search through previously asked questions and answers.
In a video showing the making of Whale (of course there’s a video — it’s a Justin Kan startup), Kan says that he created Whale after repeatedly getting asked the same questions from his social media followers. He decided to build an app to hold a library of his own answers and realized all influencers and experts could use this kind of tool. Plus, Whale gives those same influencers the opportunity to better monetize their content.
(Skip to this part of the video to hear Kan talk about the making of Whale.)
Justin Kan is currently serving as a partner and spokesperson at Y Combinator, and running a ‘product hunt for music’ company called Drop. But his history in the tech world is a long one.
Kan started out with a video platform called Justin.TV, which was a 24/7 stream of his life. This was before the days of Periscope and Meerkat, and a 24/7 live stream was more technically challenging.
He then went on to found streaming platform Twitch, which sold to Amazon for nearly $1 billion in cash in August of 2014.
But Kan has met failure as well as success, shuttering his personal assistant startup Exec.
With Kan’s history in the video world, it should be interesting to watch Whale try to fill a space that services like YouTube and Snapchat simply can’t.