Philoit's Q&A Platform and Its Ambition Convene Millennials for Discussion

Not just building a question-and-answer platform, Philoit was started last year because there were concerns about the problem "unconscious problems" or the phenomenon of problems that are not realized in society, which are felt by Co-Founders Philoit Aldi Tahir and Pieter Surya. They feel that young people in Indonesia spend their energy on content that does not build literacy and knowledge in digital media.

From the data that Aldi cites, more than 60% of Indonesia's young generation spends more than 4 hours on the Internet. In fact, as many as 7% of them spend more than 11 hours on the internet. In other words, the time and energy of the younger generation is wasted in content of media discussions that do not build knowledge, such as thousands of comments on YouTube and Instagram where every opinion written in it will not be read and lead to ongoing discussion.

“This anxiety makes it difficult for us to tell the background of [Philoit being pioneered], because the problem we are solving is called "unconscious problems". But fortunately, the Netflix documentary "The Social Dilemma" recently appeared which can describe very clearly the problem is in the algorithms on the internet, making us bound and becoming products of media consumption," explained Aldi to DailySocial.

Second background co-founder this relates to the core of the product Philoi. Aldi mastered the technical expertise regarding data & machine learning which is strengthened by literacy from books on technology and its relation to human behavior in consuming the digital world, as well as the use of AI.

While Pieter has passion in education for the teaching field of teachers and tutors. He previously started a startup called Tutoreal, to connect parents who need tutors. “But before Pieter did launch digital product, we met and agreed to build Philoit.”

Philoit is one of the startups participating in the incubation program DailySocial Launchpad 1.0, incubation program from TheGreaterHub SBM ITB, BekUP Bekraf for Startup 2020, Cubic Incubator (Bandung), and one of the startup partners at Block71 Bandung.

Currently, Philoit is still actively mentored by Aji Santika from Feedloop-DeepTech-Startup Bandung and Novistiar from HarukaEdu.

Zhihu as the mecca, not Quora

Aldi continued, the popular question-and-answer platform, especially in Indonesia, is Quora which is always the mecca. Although the basic functions of the platform are similar, he claims Philoit is more focused on providing features tocommits active users discuss in the application.

These features include gamification, points & levels, titles & achievements, and the digital currency 'Philoit COIN' which can be exchanged for prizes. “Philoit wants to stand in the middle as a combination of conventional forums and media-based applications that are full of various unique features because they aim to target young people.”

He prefers to put Philoit as 'expert hub' by taking the direction of a similar player from China named Zhihu. This question and answer platform is included in the top 10 most accessed applications in the Bamboo Curtain country. The features are more or less the same as Philoi, there are gamification and stats features, just like playing games in the form of sharing and discussion.

"In addition, the demographics and [habits] of Indonesians and Chinese are similar which can be good examples in building a similar successful platform."

Because his spirit wants to be expert hub, Aldi admitted that his party is still perfecting the Philoit feature and core business that will be implemented by inviting expert to join. The reason is, the company wants to build an ecosystem from a question and answer platform first, then invite credible people into it.

The strategy was taken because of the lessons drawn from the failure of previous players, that in the early stages they immediately used expert/public figure to attract audience. While the discussion ecosystem in which the form is formed and has not even been validated, which in the end faces difficulties in retaining the participants expert/figure in it.

Challenges and business plans

Aldi said that currently Philoit has not yet done monetization. But in the plan, the company will implement the form of a 'business model'Pay Per Question' no freemium or subscribe. For that, he invited expert or credible sources into the platform to answer any questions.

“Just like the experience in the game world, the user is required to purchase diamond which will later be used forunlock' content from expert. "

According to him, with this concept is customization user experience because users can choose what content they need and want to access. Moreover, this method is in accordance with the habits of young people who tend to be picky. The user only needs to pay for the content he wants to read answers, opinions, or opinions, from expert who are experts in their fields.

As for the challenge itself, considering Philoit has a feature coin redemption as a form of appreciation for every opinion, discussion, point of view, and form of content contribution from anyone and giving equal rights to profit.

"This is very different from other UGC platforms which manually screen people who are used" businesses or special contributors and get benefits like money and stuff.”

However, at the beginning of the test, many users took advantage of the loophole in order to collect as many coins as possible in various ways. A common example is the answer that does not fit the context of the question, copy-paste other people's answers or from other content without including a link, spam best answer, unvote spam, and using multiple accounts.

“Some even directly attack our system and access coin changes via . Honestly, that's not what we want from this coin system.”

Finally, the team made a strategy change by updating the terms and conditions of redemption, and updating a system that can automatically differentiate content quality based on text analysis. The trick is to give weight to input from users, so that the content provided by the system varies.

Meanwhile, to minimize negative content, his party chose several active users to be moderators who manually reported on the existing content.

"For other challenges ahead, we believe they will continue to exist, but along the way, we believe honesty from users, sincerely sharing opinions, is accompanied by balance. benefits that will be obtained, will form an ecosystem sharing good at Philoit."

Aldi explained that in the future he wants to apply AI technology as already used by large platforms such as Quora and Zhihu. Also, developing other interesting features such as Room to accommodate questions and answers that occur in an event event.

“We have tried this feature by conducting several independent and inviting events expert in the form of sharing and online discussions. Every question asked to the expert in the event will be displayed live in a room that anyone can access, even after event over," he concluded.

Philoit so far bootstrapped and plans to do a fundraiser. Since its release last year, Philoit now has more than 20 thousand registered users with a total of around 190 thousand question and answer content and 14 thousand blog posts. The application has been downloaded more than 10 thousand times on the Play Store.