Start Me Up! A profile of CorpQNA

The founders of CorpQNA want you to sign up for a more meaningful knowledge base, that extends its use case beyond just sales or customer service departments.

We spoke with founder Douglas Tarr about exactly where his startup fits in the world of wokplace collaboration software.

The knowledge spread out across different employees and teams in your workplace is one of the biggest strengths you can bring to market.

Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to be a big organization as well as a collaborative one, and increasingly, thanks to the sheer amount of information we deal with and process on a daily basis, even smaller workplaces can struggle in this respect.

The key is to focus on objectives that are specific and measurable, and choose flexible collaboration platforms for your internal workforce. In one sentence, what is CorpQNA?

What problem(s) does CorpQNA solve?

We are simply overloaded with information at work.  There is no good place to curate and organize a meaningful knowledge base.  This may sound surprising, since most companies already have many tools such as wikis, sharepoint, Yammer, group chat, and many other categories of collaboration.

But these collaboration tools are designed to create knowledge only.  It is an afterthought to keep things organized or accessible.  It's only done if there is some revenue attached - and so the only place in a company that has a meaningful knowledge base is sales (for new business) or customer service (for existing customers).  There are lots of other groups in the company that knowledge, and solutions for these groups often ignored. 

Most data just gets archived - a sort of "attic" for old solutions - with no real effort made to make them useful once the initial need is met.  Eventually, knowledge gets lost, people leave, and mistakes are repeated over and again.  

Employees become disenchanted and become unwilling to collaborate or problem solve.

Knowledge craves organization. Albert Einstein said that insanity is defined as doing the same things over and over again, but expecting different results.  Many of the problems we face have been seen before, even within our own organization! And yet, we cannot find the solutions, even when they are right in front of our noses. 

CorpQNA helps you solve these problems by curating and organizing knowledge into an accessible Q&A format.  

What are your immediate goals?

We want to make collaboration a rewarding experience for employees. Our goal is to validate that our solution is helping organizations grow and avoid mistakes. We are currently in a private beta test, with many companies having participated. We've been recognized as a Best of Breed Partner by Yammer and are working with many organizations to adopt our methodology.  

What were the biggest challenges involved in building CorpQNA?

It can be hard to convince people that things can be better at work. Anyone who has worked in a company for long enough has seen new tools come through and can be skeptical. Knowledge is spread out in so many places in a company. And yet almost everyone I speak with wants to make things better.  

How will the company make money?

We offer a monthly subscription to our Team Edition and Enterprise Edition products, which offer features for teams like secure file hosting, groups, enhanced security, and content moderation.

Who is in your team?

Myself and our CTO, who is responsible for new product development and the platform.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years' time?

Our vision is that CorpQNA will house the knowledge and wisdom of the enterprise - which is the real DNA of the company. I'd like to have CorpQNA be available via mobile, API, and web (perhaps on Google Glasses as well).

Other than CorpQnA, what are your favourite websites/apps/tools?

I like Intercom - it really helps me communicate with our users. Stripe was super easy to integrate for payments. We are BizSpark members, and we host our website on Microsoft Azure, and are big fans of both that and Visual Studio as a development platform.

What do you think of CorpQNA's approach for the problem of information overload? Let us know in the comments...