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- Founded: 2006
- Ceased Operations: 2016
What did the company do?
ChaCha was a company that provided free, real-time answers to any question through its website or by using one of its mobile apps. ChaCha operated on a pay-per-answer model, with users charged a small fee for each question they asked. ChaCha’s guides were trained to answer a wide range of questions, including factual, navigational, and social queries. ChaCha was one of the first companies to offer real-time answers to questions on mobile devices, and it quickly became popular with users of all ages.
ChaCha raised over $450 million in funding from a variety of investors. ChaCha was able to attract such a large amount of funding due to its innovative approach to providing answers to questions.
Who started ChaCha?
Founders Scott A. Jones and Brad Bostic
Why did they go out of business?
ChaCha faced competition from other search engines, such as Google and Bing, as well as social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. These platforms were able to provide users with a wide range of information, including answers to questions, without the need for human assistance. ChaCha’s business model relied on having a large number of human guides available to answer questions 24/7. This was a very expensive model, and it became increasingly difficult for ChaCha to compete with other companies that were able to provide answers to questions using automated methods.
Despite its large user base, ChaCha was never able to become profitable. The company was losing money every year, and it eventually ran out of funding. ChaCha also faced a number of other challenges, such as negative publicity about the quality of its answers and the safety of its users.