INDEX / MARKETPLACE
Quora for People: Expert Reputation Search Engine
A structured, searchable database of 'who's the best X in Y' recommendations scraped from social platforms and enriched with community votes, solving the problem that these high-engagement questions are asked constantly but never stored.
▶ WATCH THE SOURCE SEGMENT — How To Build A Million-Dollar Media Empire | Erik Torenberg01 THE IDEA
Every day on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, people ask 'who's the best fintech investor in NYC?' or 'who should I meet in Miami?' These posts generate massive engagement but the answers vanish. This business scrapes, structures, and stores these recommendations using LLMs, then builds a searchable product where you can query for top professionals by role, city, or specialty.
Monetization options include B2B subscription access (recruiters, investors, business development), featured profiles, and eventually a professional network layer. The key insight is that the data already exists as social exhaust — the business is about structured capture and intelligent surfacing rather than content creation. Network effects kick in once enough professionals claim and enrich their profiles.
02 THE NUMBERS
$150K – $3M
$30K + 300h
$10K + 80h
7/10
7 · GROWING →
LLM/AI development, data engineering, product design, community growth, B2B sales
03 THE VERDICT
The core insight is strong — high-engagement social questions create valuable unstructured data that no one is capturing — and LLMs make the technical execution newly feasible. However, LinkedIn's dominance in professional identity creates a distribution and trust moat that's hard to overcome, and the chicken-and-egg problem of building a useful database before having users is real. Strong bet if you start hyper-niche (one city, one sector) and prove monetization before expanding.
04 THE FIELD
- LinkedInest. 2003STEADY · ADDED 2026-06-07
DOMINANT PROFESSIONAL NETWORK, 900M+ USERS
The default professional network but doesn't solve the 'who's the best at X' discovery problem in a structured, trustworthy way.
- Lunchclubest. 2017DECLINING · ADDED 2026-06-07
NICHE PLAYER, AI-POWERED PROFESSIONAL INTRODUCTIONS
AI-driven professional networking for introductions; lost momentum post-pandemic.
- Quoraest. 2009DECLINING · ADDED 2026-06-07
ESTABLISHED Q&A PLATFORM, DECLINING RELEVANCE
The incumbent Q&A platform that inspired this idea but doesn't specialize in professional reputation or people discovery.