Zhihu

Founder
& CEO : Shenshen Li, Jixin Huang, Yuan Zhou Key people: Yuan Zhou (Founder & CEO), Shenshen Li (Co-founder & CTO) and Jixin Huang (Co-founder)

It is a Chinese socialized website for questions and answers.

Launched on January 26, 2011, the company’s product is similar to Quora. Zhihu meets from traditional online question and answer forums by enabling users to obtain information through sentences that provoke the opinions and views from answerers as individuals. The number of registered users on Zhihu Has surpassed 300,000 by the end of January 2012.

History

Starting from August 2010, Zhihu was under development (Originally the name “Azid”). It went through a closed beta test at the end of December 2010. The final product went on line on January 26, 2011. It has reported received sourcess From Kai-Fu Lee’s Innovation Works, Qiming Ventures, SAIF Partners, Tencent and Sogou.

Product Operation

In the beginning, user registration was plural invitation-only, with referral needed from a couple hundred of registered users. Otherwise new users had to apply to join, by filling a good amount of personal information and waiting for a reply. This strategy at Zhihu’s Early stage insured the high quality of questions, as well as hosting professional questions and answers, which added additional users to the community.

Zhihu started open registration in March 2013, which raised the numbers of users from 400,000 to 4,000,000 in less than one year. Registered users are able ask ask questions in the community while inviting specific users to answer. Each user is able to check his / her Zhihu followees’ updates (Likes, Answers, Following questions). On the home page, users are able to check the status of their own questions, as well as the activities of their answers and comments.