Ask CoCo - Advice Through Polling

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Ask Coco is a free social polling app that lets you make good decisions by taking advices from random people, willing to help. They realized that the answers created within the app would become a collective consciousness for all and thus they called the app CoCo (Collective Consciousness). Below is our interview with Nihat Tanfer, from Ask Coco:

Q: What is Ask COCO and how does it work?

A: Ask COCO is an app that gives you advice, within a timeframe of your choice, for whatever you’re asking for. May it be multiple choice or open ended with or without photos and/or videos, people can seek advice from the rest of the World, or from their friends. They can even seek advice anonymously.

Once you download the app and create an account, you can ask a question to people on your contact list, share your question on Facebook, embed it into your website and best thing about it is that people you asked do not necessarily have to have the app to answer your question.

You decide whether your question is anonymous, public, to be answered within half an hour or can take votes for the next 3 days. Once you create your open ended or multiple choice question, you can add photos to your options from your camera roll or by making an image search within the app.

Once your question is posted users can answer and comment on your question. All this is viewed in a news feed area where users see questions from the accounts they choose to follow.

Don’t know what to say to your boss in a bad situation? Not sure what to wear? Is that girl/guy right for you? Upload or search on the web, let the masses decide :) Are you stuck between a rock and a hard place, even when your friends aren’t there for you, COCO is!

Q: What’s Ask COCO startup story? How did Ask COCO start?

A: It started with a premise that instant collective intelligence could be used in every day life, which obviously had great implications for businesses as well.

As a group of friends always talking to one another and asking each other for advice, we wanted to make this process simpler. From public questions such as ‘Who’s going to win the super bowl?’ to questions to a group of friends such as ‘Dinner and a movie or should we go out tonight?’ to anonymous questions to friends such as ‘Which present should I get for our anniversary? ‘, we wanted to be able to ask everything, anything and get an answer straight away.

So we came up with the idea of an app and eventually realized if used by people, the answers created within the app would become a collective consciousness for all and thus we called the app CoCo (Collective Consciousness).

Q: What are main benefits of using Ask COCO?

A: Ask CoCo gives its users the ability to ask questions to friends, family or the whole World for any type of advice. People can also look up what other people decided to do when in their situation. The main benefits of using Ask CoCo is to take control of your decision making process in all walks of life.

Q: What were the main challenges you faced in developing the app?

A: We wanted to give users as many options as possible when posting a question and we also realized we don’t want users to overthink on the questions so we limited the options to a maximum of 4.

Making the app look familiar was a tough one. We wanted to design the app so that users can use it easily and not be estranged by a new user experience.

Q: What can we expect from your team in next six months?

A: In the next six months we plan to grow in user numbers and keep a stable system, which can handle the traffic we hope Ask Coco will have.

We plan to add new features from the feedback we hope to receive from the new community of users and create an Android app.