Umpf speaks to Flawk Founder Matt Coalson

Flawk is a one-to-many communication model that’s been causing quite a stir in the socialsphere of recent weeks. Following its glowing review from Mashable, interest in the real-time Q&A platform has skyrocketed; much to the delight of co-founders Matt Coalson and Kabriel Robichaux, who met 12 years ago at game development company Electronic Arts.

We caught up with Coalson who explains how the idea for Flawk first came to fruition.

“The idea for Flawk came from a mix of two things.  Our love for music, and the desire to help people connect better.  It’s frustrating to see someone you really want to talk to do a Twitter Q&A or a Reddit AMA and not really feel like you’re part of the experience.  We thought we could do a better job at bringing those people together.

“Traditional Q&A platforms are static and real conversation never happens in a disconnected environment.  Without a live audience and reactions to what’s happening, you might as well be in a vacuum.  There’s also the problem with organization; whenever one person attempts to interface with a large amount of people on the internet without the right set of tools bad things usually happen.”

And while Flawk is an obvious platform for celebrities and their fans; Coalson sees the potential for much more than that.

“First and foremost we are a communication platform aimed at helping people connect with their followers.  Our slogan is “everyone is a fan” which can be interpreted as “everyone has someone that wants to hear what they have to say”.  This could be a teacher, a student, or a community organizer, anyone really as it’s a general purpose engagement platform.

“Our goal is to capture the fun and excitement of actually engaging directly with your audience live. We believe it matters when people are live and fully engaged. While there are some social networks that have features to allow you to post messages, and comments or replies, they are all general purpose. We found that the more we structured the interactions between participants, the more efficient and enjoyable everything became. Once questions were a meaningful part of our system it was as simple step to extend them to allow the audience to vote on the ones they like the most.

“This level of participation is simple, but because it is live there can be a lot of excitement in seeing how questions rise to the top. We see a lot of room for innovating on how the questions from the audience get sorted, filtered and curated. Our focus is on the live experience, and we think that is a huge differentiator not only with Twitter and Facebook, but just about anyone else out there today.”

What are you waiting for? Check it out here: https://www.flawk.to/