Overview
Quest was a short-form asynchronous audio Q&A platform built around career advice, where experts recorded answers to vetted questions in under five minutes. Founded in Amsterdam in 2018 as Cooper—a private introduction-based professional network—the company pivoted twice before shutting down in 2022 after burning through nearly $2 million in funding. The core thesis was sound: professional mentorship is inaccessible to those outside elite networks, and experts willing to help are too busy for one-on-one sessions. But Quest could never resolve the cold-start problem that sits at the heart of any two-sided content marketplace. The expert supply side had weak incentives to contribute content consistently, while the consumer demand side—junior job seekers and new graduates—was too small and too transient to justify the editorial overhead required to maintain quality. Three product iterations across four years produced no durable product-market fit, and the company ran out of runway before finding one.
Founding Story
Robert Gaal and Emiel van Liere are Dutch serial entrepreneurs who had already built and exited companies before co-founding Cooper in 2018. [1] Gaal had worked at Google, where he helped grow a team serving millions of users daily and launched a Google hub for startups. He was also a member of Atomico's Angel Programme, giving him deep roots in the European venture ecosystem. [2] Van Liere had led the mobile team at Hyves—a Dutch social network with over 10 million members—and had previously exited a startup called Folio. [3] The two had worked together building Hyves and Wakoopa, a consumer analytics platform later acquired by GfK. [4]
The founding insight came from personal experience. Both founders had mentored junior professionals and found themselves frustrated by the limitations of LinkedIn as the only real tool for making meaningful professional introductions. [5] Gaal later articulated the demand-side problem clearly: "These are people that are looking to learn the lingo or the mindset of how am I going to grow in this position? [and] often, that sort of etiquette is not always accessible to anyone, which is really why we built Quest. We really wanted to make sure that accessibility to a growing career is for everyone." [6]
Their first answer to this problem was Cooper: a private professional network built around curated, introduction-based connections. The idea was to make warm introductions the default rather than the exception. Cooper raised a $2 million seed round in November 2020 led by Comcast Ventures, with LocalGlobe and 468 Capital participating—a credible syndicate for a European consumer social startup. [7]
After approximately two years without product-market fit, the founders abandoned the Cooper model and pivoted to audio. The legal entity remained registered as "Cooper Media," signaling that the audio pivot was a significant strategic departure rather than a feature iteration. [8] The new product, Quest, launched in 2021 directly into the peak of the Clubhouse-driven social audio wave. The founders applied to Y Combinator with the Quest concept and were accepted into the Summer 2021 batch with a team of five. [9]
Timeline
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2018 — Robert Gaal and Emiel van Liere co-found Cooper, a private introduction-based professional network, drawing on their shared experience building Hyves and Wakoopa. [4]
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2018 — Cooper's founding thesis emerges from the founders' mentoring experiences and frustration with LinkedIn as the primary tool for professional introductions. [5]
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November 2020 — Cooper raises a $2M seed round led by Comcast Ventures, with LocalGlobe and 468 Capital participating. [7]
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2021 — After approximately two years without product-market fit, Cooper pivots to Quest—a short-form asynchronous audio Q&A product focused on career advice. Legal entity remains "Cooper Media." [8]
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2021 — Quest joins Y Combinator's Summer 2021 (S21) batch with a team of five. [9]
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August 29, 2021 — Sifted publishes a profile of Quest ahead of YC Demo Day, reporting approximately 1,000 users, 10+ hours of content, and the company's plans to raise additional funding and explore subscription monetization. [10]
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August 30–31, 2021 — Robert Gaal announces Quest's YC S21 inclusion on Twitter, citing 100+ speakers and 10+ hours of audio content. [11]
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August 31–September 1, 2021 — Quest presents at YC S21 Demo Day. YC group partner Gustaf Alströmer publicly endorses the audio thesis. Quest receives $125,000 from YC. [12]
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2022 — Quest fails to find product-market fit with the audio career advice product and pivots a second time, repurposing the Q&A infrastructure as a tool for podcasters to interact with listeners. [13]
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2022 — Quest shuts down after exhausting nearly $2M in total funding. Robert Gaal announces the shutdown on Twitter, citing failure to find product-market fit. [13]
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April 27, 2022 — Third-party LinkedIn article documents Quest's shutdown and frames it as a cautionary tale about burning $2M without achieving PMF. [13]
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2022 — Robert Gaal goes on to found Vesper Labs. [9]
What They Built
Quest's core product was a short-form asynchronous audio Q&A application focused on career advice. The concept was simple: professionals with relevant expertise record answers to career questions in under five minutes, and those recordings are made available to listeners—primarily junior job seekers, new graduates, and early-career professionals—on demand. [14]
The user experience had two distinct sides. On the supply side, speakers—founders, operators, and senior professionals from companies like Google and YouTube, as well as authors like Nir Eyal—chose a question from a pool curated by Quest's editorial team and recorded a short audio answer. [15] The editorial team vetted questions before speakers recorded, creating a quality floor for the content. On the demand side, listeners browsed and played these audio clips on their own schedule, seeking practical career guidance on topics like identifying early-stage startups to join or understanding what growth strategies actually worked. [15]
The deliberate design choice to make the format asynchronous and short-form was a direct response to the live audio trend of 2021. Quest positioned itself as distinct from Clubhouse rooms and Twitter Spaces, which required real-time participation. [16] Gaal articulated the supply-side rationale: "There's a lot of experts that really do want to help, but they're just busy. They can't let their schedule be harmed by a one-on-one mentorship session — often, they're even too busy to record a podcast." [10] The sub-five-minute format was designed to lower the contribution barrier enough that time-constrained experts would actually participate.
Gaal also made a qualitative argument for audio as the medium: "I think audio has something that inherently is very expressive. There's no way to record audio and be insincere." [10] The product leaned into this—positioning audio as more human and authentic than LinkedIn's text-based interactions.
At launch, Quest had over 10 hours of recorded content, largely from speakers in the tech sector, including founders and operators from YC-backed companies. [10] TechCrunch described it at Demo Day as "an audio Q&A platform where experts can share advice and stories in short audio clips — think a micropodcasting Quora." [17]
When the career advice product failed to achieve product-market fit, the team executed a second pivot in 2022: repurposing the Q&A infrastructure as a tool for podcasters to interact with their listeners. [13] The podcaster tool appears to have been the final iteration before shutdown. Its feature set, user base, and traction are not documented in the public record.
Market Position
Target Customers
Quest's primary users were junior job seekers, new graduates, and early-career professionals seeking practical career guidance. [18] This demographic is defined by a specific, time-limited need: they want to understand how to navigate early career decisions, identify good companies to join, and learn the professional norms of industries they are trying to enter. Gaal described them as people "looking to learn the lingo or the mindset of how am I going to grow in this position." [10]
The secondary users—and the actual content producers—were senior professionals, founders, and operators willing to share career knowledge. Quest's YC network gave it access to a credible initial cohort of speakers, including YC founders and employees of companies like Google and YouTube. [14] This supply side was not a paying customer; it was a volunteer contributor base whose participation was essential to the product's value.
The structural problem with this customer definition is that the primary users—junior job seekers—are high-churn by nature. Once a user finds a job or advances past the early career stage, their need for the product diminishes. This made long-term retention structurally difficult regardless of product quality.
Market Size
The professional development and career advice market is large in aggregate. LinkedIn, the dominant professional network, had over 740 million members globally by 2021. The online learning and professional development market was valued at tens of billions of dollars. But Quest was not competing for the full professional development market—it was competing for a specific slice: short-form, audio-first, expert-driven career Q&A for early-career professionals. That slice is considerably smaller and harder to monetize. The users most likely to engage with free career advice content are also the users with the least purchasing power and the highest churn rate.
The social audio market that Quest entered in 2021 was experiencing a speculative peak driven by Clubhouse's rise. Clubhouse had raised at a $4 billion valuation in April 2021. [19] But the social audio wave collapsed quickly—Clubhouse's downloads fell sharply in the second half of 2021—and the broader market for audio-first social products proved far smaller than the 2021 hype suggested.
Competition
Quest faced competition from multiple directions simultaneously, which is a structural disadvantage for a small team.
LinkedIn was the dominant incumbent for professional networking and increasingly for professional content. Its text-based format was less expressive than audio, but its network effects and user base were insurmountable for a startup with 1,000 users. [18]
Quora occupied the expert Q&A space in text format with massive scale. TechCrunch's "micropodcasting Quora" framing was apt—and highlighted the challenge of competing with a platform that had already solved the content discovery and expert recruitment problem at scale.
Podcasts served the long-form audio expertise market. While Quest differentiated on brevity, the podcast ecosystem already had established distribution channels (Spotify, Apple Podcasts) and listener habits that Quest would need to displace.
Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces dominated live social audio in 2021. Quest's asynchronous format was a deliberate differentiator, but it also meant Quest couldn't benefit from the real-time engagement and viral mechanics that drove Clubhouse's early growth. [19]
Lunchclub offered AI-matched professional introductions—a different mechanism for the same underlying problem Quest's predecessor Cooper had tried to solve.
YC group partner Gustaf Alströmer endorsed the audio thesis at Demo Day: "Prior to YC and Airbnb, I worked on an audio app called Voxer and my biggest takeaway from that time is that voice is a medium that we've massively under innovated in... Quest is going after some of the most unlocked content that still most remains in our head — how each one of us approached our careers." [10] Notably, Voxer—the voice messaging app Alströmer referenced—itself failed to achieve mainstream adoption, a data point that complicated the endorsement.
Business Model
At the time of YC Demo Day in August 2021, Quest had not yet established a revenue model. The company was actively exploring monthly subscriptions as a monetization path. [10] No subscription pricing, conversion rates, or revenue figures were ever disclosed publicly.
The subscription model faced a structural challenge: the users most likely to pay—senior professionals with disposable income—were not the primary audience. The primary audience—junior job seekers and new graduates—had limited willingness to pay for career advice content that was available for free in other formats (podcasts, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn posts). Monetizing the expert supply side through speaker fees or sponsorships was not documented as a strategy the company pursued.
The company burned through nearly $2 million across all iterations without establishing a revenue stream, suggesting the monetization question was never resolved before runway ran out. [13]
Traction
At the time of the Sifted profile in August 2021—Quest's most visible public moment—the product had approximately 1,000 users and over 10 hours of recorded content. [18] [10] The speaker roster had grown to 100+ contributors by Demo Day, according to Robert Gaal's own announcement. [20]
These numbers tell a specific story. With 100+ speakers and 1,000 users, the listener-to-speaker ratio was roughly 10:1—a thin audience for each contributor. For comparison, a podcast with 1,000 listeners per episode is considered small but viable; Quest's content library had 10+ hours spread across 100+ speakers, suggesting an average of roughly six minutes of content per speaker. That is a low contribution rate and a thin content library for a product asking users to return regularly.
No engagement metrics—daily active users, listen-through rates, or return visit rates—were disclosed at any point. No traction data was published after Demo Day, which is consistent with the company's failure to raise additional funding and its subsequent pivot and shutdown.
Post-Mortem
Quest shut down in 2022 after four years of operation across three distinct product iterations. Robert Gaal announced the closure on Twitter, citing failure to find product-market fit. [13] The company burned through nearly $2 million in total funding—the bulk of it raised for the Cooper product that was ultimately abandoned—without establishing a revenue model or a durable user base. The failure was not a single event but a compounding sequence of structural problems that no pivot resolved.
The Cold-Start Problem Was Never Solved on Either Side
The most fundamental failure was Quest's inability to bootstrap a two-sided content marketplace. The product required a critical mass of expert contributors to be valuable to listeners, and a critical mass of listeners to give experts a reason to contribute. Quest never achieved either threshold.
At Demo Day in August 2021—the company's most-resourced moment—Quest had approximately 1,000 users and 100+ speakers. [18] The listener base was too small to signal meaningful demand to potential speakers, and the content library was too thin to give listeners a reason to return. The team's attempt to address this was to leverage the YC network for speaker recruitment, which produced a credible initial roster of tech-sector founders and operators. [14] But YC-network speakers are a finite and self-similar pool—they skew toward startup founders and operators, limiting the breadth of career advice available to users outside that ecosystem.
The editorial vetting model—where the Quest team reviewed questions before speakers recorded answers—was designed to maintain content quality. But it also created a scalability ceiling. Every piece of content required human review, which meant content volume was bounded by the team's capacity, not by speaker willingness. With a team of five, [9] the editorial bottleneck constrained the supply side precisely when the product needed to grow it.
Expert Supply Had Weak Structural Incentives
Gaal acknowledged the supply-side tension directly: "There's a lot of experts that really do want to help, but they're just busy." [10] This framing—experts want to help but lack time—was the product's core bet. The sub-five-minute format was designed to lower the time cost of contribution below the threshold that would deter busy professionals.
But time cost is only one dimension of the contribution decision. Experts also weigh audience size, professional visibility, and reputational upside. With 1,000 users at launch, Quest offered limited visibility compared to alternatives. A senior professional could record a LinkedIn post, publish a Substack essay, or appear on an established podcast and reach a far larger audience. Quest's audio format offered authenticity and intimacy, but not reach.
The company did not offer financial compensation to speakers, meaning the entire supply side depended on altruistic participation. This is a viable model at scale—Quora and Stack Overflow built large contributor bases on similar logic—but it requires either a very large audience to provide reputational upside, or a strong community identity that makes contribution feel meaningful. Quest had neither at the scale it reached.
The Target User Was High-Churn and Low-Monetizability
Quest's primary audience—junior job seekers, new graduates, and early-career professionals—is structurally difficult to build a durable business around. [18] Users in this demographic engage with career advice content intensively during a job search or career transition, then disengage once their immediate need is met. This creates a leaky bucket: the product must continuously acquire new users to replace those who have aged out of the use case.
High churn is manageable if acquisition costs are low and monetization is strong. Quest had neither. The company was still exploring subscription monetization at Demo Day, three years into its existence. [10] Junior job seekers have limited willingness to pay for career advice content, particularly when free alternatives—podcasts, YouTube, Reddit communities, LinkedIn posts—are abundant. The subscription model the company was considering would have required converting a high-churn, price-sensitive audience into paying subscribers, a conversion challenge that the company never had the user base to test at meaningful scale.
Three Pivots Consumed Capital Without Compounding Learning
Cooper operated for approximately two years (2018–2020) without finding product-market fit, then pivoted to Quest Audio in 2021. Quest Audio operated for approximately one year before pivoting to the podcaster interaction tool in 2022, which was the final iteration before shutdown. [13]
Each pivot consumed time and capital without building on the learnings of the previous iteration in a documented way. The Cooper-to-Quest pivot was a significant strategic departure—from a network product to a content product—that required rebuilding the product, the user base, and the go-to-market strategy from scratch. The Quest-to-podcaster-tool pivot was similarly discontinuous: the target user shifted from junior job seekers to podcast audiences, a different demographic with different needs and different acquisition channels.
The $2M seed round raised for Cooper was largely consumed before the Quest audio product launched. By the time Quest reached Demo Day, the company was seeking additional funding with 1,000 users and no revenue model. [10] The failure to raise post-Demo Day—implied by the shutdown narrative—left the team with insufficient runway to iterate further. The podcaster tool pivot appears to have been attempted with the remaining capital from the YC round, a $125,000 increment that was unlikely to fund a meaningful product rebuild. [12]
The Social Audio Tailwind Reversed
Quest launched its audio product at the peak of the Clubhouse-driven social audio wave in 2021. [19] This timing provided press coverage and investor interest, but it also meant the company's fundraising environment was tied to a trend that collapsed quickly. Clubhouse's downloads fell sharply in the second half of 2021, and investor enthusiasm for audio-first social products cooled correspondingly. Quest's Demo Day presentation in August 2021 landed at the precise moment when the social audio narrative was beginning to deflate. The failure to raise additional capital after Demo Day may reflect both Quest's specific traction challenges and the broader cooling of investor appetite for audio social products in late 2021 and 2022.
Key Lessons
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Two-sided content marketplaces require a credible answer to the cold-start problem before raising growth capital. Quest raised $2M for Cooper before validating the professional network thesis, then pivoted to a content marketplace that faced the same bootstrapping challenge in a different form. Both products needed simultaneous supply and demand to function, and neither had a mechanism to bootstrap one side cheaply enough to attract the other. Startups in this category need an asymmetric wedge—a reason for one side to participate even when the other side is thin—before scaling.
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Altruistic contribution models work at scale, not at launch. Quest's expert supply side depended entirely on voluntary participation from time-constrained professionals. This model can work—Quora and Wikipedia demonstrate that—but it requires either a very large audience to provide reputational upside for contributors, or a strong community identity that makes contribution intrinsically rewarding. At 1,000 users, Quest offered neither. Products that depend on altruistic contribution need to either pay contributors early, build community identity aggressively, or find a supply-side user who benefits directly from the act of contributing (not just from the audience size).
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High-churn demographics require either very low acquisition costs or very high monetization to sustain a business. Quest's core users—junior job seekers—disengage once they find a job or advance in their career. This is not a flaw in the product; it is a structural feature of the use case. Building a durable business on this demographic requires either a viral acquisition loop that continuously refills the funnel at near-zero cost, or a monetization model that extracts enough value from each user during their active period to justify the acquisition cost. Quest had neither a viral loop nor a revenue model at the time of shutdown.
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Serial founder credentials and credible investors do not substitute for early evidence of retention. Quest had experienced founders with prior exits, a $2M seed from Comcast Ventures and LocalGlobe, and YC backing. None of these inputs produced a product that users returned to consistently. The 1,000-user figure at Demo Day—after three years of operation across two products—was the most important signal, and it pointed to a retention problem that additional capital could not fix without a fundamentally different product insight.
Sources
- TechCrunch: Cooper Seed Funding (November 2020)
- Sifted: Quest Audio App Profile (August 2021)
- Silicon Canals: Cooper Raises €1.68M
- CB Insights: Robert Gaal Investor Profile
- Y Combinator: Quest Company Directory
- Crunchbase: Quest Organization Profile
- LinkedIn Pulse: Why This Startup Lost $2 Million (April 2022)
- PitchBook: Quest/Cooper Media Company Profile
- TechCrunch: YC S21 Demo Day 2 Roundup (September 2021)
- Robert Gaal Personal Website