Where is the best place for a woman to travel? What do cinema goers think of the latest superhero movie? How does one register a business abroad? Each day, hundreds of thousands of queries such as these flood China’s most popular online question-and-answer forum.

Zhihu, which is today valued at $1.25bn, publishes online books, many written or edited by its top users and often based on trending topics, and sells podcasts and text explainers. Zhihu Live, a pay-per-view platform for livestreamed talks by celebrities and experts, attracts 4m viewers. In four years, Zhihu has generated 100m registered users and 780m unique monthly visitors, surpassing Quora’s 200m monthly visitors.

The idea for Zhihu came to Zhou Yuan a decade ago when, as an enthusiast of a Chinese blog used by Apple lovers, he believed he could do something similar.