[nathan_compton]

I'd like to elaborate a little bit on what I'm suspicious of. Two relevant ideas are commonly encountered on Hackernews. The first: "Commoditize your compliment." (https://www.gwern.net/Complement) and the second, related, notion of "platforms."

It sounds to me like your startup wants to create a platform which captures the relationship between a family and their child development expert. In this business model your compliments are families and child development experts and by creating a low friction market between them you are naturally inclined to view them as commodities, as the platform holder. In my experience educated professionals don't like to be treated as commodities (in fact, I've never met a person who likes the idea of their labor being commoditized). Furthermore, my sense is that in the particular case of childhood development, a more personal touch is required (is perhaps the actual effective thing) in counseling children and families. In my view, the business model you have here, the fact that you think of it as a startup and that you debuted it on Hackernews, suggests that these fundamentally economic ideas form the substructure of what you are proposing.

The idea of connecting families to expert advice is great. If you really cared about that, why didn't you form a cooperative of child development experts who could invest in the appropriate technology? Such a platform, because it would be under cooperative control by the professionals in question, would resist commodification of both the families and professionals involved. In fact, a cooperative arrangement could even extend ownership to the families involved.

When I see a startup I assume the founders have dollar signs in their eyes. Years of hanging out on Hackernews have only underlined that perception. What I am getting at is that the very structure and context of this idea suggests either an ulterior motive or (to be more charitable to you) a misaligned incentive. I'm suspicious of either.