[tomashertus]

Heh, a couple of years ago, I had an idea for an "Uber for Experts." It would provide a similar experience to Uber, but instead of a ride, you'd get 30 minutes with a domain expert of your choosing. I never got around to working on it, but there might still be an opportunity for something like this.

[Founder82836]

Remember that for any startup idea, there is reasonable chance that Google launched it and already killed it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Helpouts

[latexr]

That is more indicative of Google’s culture and lack of focus than the viability of the idea. With the death of Google Reader, plenty of RSS aggregators popped up and are still kicking.

[rrr_oh_man]

There can be more than one pizza restaurant.

[tomashertus]

Wow! I had no clue that this ever existed. I guess it was DOA given its short life-span.

[cellis]

And way before that, there was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

There's a few companies out there that provide these "expert networks." GLG or AlphaSights

Not necessarily tutors, but I run into the same issue in Product Management. I need to do customer research, but the process of finding people to speak with is time consuming and very much like sales. To have 10 conversations, I'll probably have reached out to at least 40-50 people. I have to build a "funnel" of people in order to maintain having a few conversations per week.

Note: I experience this problem at startups that don't have existing customer bases. With companies that have existing customer bases, finding people to validate ideas and get feedback is not arduous .

[neom]

I was an AlphaSights "expert" on cloud for a while, they paid me super well and the people asked good questions, I stopped doing it because It was mostly hedge fund managers I was talking with, but given how much they paid me, I can't imagine what their clients must have been paying.

[ghaff]

I did a few calls with an expert network firm once upon a time when I was an analyst. My limited experience was that they were really looking for inside information rather than broader insights and a lot of product companies actually forbid engaging with them.

Super-well paid is a matter of perspective. As I recall it was about $500 for an hour call but it's not like I personally got all that and was pretty normal as a consulting rate.

[neom]

Mine as after DigitalOcean went public, I was long gone from it, they mostly wanted to talk about where cloud is going (would managed hosting/ftp hosts go away, what do you think will happen to the front end, blah bah blah) - They paid me hourly well over an order of magnitude more than what you were paid, heh. :)

[joshdavham]

Might honestly not be the worst idea!

People could put up basic profiles with their skills listed and you could purchase a time slot with them. It’d be relatively low commitment for both the experts and also the advice seekers.

Some technical problems might be verifying expertise but this could be handled with a sort of social proof like how LinkedIn allows users to vouch for certain skills. In fact you could probably facilitate account creation by pulling from the LinkedIn api.

But yeah, good luck if you build it!

[rm_-rf_slash]

I agree. I’d like to be able to share my knowledge from time to time for a small fee and little hassle on my part.

I made some money on Codementor for a time and enjoyed it while I was between jobs, but wasn’t easy to balance that with FTE so I dropped it after a while.

[ghaff]

Every now and then when I was working full-time, I had some piece work things that made me some reasonable pocket change. They were sometimes interesting (e.g. being a judge for a best-of award at a conference) and/or a way to fill a few dead hours and have an interesting chat. But if you have a good job, they're mostly a distraction for not that much money in the scheme of things.