[Inebas]

Hi Yuri,

Yea I see your points but couldn't the same points be made for elance and yet they exists. I don't know the financials but I am using elance right now because coding this thing takes too long for my taste and I want to move on to the next thing.

With that said, elance may be used by someone who has no development skills whatsoever so it will have a bigger market, no doubt.

But, I can see a service like this to go beyond development, it could be about marketing, strategy, SEO, etc...

PS: Would you be willing to mentor me ;)

[YuriNiyazov]

No, elance is something else - people on elance are not good for a quick, off-the-cuff 1 hour conversation. With elance there's a definite project start date and a definite project end date, and a deliverable that is either delivered or not. There's a large market for outsourcing this kind of long-term or even medium-term development - there's a very basic distinction between hiring someone else to fully do it during their own time vs. you doing something yourself and having someone educate you and walk you through it. After all, you can always reject the work someone did on elance, because the payment is per-project. In a mentoring situation, you can't really say "well, our conversation wasn't helpful", unless the mentor spent the whole conversation talking about something completely irrelevant - the act of mentoring is a little more amorphous.

What you are actually talking about is something along the lines of what lawyers do: you purchase a set amount of hours upfront (a retainer), and then you reach out to them with specific problems as they arise, until you use up all the time you've purchased. Sure, there might be a market for all kinds of professionals to sell their future services for retainers.

With regards to me mentoring you: sure, e-mail me, we can chat more.