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Show HN: Officehours

officehours.io

33 pointskarjaluoto21 comments

I've held a few sessions as an advisor on Officehours.io and my experience has been very positive. The ten-minute format fosters a succinct Q&A and to date my sessions have been quite productive. It's yet to feel like a waste of time, especially because I've set aside the time to participate. Since there's inherent value in providing advice (as well as receiving it), charging for the conversation hasn't even crossed my mind. I think the broad spectrum of advisors (from well-known names to newcomers) helps to encourage interaction; users who are intimidated by titles can get their feet wet with an advisor by checking their knowledge stats alone. Mostly, I applaud the sentiment behind the work, which draws on the design community's tradition of sharing what you know.

We love having folks like you on Officehours. Thanks for being a part of it!

A lot of the people shown on the site seem pretty young and possibly inexperienced. Are you letting just anyone be an "expert"?

Yes—but the language needs to change.

Initially our plan was to vet each advisor before allowing them to offer sessions. That said, we didn’t want to be the arbiters of who has good feedback to share.

So, we opened up the option to be an advisor, to everyone. And what we’re seeing, in doing so, is sort of interesting. Seems like some of the folks I thought wouldn’t get any requests for sessions are. (So, probably good that we don’t get in the way of these folks.)

That said, this approach means that we need to update the descriptions used on the site—because the term expert is not always accurate, and can be difficult to quantify. In the weeks to come, this word will be removed from the site.

Yeah, I think you'll need to be more clear about that. Or maybe have an "experts" section for those that are truly experts.

Definitely. The copy change has already been set in the Sketch docs. We just need to find some time to make all of these little changes. (So many things to fix!)

Do you do a criminal background check of these so called "experts"? How credible are these people giving advice? Just curious if you know what I mean.

No—we don’t run criminal checks. (I can’t imagine how such a task would be viable.) Instead, we expect that users will do their own due diligence in researching the individual before asking for their feedback.

I agree on the viable part. But I had to ask :). So how different are you from clarify.fm?

Clarity is microconsulting and allows users to tap advice by paying for it, by the minute.

Officehours is more of a community. If you need a hand with something, you can ask someone—no charge. And when someone needs your help, you can return the favor.

So, similar in function, but philosophically quite different.

Nice, but why would people give their time away for free? Time is valuable and people want to get paid.

There are services that work like that. Clarity.fm is perhaps the best example. They take a sort of micro-consulting approach. This allows experts to sell their time in 1 minute increments.

My problem with this approach is that the people who most need the help don’t have the money; and those who can help the most don’t need the money. (I can’t imagine many senior people actually wanting to squeeze money out of a college student.)

I’ve met with a lot of young designers over the years—and I’m happy to lend a hand. That said, it’s difficult for me to spend an hour or two with everyone who asks.

So, for me Officehours is a way to still help, but much more efficiently. I can offer 4 sessions in an hour, scheduling and time zones are all automated, and so are notifications.

Admittedly, I’m biased (no wonder). But, this is really the reason we built Officehours. We believe that a lot of people want to help others—but they want a more convenient way to do so.

The other aspect to this is reputation. We’re building karma/ratings into the service. As such, those who help out the most, and get the best ratings will rank higher on the site (and have more access to other advisors).

We think this will be a particularly handy way for early/mid-career folks to showcase their expertise. (Sort of like a high Twitter following can.) Once we have categories in place, visitors will be able to view by groupings like Marketing, Design, NodeJS, what-have-you. Those who show up higher in these listings will likely seem more credible, as a result.

The other interesting part is that this isn’t limited to a mentor/protégé relationship. I helped a friend out with a question about switching from Photoshop to Sketch, using Officehours, last week. These relationships are important, and do a lot to build one’s reputation with other potential partners/clients. :-)

It’s still early, but I wanted to quickly show what we’re working on. It allows anyone to get/give 10 minutes of free advice. :-)

I'm digging it!

Thanks Paul—it’s great having you on there as an advisor! We’re awfully happy that people like you are willing to share your knowledge with others. :-)

Looks pretty cool. One piece of advice that will IMHO make or break the usability of the site: You are going to need to add tags and / or filtering options for the skillsets of the advisors. Reading a one-to-two-sentence bio of each advisor to find out what they do is not very workable.

It’s definitely in the works. We just had to prioritize tasks so we could get a prototype in users’ hands. (Because once we did, we found a lot of things that needed fixing.)

Plus, when we started, categorization wasn’t that big of a deal—just because there were so few advisors on the site. That said, the list quickly grew, and a number of folks asked us to add this.

Chat functionality is our priority at this moment. Once that’s done, we’ll get the categories and tags in place.

BTW: As I can’t show images on HN, I posted a couple of samples of what we have in mind, over on Chapp: http://chapp.is/Officehours/3i5zcBjSrzvdGuMtv

Nice and good luck :)

Thank you—we’re putting everything we have into making this good! We certainly have lots of work to do, but I feel like this thing could benefit a lot of people. :-)

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