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Comment by tbrooks | Hacker News Reader

I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent.

This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry.

The main problem is this:

You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company meeting.

What do you do? You can either:

1) Find a speaker yourself by searching Google and sifting through the mess of results

2) Call a speaker's bureau and get raked over the coals on price

3) ???

Ideally, there would be a marketplace for speakers. Where you would be able to search for talent that fit your criteria (available these dates, for this price, talks about these things, is well-regarded, etc.) and book them online.

Nothing like this exists.

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There are marketplaces for speakers: espeakers.com, orate.me, bigspeak.com, kepplerspeakers.com, speakermatch.com, eaglestalent.com, celebrityspeakersbureau.com, among others. The speaker profiles include prices, areas of expertise, and a way to inquire and book. What they don't show, that you're asking for, is speaker availability and popularity. The problems I see with disclosing the schedules of speakers: 1) celebrities have real privacy concerns, 2) talent does not want their real demand every day of the year exposed to the public because it can hurt the mystery of their appeal, and 3) disparate calendaring methods maintained by each speaker mean that no web site can be in sync with all of its talent thus instant online booking is hard to do. As for the popularity requirement you asked for ("well-regarded") this is difficult to define because assessments are nonstandard; so what you get in all speaker marketplaces is endorsements and accolades the speaker cites themselves in their own profile -- which will always be self-recommending.

No, none of the sites you mentioned solve the problem I posed.

Bigspeak, Keppler, Eagles Talent, and Celebrity are bureaus and function in a traditional way. Espeakers and SpeakerMatch are essentially speaker directories -- they make money from speaker's paying them a monthly fee or in a lead gen style.

Orate.me is new to me, I haven't seen it before. In a cursory look at their site, it looks like their speaker list is just NSA members.

Also the calendaring problem is easy to solve...

There's enough public data to develop a sentiment algorithm and solve the popularity problem.

It seems like the bureaus are the marketplaces; you just don't like their model for pricing and acquiring talent.

When I worked at a bureau, we had a running joke... When a meeting planner asked, "How much is so-and-so speaker?" We'd reply, "What's your budget?" Coincidentally, that was how much the speaker was. Regardless of how much we knew the "rack rate" of that speaker was.

During the 2008 election, Rudy Giuliani was running as a Republican nominee. When his financial disclosures came out, he surprised everyone with how much he made on the speaking circuit. News orgs filed FOIA requests to see what universities and public institutions paid him to speak.

For some events, he'd speak in the same city to different groups. The price each group paid was wildly different (+/- 50k). The meeting planners hit the roof.

Speakers bureaus do not view meeting planners as their clients, the speakers are.

If you have contacts in the industry, you could use something like sharetribe to see if you can build a marketplace: https://www.sharetribe.com/

It is super easy to get going with their hosted service. (Not an employee, just a satisfied user.)

Of course that turns this from a technical problem to a marketing and sales problem, which may be less appealing.

tbrooks I'd love to learn more about this -- could I get in touch?

sure. my email is my username at google's mail service.

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