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I'm the co-founder of Fliffr. We're building a marketplace for services where you can charge by the minute. We have everything from experts in SEO, chefs, personal trainers, Esport professionals. We also have a couple of developers, for example you can contact me for advice on #go #javascript or #ionic. Our goal is to build a service to quickly get in contact with an expert and only paying for the advice you need.

Users can contact our experts through chat and video/voice calls.

Do sign up for Fliffr and try it out, we're on both iOS and Android stores, or visit https://www.fliffr.com . And if you have any feedback I'd love to hear it.

Love the concept, but I can't see this as useful as an App, since pretty much every use case I can think of I'd want to be at my computer for.

I also find it kind of amusing that you're advertising esports advice from a woman who plays on a CS:GO team which can't even compete with a mediocre ESEA-IM team... she might be an absolutely amazing teacher and amazing person to work with, but she isn't good at the game, which really undermines your marketing strategy.

Are the csgo team coaches really good at playing comp. csgo? Dont think its the main quality you need to have to push him forward.You great player but never be able to communicate it to others.But as a good observer with analytical skills you can be great at spotting potential and weakness etc etc

That's something that has been discussed in depth in the pro community for a long time... the conclusion that most team owners have made is that you generally need a coach who can play at a top pro level or has previously played at a top pro level. Obviously the target market here isn't pro teams, but even so, the people who have large amounts of money on the line choose not to hire coaches who have never been very good at the game.

I also have a lot of first-hand experience with this since I taught paid lessons in CS 1.6 way back in the day. Generally the market for lessons is full of mid-tier players who are very dedicated, but don't have the support necessary to improve (ie. a team of players as good as them or a proper coaching system). These players are almost all looking to go pro some day, and want to be able to break through to that level. Since the difference in skill between a Top 1% player and a Pro in CS:GO is so massive, any random competitive player won't be able to give good advice since they are at the same place as the client, and can't understand WHY things are done the way they are among the Pros.

It's worth noting that the Orbit Female CS:GO team isn't even all among the top 1% of players - they went 10-6 in ESEA-Open last season, which is the lowest level of competition which is even sanctioned. Any team that is dedicated and practices, even if they aren't good, will make it through Open at X-4 without much difficulty (I've coached a few teams through this).

We'd love to have you on our platform. Have you considered signing up?

I'm available on danielk at fliffr.com if you have any questions.

I haven't played in a long time (I'm only involved tangentially these days), so I wouldn't be interested, but thanks :)

She is a great coach (I've taken lessons from her) but I get you point. We are partnering with quite a lot of gamers, among them organisations like Denial and Elevate.

Great idea! I have just signed up and added some skills.

However, I am not sure how I should charge. Since you don't have enough people offering the same skills I promote and I presume very low to inexistent demand, there is no price correction at this stage, nor market to begin with :(.

It would be useful if somehow your app could suggest a recommended fee for a given skill.

It looks like a great idea though!

Thanks for signing up!

As you say there isn't much demand, but we are working on it. Thanks for your suggestion on recommending fees :)

Does it support a web-interface? It's not clear from the website.

Not yet, but it is something that we are thinking of adding. Would a web interface be useful to you?

Yes, interacting with a UI on a desktop computer is so much better than using a phone screen.

Cool, thanks for the feedback. If you want me to reach out to you when we have a web interface drop me an email at danielk at fliffr.com

If I'm getting consulting for e.g. code, I'd want to be at my laptop coding away, not stuck with my face in a phone screen.

Software/Devs/Code already have a niche platform for this at: https://codementor.io

I would second this. In terms of software dev, I'd want this application to live the same place that I'm doing the majority of my work -- my desktop.

I like the idea too, but also got lost at no web interface. There are instances where you'd want to screen share and look at code. Slack integration would be kinda cool too.

There are instances where you'd want to screen share and look at code.

Not only "instances," but that seems like a worthwhile business just by itself.

Thanks for the feedback

1 tip to improve your site, include the expertise next to the person.

https://i.imgur.com/KAPuVPv.png

For example, idgaf their name, let alone their username on a service I dont even use yet. This screen that should tell me everything, tells me nothing.

Best of luck. Promising idea.

I've started offering a service like this[0] for React apps. The response so far has been really good, people love it!

It's exactly how you say it is, by spending some time identifying the biggest issues and then spending an hour with the team I can get them to rally around some easy fixes that'll be valuable for the business long-term.

Developers love it as their bosses finally understand the value of refactoring, and managers love it because they get actionable tips that'll help the business.

Making this a general platform would require a lot of good curation, but nothing impossible. Now you got me thinking…

[0]: https://mxstbr.com/audits/

That looks like a valuable service, but it is slightly different from the micro-consulting the parent mentioned. From your perspective, do you think there would be value in a service that offers this consulting thirty minutes at a time?

30 minutes is quite a short amount of time, especially given that most companies who will pay for consulting are quite far ahead in their projects already and will have a large codebase.

I could see 30 minutes to an hour working out for e.g. a bespoke greenfield codebase setup, but I don't think restricting it to 30 minutes makes a lot of sense.

Please don't call people Gurus. I've had at least three lousy experiences working with people who referred to themselves as Gurus. Some of them didn't even know the dictionary definition of the word. I feel I have dodged a number of bullets since then, by developing a healthy prejudice against self-titled Gurus.

+1

And "visionaries". May be it's just me, but my defenses go up whenever I read a profile with visionary in it.

Thought leaders, ugh.

What about rock stars?

Ninjas!

I run away screaming when I see this in somebody's profile.

To be fair, that's because of the throwing stars, though. Everyone should be afraid of Ninjas.

But that's just the thing -- most people referring to themselves as ninjas are designers aspiring to be devs, and they are usually cute chubby smiling guys who tend to stumble on their own feet. Hardly something to be afraid of!

"For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his time. "

The trouble here is that the guru or consultant who comes in needs to understand the context of the problem, which can't be done in 30 mins.

we have a lot of architecture consultant companies which provide these services already.

If you microfocused it enough it would work.

Am I doing anything wrong isn't happening in 30 mins. Am I doing anything wrong with React is more than 30 mins. Am I abusing Flux? That sounds doable. videoconference with a live dev plus codebase access.

In a previous career I walked hundreds of consultants thru connecting to the telco WAN and ISP network that employed me, and I can't help you with everything but in 30 minutes I can easily tell you what is wrong with your BGP configuration or your frame relay configuration or your MPLS/ATM connection. At least WRT connecting to that employer, at least WRT connecting 15 years ago. The consultants knew their client networks inside and out, I mostly told them "no do not redistribute via RIP RFC1918 address space to us" or "no you really don't want to send us a 0/0 route" or "you think we'll accept a route for a.b.c.d/27 and you're actually sending it correctly but you not having sent us a LOA means I'm filtering it right out" or "you might want to think about enabling md5 authentication because we have, as our welcome letter you obviously didn't read, clearly explained" and yeah people actually tried stuff like that. Also people with obvious peculiar ideas about how BGP works WRT priority of routes and load balancing and stuff. Could I tell these "network administrator consultants" how to set up MCSE server stuff, well, no, but I sure told a lot of them how to configure Cisco WAN interfaces and how BGP works (or doesn't work)...

You can do a lot in 30 minutes over a narrow enough specialty.

Wouldn't reading a book about React before they started working with it be preferrable?

That's something I've seen getting much worse over the past decade with the proliferation of frameworks. What you call "getting up to speed" is tempting to call "playing with". People work with tools that they have no knowledge of. Learning on the job is good, but I think one should have at least an idea of how the tools are supposed to be used and how they are implemented before doing anything else than throwaways.

I don't know how to fix it really, it more of a cultural thing than a technical. Knowledge must somehow be cool and respected again. Or maybe I'm just getting old and this is really a faster way of building things. I just can't think of any other area where professionals jump to the next tool without even learning the one they use.

> Wouldn't reading a book about React before they started working with it be preferrable?

Great in theory but difficult in practice. Developers rarely ever have the luxury to pick up a book as a means of getting up to speed when there exists online resources like Google and StackOverflow where you can easily find posts that answer your query string(s) verbatim.

But you don't necessarily know what you don't know.

If you don't know enough to ask high quality questions, SO and Google won't help you.

If you're lucky, G will lead you to tuts and repos with useful code.

If you're not, you'll make a ton of stupid beginner mistake and be overdrawn on the technical debt account before you even start.

JavaScript frameworks are rarely ever worth buying a book to get up to speed for. Books like this [0] are a much better time investment as the deep knowledge gained would be useful beyond the currently trending JS framework.

[0] https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

Throwaway, prototype, proof of concept, spike, playing around, whatever you want to call it. In many (most?) businesses, they never get thrown away. They form the basis of the product.

In other words, the thing that makes software so unique and valuable, is the very thing that most organizations don't take advantage of. They think that if you throw it away, you are scrapping something akin to physical materials.

Shame, really.

The problem is that React best practices have changed in the past year alone. Buying a book from say, early 2016 would be useless now.

"For instance I recently joined a project that was built by devs coming up to speed on React. And boy did they abuse Flux, they didn't build a store for every drop-down but it's pretty damn close. However I really think a React Guru could have steered them around this mistake with just 30 minutes of his time."

Problems like this tend to be consequence of team that does not tolerate dissent. E.g. either clique that stamps out dissenters as obviously stupid or dominant individual eager to bully anybody who does not conform to his favorite cool aid. Someone would say that "maybe we are going too far" otherwise.

Consultant wont be able to solve that one in 30 minutes.

This would be great for non-tech too. That is, a marketplace for micro-consultations where I can look up industry-specific consultants. It would have saved me lots of time (months) on several projects I've played with launching over the last few years.

Isn't this kind of http://clarity.fm offers?

That would be cool. I've run into a problem myself of not knowing what technology to use when building a web-shop, but complicated by the fact that users uploaded images to be printed onto their item. Sometimes I just need someone with e-commerce coding experience to talk to me for half an hour or so to let me know what my best options are.

I recently launched my third startup Elastic Byte (https://elasticbyte.net) a DevOps and cloud management company that offers simple monthly plans to design, build, and manage your cloud infrastructure. Pricing is transparent and upfront (which is rare for consulting/service companies) with no long-term contracts and no vendor lock-in.

We specialize in AWS and Google Cloud, and can help with simple LAMP/MEAN stacks all the way to complex multi-region microservice architectures using Terraform, containerization, Kubernetes and beyond.

For tech it could be a nice add-on to Stack Overflow, since they have a reasonable amount of data of people's knowledge/quality and a reputation system

http://www.fiverr.com seems like the current standard for these kinds of tasks. Problem being it's mostly overseas labor and the quality isn't great.

https://hourlynerd.com/ is an interesting model, if a different industry

I'm curious if anything related with teaching CS or how to program would be appelative to people? Something like 1:1 teaching/mentoring..

I teach CS (programming, web development, distributed systems) on a local university, but have been thinking if there would be people interested in having 1:1 access to someone with development and teaching experience, for 30 minutes or 1h..

wasn't google helpouts something like that?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/02/16/google-h...

they shut it down.

This just stinks of another way to abuse the talent. If you want to pay someone below-market rates to fix your business's problems, there are already a multitude of race-to-the-bottom "contracting" sites to suit your needs.

Real consulting at market (or even above-market) prices exist for a reason. The kind of people who will spend hours setting up a consult, to only officially charge for 30 minutes, are exactly the kind of people you don't want working for you, for any period of time. You get what you pay for.

I can't for the life of me imagine what an apparently legitimate "micro-consulting" gig would look like, where the talent being hired isn't being asked to overperform for the amount of billing time being requested.

This sounds a bit like both https://clarity.fm/ and https://www.codementor.io/

Long ago I offered a paid answer service for Drupal StackExchange questions via the drupal.org services list and never got anyone asking for the service. Just a data point.

I got this pitched multiple times in the last months. Nobody got the focus right in my opinion because it needs to be open and paid. I would use this from both sides i really see the potential here as well.

This is exactly what Clarity provides - https://clarity.fm/

https://officehours.io/

I think you mean software consulting but Expert360 is a good example for other types of consulting.

I have never used them, but isn't this the model airpair is going after?