Start-up Idea: Selling Experience | Hacker News Reader

Start-up Idea: Selling Experience

3 pointshxt14812 comments

I currently manage an investment blog called My $10,000 (www.my10000dollars.com). Over the course of my blogging days, I've learned that my interview series are by far the most popular and interesting posts. This led me to an idea - selling experience.

What if we created a platform that allows people with various experiences to "sell" their experiences? If you were an aspiring mountain hiker who wanted to conquer Mount Everest, would you be willing to pay some fee to talk to someone who's had an experience climbing the mountain?

Or if you were an investor who's lost most of his/her retirement fund in the financial crisis, would you want to talk to someone who went through the same disaster but recovered from it?

Haven't thought through all the details on execution, but I'd thought I would share the thought and seek your input.

Why am I sharing this with the public? Well I have other endeavors I'm pursuing and won't be able to focus on it even if this idea was viable, so why not share it with others who could potentially take this and run with it, right? :)

Chicken, meet egg.

This has the problem of being near worthless until you have both a large pool of experts and a large pool of paying customers who want that expertise. It's got pretty much all of the problems of the question/answer sites (which StackOverflow seems to have proved convincingly can work, though it's pretty rare that it does), and few of the benefits to you the developer (the benefits you lose include all of the viral elements, all of the SEO, and anything else that comes from having a huge bunch of useful user-generated content that is publicly accessible).

That's not to say it can't work...I just don't have any good advice to offer on avoiding being a dead zone that attracts no search traffic, has little incentive for people to signup until a bunch of others have already done so, etc.

Everything is near worthless if you can't market your product right. What would eBay be without the sellers or the buyers? Similarly, how did Yahoo Answers and AnswerBag successfully launch their question/answer sites? Without the proper distribution, it becomes the "dead zone" you speak of. However, the evidence is clearly there that these sites could work (Yahoo Answers, Answer Bag, StackOverflow, etc).

Now as far as this particular idea on selling experience, I would imagine the traffic and activity would start from the ones interested in selling the experience. The interests need to start with people with valuable experiences who may show interest in trying out the service to see just how profitable they could be by sharing their unique experience. Then this can spark interest in the "buyers" who may find the right experience/knowledge they were looking for.

If you get the right distribution, I believe it can overcome the challenge you speak of. The question I would ask you is: "If Google launched this service tomorrow, would you think they can make it successful?"

This said, I would agree that it would be a challenging start-up if you do not have the right plans/capability to scale up.

Similarly, how did Yahoo Answers and AnswerBag successfully launch their question/answer sites?

This is why I explicitly brought up answer sites. Your idea doesn't get the benefits of those kinds of sites, because publishing the expertise limits your ability to sell it (and makes it into another answers site). If you don't publish it the site does not become incrementally more valuable every time a question is answered, as Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers does. It always remains a place where someone can buy expertise from someone they don't know, with qualifications that may or may not be accurate, for a price that cannot be compared.

My point is that your proposal seems like it would have all of the negatives of starting a new answers site, but none of the long term benefits. Answers sites start off with these problems, but may eventually overcome them as more and more questions get answered and the pool of regular readers and submitters grows, but yours would have these problems forever. Your site doesn't get bigger, stickier, and more powerful, when you sign on new users and new experts.

I'm not saying you can't do it, or that it won't be successful. I don't know. As Paul Buccheit says:

Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice

I simply don't see how you (or even Google, who have retired their own Google Answers) could overcome those barriers and reach a self-sustaining business.

As someone that connects industry specific knowledge to people that need knowledge, and perhaps has tools that make that task easier, you could very well have a lucrative consulting gig. But, I don't know that you'd have a startup.

But, what do I know? I build systems management software.

I think this is an interesting topic, but at the same time feel it will be hard to profit from. It seems as though this idea will be more of a conulting hub, where you generate these topics of experiences and share it with your audience. Take for example, Steve Vincent, who commented on Bernie Madoff's lifestyle in prision. Small niche, yet can be very profitable.

Interesting example, I had never read that. Here it is: http://www.prlog.org/10272725-prison-consultant-vincent-stev...

I hate to rain on your bonfire, but here's what you're up against to profit from this: I took your two examples & threw them into Amazon (UK):

Quest for Adventure by Chris Bonnington (Paperback - 19 Sep 1991) 23 Used & new from £0.01

Return to Go (Hardcover) by Jim Slater (Author)

12 used from £0.25

So besides the critical mass issues raised by other commenters, your information providers would have to be either cheaper, more experienced (neither realistic), or somehow provide a far richer experience than these two well-regarded examples. That's a big hurdle & it doesn't scale well.

Seems more like one-on-one mentoring. http://schoolofeverything.com/

I think it could work a bit like 99designs. Someone posts a request for an expert on something ("I like to get advice on climbing the everest and offer 100 dollars for it") and different experts "bid" on that offer by posting their cv or something else to proof they're experts. hen and egg problem non the less.

If you haven't seen it yet, you may find the I am A Subreddit interesting: http://www.reddit.com/r/iama

A lot of them are not really what you're talking about, but some are. "I am a Tax Researcher: Ask me anything" and the like.

Individuals who want to sell their experiences and expertise are generally called "consultants". A marketplace for whate are essentially dilettante or part-time consultants seems hard to regulate and verify.

So this would be like consulting, but about things that only other people actually know about. So... specifically, management consulting?

Isnt this what Yahoo Answers and countless competitors has already done, from the other side of the equation?

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