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"Telling it like it is" is typically a cover used by assholes who want to give a simplistic, boneheaded, confrontational opinion completely devoid of context and empathy.

> I imagine myself paying $10 and asking "hey, what do you think of my outfit tonight?" And he would kindly inform me that my chances of scoring (or whatever they call it these days) wearing these sandals, hiking pants (pull these zippers and they become shorts!) and grey kinda stretched-out long-sleeve t-shirt are next to zero. But my Friday night activity was going out with my wife, toddler & 5-year-old to have dinner with a bunch of retired English expats in the middle of nowhere in central France.

I imagine you meant to include at least a modicum of detail to establish the context of your question to get any value out of your $10; or maybe you just wanted [to imagine] the exchange to be frustrating.

Sure; my point in that example was that his pitch (esp. including his chosen list of interests and potential questions) felt extremely narrow to me; I'm also a white American male and only 10 years older; but the world he seems to be inhabiting (men's fashion! weightlifting!) is not even adjacent to mine.

If we met in a social situation, we could probably find something to talk about; but we'd not be paying either other for that.

> but the world he seems to be inhabiting (men's fashion! weightlifting!) is not even adjacent to mine.

I doubt the service would be valuable if he were offering advice on subjects you're already comfortable judging for yourself.

I think we're missing the joke here:

this is an update on the concept of "my 2 cents", with the difference being...

...he has adjusted for inflation, with a markup.

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

From 1913 to 2014, $0.02 cents inflated to $0.48 cents. At that rate, wouldn't it be over 100 years before reaching $10? In which case, in 2014 he'd have to share 20.83 opinions per session to justify the cost.

I tried to find a year for which $0.02 in today's money today would be approximately $10, but it turned out that you'd have to start somewhere in the middle ages, and the error bars get pretty large.

That's inflation adjusted, but now you need to do the compound interest to get it from $0.02 to $10.

But your friends have been lying to you.

About your website/app/resume/outfit.

You need to know the truth.

How can you afford to not know?

This is really my point. There are probably better sources of truth than "some people I hang out with sometimes".

Those sources vary depending on the subject, but they probably won't be "someone I don't know, from the internet" either, unless he happens to have that specific expertise and you have a common need.

Website/app/resume: for me this just equates to "how is the business doing", and I don't ask friends; this is what data is for. There's a possible conflict of interest here with our CEO (my primary source of truth for financial status), because he wants to motivate the company (and hence generally add a positive spin); but he's also well-aware that transparency & trust are far more important than any temporarily gain from faked positivity.

Outfit: sure, appearances matter in life & work. But I have better sources of truth here as well than "ask a friend"; hello again CEO/founder, for one. We talk about what we're wearing if that's going to be relevant, and (more likely) how we're speaking on phone calls, and what can be better. Think he's honest? Well, he'd be a fool not to be.

But most of the time my wardrobe only matters to the extent that my wife feels I'm appropriately dressed if we're out in public, and she's perfectly capable of pointing it out if I've misjudged. It's just "oh hey, don't forget we're going out to dinner before we come back home tonight", and that works.

Your Friday night sounds pretty awesome.

This made me laugh.

He isn't trying to suggest this is a service which everyone will find useful or interesting. It actually takes a lot of honesty with yourself to even understand why you might need this service. Thousands of people every day make decisions on their own, or on the advice of others, which are badly informed decisions. This guy could help them.

For $10, he isn't going to send you a 5 word email and ignore you forever. He is going to have a reasonable dialogue pertaining to your question/concern. If you say "No bro, I am not looking to score" he will ask "OK, well what are your intentions? What is your actual concern with your outfit?"

> If you say "No bro, I am not looking to score" he will ask "OK, well what are your intentions? What is your actual concern with your outfit?"

RainSunshine, you registered at HN today and have posted only on this post and nowhere else, speaking with high confidence about how a random person on the Internet will respond to specific example questions.

What is your relation to Jordan and/or this site?

Holy telling it like it is!

everyones gotta start somewhere

I have no objections to RainSunshine's commentary, it's actually quite valuable in the context. I just believe that whatever link they have to the site should be clearly disclosed, if such exists.

I have none. His website looks nice, his business model is sound, and people are talking crap about it simply because they don't personally see a need for it. I felt like defending that.

That was part of my point -- I personally don't have any real overlap with his life context (and I do have people who can discuss my flaws with me, with enough honesty that it's not always comfortable).

But there are people who could seek him out as someone a bit further along than they are, on a similar path, plus some market for people who'll try it for fun.

I think you run some very good points. For me, I agree. I have very few people in my life, but the ones that are happen to be great at notifying me of the things that I do that aren't good.

I'd wager that there a lot of people out there that ultimately do not have such friendships. A lot of people have poor self-esteem and surround themselves with crappy, dishonest, alike people. The idea here is that some of those exact people will have just the amount self-actualization that you need to email this guy. Hopefully this guy is willing and ready to meet these people more than half way and do his best to empathize.

I realize that I just issued a lot of insults to a group of people I explicitly said I do not belong to. Self-acceptance is a great thing to encourage and facilitate though. I wonder if that's this guy's intention...

Usually the consultants I pay or meet are much more expensive than $10.

How about $75?

http://talkshopwithus.com/creatives/

They also likely have a clear expertise.

I am not sure what the point of that comment is.

It is that people in any kind of business pay much more than $10 for quite bad advice. $10 is quite a small investment.

I'm usually willing to offer bad advice and uninformed opinions for free, so what is his competitive advantage?

> like: "you interrupt women more often than you do men"

Nice enlightened example.

Who the fuck cares if you don't see the need. It is a niche product, like an impulse buy in a supermarket. I don't see need for 99% of the crap what is sold in a dollar store, but the dollar store is still a quite solid business.

That said, I just bought my advice, paid but I still don't see email. Damn.

The lesson learned here is that the cost of living is so high in California that $10 only has the buying power of $0.02

damn, can I send you my $10? That's at least a $5 joke in any housing market.

And wasn't someone complaining that HN had no humour just the other day! Nicely done ;)

Sorry about that - this got popular faster than I thought it would! Did you use paypal or bitcoin? I think I'm having issues with Coinbase at the moment.

Could you send me an email directly at brutalhonestyio@gmail.com? I'll get to yours next :)