10min for $10
Hello everyone,
Indiehackers is an amazing free community, but sometimes you need a face to face with an expert.
I am considering offering a startup advice service called 10for10. 10min of advice for $10. Sometimes founders and experts don't have a lot of spare time, but they can spare 10min to help someone, and just 10min of advice could save you days of research.
I have years of startup experience and gone through multiple accelerator programs, developed multiple hardware and software prototypes for companies, and also have a PhD in computer science, so I would initially start the service with just myself to see if it works, and then develop a platform to add additional experts.
What do you think of the idea? Would you use it? What advice would you pay for?
Thanks for any advice
It will take at least 30 minutes to explain my business and problem. Do I get charged for that time? How do I get useful advertise form an expertise in 10 minutes? How do I know that the information I get will be useful or some info that I can get from marketing articles or answers here? e.g. do this to increase SEO ranking, advertise on FB, etc.
Thanks for your reply, i really appreciate your opinion as i really want to offer something that people want. The goal is to be accessible to everyone, 10min is not long at all, but essentially it allows you to ask how to fix a single problem, or what resources should i look into to fix the problem. Theoretically, you could have multiple 10min slots to get more advice, but some experts don't have that time, and the majority of bootstrappers don't want to spend a lot of money.
Can you give me some examples of the questions that can be asked and answered in 10 minutes to address a single problem? I am very curious.
Q) I am not getting enough traffic to my website, how can i improve it?
A) Creating content is a great way to get traffic, Neil Patel is SEO expert, go through his website and see if that help. Otherwise, you could consider ads if you have the budget...
Being an experienced professional, I do feel sometimes that there should be a market for such a platform.
I would definitely pay for someone who had experience working with a specific problem set like
" How to increase conversions on this landing page" followed by some material on the problem.
"How to improve CPI with a limited marketing budget followed by some material on the problem."
"How to plan my career given my career graph"
and so on, this way it could be 10 very focussed and fruitful minutes for me as a consumer.
Thanks for commenting i appreciate the support. The goal would be to have a very clear and refined question that an expert could focus on and provide a very precise answer, ideally with resources that could help answer the question. Often not knowing where to find the answer to questions can be just as big a problem as the actual problem.
I agree. Knowing whom to reach is a big problem. You might be competing with Fiverr for work on defined areas on one end and research platforms that investors used for ground research on another end. Finding the first killer use case might be key.
10 minutes or 10 hours - sounds like you're focusing on a wrong metric.
Early stage founders are probably looking for quantifiable output, like a PDF of their business plan, or USP or Brand Positioning, or P&L forecast, rather than just time.
Also, $60/h is not that steep. Not sure how far or deep you can get even in an hour.
Not against the idea in general, but this sounds like a typical consultancy, but instead of a monthly retainer, you'd get 10 minute increments, which is.. novel.
It would be consultancy work, but as you said in 10min slots so that anyone could afford to get advice, and anyone could afford to give advice. Some experts have amazing resources and charge hundreds of dollars per hour, so maybe 10min is enough to save you 10hours.
Agree with you, would be nice to ask for help for a specific end product.
I do think there is a market for this - see, for example, https://clarity.fm/. However, I have never used it/paid for advice in general because I have a pretty extensive network. I recognize that this is a privileged and lucky position to be in, so would you target it to people who don't have this luxury? Say, early-career folks? Trouble is, they're likely to have less spending power...
The one time I considered using Clarity was when I was fundraising for my previous startup and needed access to funders (which was where my network was lacking). Still don't think I ever did it and sought to get introduced instead.
In short, I'm not your user, but I believe there are others who might be. Hope this helps! Good luck :)
Thanks for the link, clarity looks like a great platform. I think that would be a faster route to being able to help and advise startups.
10min for 10U$ is too cheap for consultancy rates. It only becomes within a normal range if you really don't spend a second more beyond those 10min (i.e. you don't do any kind of intake nor research). In that case, I would be super dubvious of what kind of advise can you provide that I can't find by googling or by taking 2 minutes to ask here or on reddit. Like in the example you posted:
Your example answer:
means that you didn't even check the website of the person asking. You have no idea their industry, what enough means, you don't even know if their website is already SEO optimized or not.
I would really try to niche down and provide some useful (even if fake) examples of the kind of value I can get after 10 minutes talking to you. Startup advice is too broad, and many industries are very different from each other as to think that you can advise everyone, from someone making a website to someone in biotech.
I understand your point, but similarly in 10min you could get a suggestion of a grant to apply to or an investor that might be interested. I agree that most people would need more than 10min but you could get multiple 10min sessions if you could afford it.
The goal was to try and get experts to help, but many don’t have time, so they may be able to commit to 10min. On the other side, it would be nice if everyone could afford an expert’s advice, so maybe a highly focused question could get a highly focused answer. It was just an idea, but in clarity you charge by the minute, so I decided not to pursue the idea further.
I like the concept, I wouldn't say I don't, but if you are buying people's time, you can't really be cheap, and you can't forget in the math that there is more time involved than just those 10 minutes. A highly focused question, for example, would imply that the person could prepare the answer beforehand.
What I do think is that most people can get very wise advise by hanging out in their local founders meetups, etc. In an informal chat I wouldn't expect someone to come up with answer to the same level I would expect them to be if I hire a consultant, but it really helps fencing ideas with knowledgeable people.
Success in your future endeavors!
The $10 for 10min is only the initial concept. It doesn’t work for experts that charge $500 an hour. If i had decided to turn this idea into a platform the $10 for 10min would be fixed for the first maybe 100 hours, then after you set your own price. There could also be a fixed $10 for the first 10min so you can see what you think of each other.
There are many places you can get advice but I guess if you want it quickly then this sort of platform could help. Also if you are not able to go to a meet up this is an alternative option.
I have just realized you are the same person from the manufacturing question ;-)
Seems you like my questions :)
Since I'm not sure what kind of advice I'll get, it might be pricy at first. Imagine hourly rate of a coder. It might be 20$/hour for example. Your hourly rate is 60$/hour
But on the other hand if you can convince users that you're experienced enough and if you show some previous examples of advice, then it might work I guess
Thanks for the input. Some experts charge hundreds per hour which very few people can afford, so i was hoping 10min would make it easier to afford, and still give a decent return on investment.