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Would you unblock others for a fee?

I'm building unblokd.com - a place where people learning to code can get unblocked fast for a fee.

I've validated one side of the marketplace - got great feedback from users who are learning code saying they'd use it when they're stuck. They want to avoid spending lots of hours trying to figure out something someone more experienced can solve in 5 minutes.

Now I want to validate it with people who can provide the help!

Would you help others get unblocked and earn a cash bounty?
Would you be up for mentoring them for a monthly fee?
What do you think of the concept?

Any feedback really appreciated! Thanks!

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    oh and another thing I didn't mention - it's all async and text-based learning.
    Maybe just integrating Tupple for code pairing when needed.

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      Tuple looks interesting, didn't know about it yet, thanks!

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        yeah Tuple is great, best tool for code pairing 👍

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    There's also another side to it

    • users who solved a problem can list it so that others can unlock the solution for a fee, generating cash back and extra $ for the developer

    • developers can also publish unlockable mini-tutorials for the most common problems, and let others unlock them for a fee

    At first, I'm leaving that out for the MVP. But I'm excited about those features!

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      This sounds a bit like monetizing all the help developers provide to each other for free atm (Stack Overflow, GitHub Issues etc.), as someone that profits so much off the knowledge of others every day I'm having mixed feelings about this (but I guess you could always argue that it'd be more of a premium thing for complex issues - which then again wouldnt function well in a text-based environment I guess).

      Money definitely changes the incentive for sharing solutions to common problems (I think there's studies from research on incentives on that), cuz it's no longer a social thing (helping out for karma) but a commercial act. Still I can see the value in this, I mean it could also be a foot in the door for freelancers (providing solutions for entry-level problems and their services for anything more, leveraging the credibility from their problem solutions). Interested to see what you can come up with, good luck!

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        I agree with the sentiment that developers helping each other out shouldn't be monetized.

        But solving very, very specific problems should be monetized.

        For example, one of my friends got a take-home-assignment to solve as a part of his interview for junior developer position. More or less it's Yahoo Finance scraper and there were quite a few things he couldn't figure out because they weren't "googleable" so I had to help him out here and there.

        I did it for free because he's my friend but I'd expect something back from a stranger in this case.

        TL;DR "How to reverse a string in JavaScript" = FREE, "How to scrape data from superhardwebsitetoscrapte.com" = PAID

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          very well said!

          Those cases are exactly why I'm building this. I often got stuck in those exact situations. Many of my dev friends mentioned the same thing.

          There's a lot of demand for learning how to code, so hoping a platform like this contributes to the whole ecosystem.

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        thanks, that's great feedback!

        I am a fan of the open-source / help others as much as possible ethos, but also a fan of people getting paid for the work they do and opening up opportunities in that area.

        This complements that - you have all the places where you can get help for free but few where you can pay others for help (and, as you said, I expect it to be used for more complex, personalized solutions).

        There are a lot of times when help is really slow or inaccurate on those platforms, especially for beginners. While I was learning I wanted a place where I could just pay someone for some advice or seeing how to solve a specific code problem.

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