Sorry, right now I don't think we have a good way to validate international phone numbers, we should fix that soon. The email refusing "+" was because of a crappy lib that I was using, and it isn't terribly high on the list of things to fix.
So, I guess the real answer is that it is restrictive because that was what was easiest.. sorry :(
It's worth hesitating before introducing a confirmation-email step. You're certainly going to lose people every time you increase the complexity of the signup process.
Neat way to kill two birds with one stone. Not only do you get to promote Exec but you also get people to donate to a wonderful charity. Its great that you got such great founders to donate their time.
Win-win indeed! Thanks. I'm on the advisory board of donorschoose.org, so I'm super biased, but they're indeed awesome (also, use my matching code! 'breadpig')
This really demonstrates the power of strong personal/professional networks. Each of these founders are probably happy to talk to smart, budding entrepreneurs, for as the saying goes: "He who teaches, learns".
Justin Kan was able to bring them all together in one place, that place being his most recent startup. The charity angle doesn't hurt either, and adds a "feel good" element to this that makes it much more share-worthy.
I love seeing creative marketing and promotional ideas like this. So long, and thanks for all the inspiration.
This is full of win.
$100 for charity and an hour of advice from some really great people. I'm on board, now I just need to figure out who I'm going to talk to. Edit: signed up to talk with Tikhon Bernstam.
This phone-calls-with-celebrities model has been tried many times before but it simply isn't viable in the longterm for various reasons. Clearly you can get people to do it occasionally and even enjoy it, so it's great for things like what exec is doing, but it's not something that many people would do on a regular basis.
That said there are definitely still unexplored variations on this idea that have at least a decent probability of success, so I think it's worth it for those seeking ideas to take a closer look here.
This is just a promotion to get people to know about and maybe even try Exec. $100 / hour is far, far under the value of the Alexis, Steve, Tikhon and Matt's time -- they are donating it to charity.
The point isn't to be sustainable, although if people like it we might do it again with a different set of people as another promotion.
In this case it makes sense because these people already do consulting for a living, so this is just another way to get clients. And further, the person calling is going to be looking for expertise about a specific topic rather than looking to talk with a specific individual because of their accomplishments or whatever, so it's much less socially awkward.
I do still think there is an opportunity though to get celebrities who wouldn't normally do this to do it, it's just that none of the ways that have been tried so far have been suitable.
It's not just consultants. They connect you with industry experts. One of the biggest spammers on linkedin I find are these types of companies looking for domain experts.
Yes and no. I've been used as a GLG expert a number of times. The only people who seemed to use their service (read willing to pony up for the very high per hour rates) were institutional finance research groups doing due diligence for M&A or similar transactions. That's a pretty specific market with very deep pockets.
This is a really cool idea. I tried to book Matt or Justin saturday for an hour but any would be worth that small price. I bet if you had pg people would pay 1k+ per hour.
I did a lot of interviews via GLG (and similar services) as a consultant, with rates ranging from $200-700 per hour. The $700 range was for C-suite interviews at $5-10B revenue companies. I imagine a senior person at Apple or Boeing would be well in the thousands per hour for a similar service.
The people who are paying for these services aren't small start-ups trying to grow -- it is private equity and consulting firms with really deep pockets making multi-million/billion dollar decisions. They'll pay what it takes.
I've done GLG (and other similar services) in the $700 range. It's not just for C-level execs at $5-10B revenue companies (I cofounded two venture-backed startups).
I started by charging $400. Then I realized that some of these calls last 15 minutes. At "$700 per hour" we're talking about a whopping $175 to do the scheduling routine (some back-and-forth), make time in my schedule, interrupt "flow", and take the call.
I now insist on a 1 hr minimum and bill $700 and do it occasionally when the offers come in (handful of times per year) because I like talking about the subject matter. It's not exactly the best use of my time.
I seriously wonder why someone hasn't created an app/escrow service to mimic/enhance 900 numbers.
Experts enter, hours available, and their price per unit (minutes, hours, whatever).
Users would basically pay the experts premium to cut through any and all communication filters to get ahold of that person right then. If the expert doesn't answer his phone right then it would text them to respond with 3-4 digits for a set time (clients chooses time range) to reschedule (or deny).
If you find yourself not taking calls the system will automatically increase your cost per hour until it is worth your time to just answer the damn phone (it will be eventually).
Think of it as a simple handshake service for payed phone consultation.
In the speaker/entertainment industry you quickly come to realize that pretty much everyone has a price to get their full immediate attention, it doesn't matter if it's Bono or Tim Cook. Not to be crass but everyone is pay-for-play at some dollar amount.
Anyone from Ilya Grigorik, to Gary Vaynerchuk could probably set a price point that would make them very happy and generate calls.
We haven't launched yet (just testing out the system), but we've processed five client/expert sessions in the past couple weeks and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
Awesome, this whole issue has been a bugaboo for me a long time.
Make sure you create a embeddable widget that people can plaster on blog posts, articles, "maker" sites, Knol(lol, but I think something like this would have given that service more legs and actual buzz), etc. For tech people especially, if your widget lists their high price point, a widget could actually add further legitimacy to their expertise as they write. Win win.
One thing to keep in mind, some experts (depends entirely on their emotional relationship to money, brilliant people do this too) may tend to lower their level of engagement over time since there can be a reluctance to "increase price" when they start getting bored and feel your service is a burden at the income level provided, you should definitely have a mechanism to auto increment their list price as their involvement or acceptance rates decrease (or you can just add more experts, but ideally you do both, to organically implement tiered expertise).
As an example, Sean Hannity is an extremely busy guy (you used to be able to get him for 35k) and really doesn't like doing live one off events, his daily radio show is an insane time obligation, and he would rather be book touring, but you can still get him on the east coast for 100K and a private jet :-)
Well, yes it isn't new, there are also still 900 numbers. But just look at the offerings, Skype, AT&T(ether), the services are either a "value add" for the company or just look like crap. This space is begging for an implementation that doesn't suck.
No founder is so cheap as to have their time to be rented from. Besides, if I want to connect with some of the founders, all I have to do is send them an email.
- email cannot contain the '+' character (yes it can!)
- phone should be 10 characters long
I can go around the first problem but not the second one (I'm in France: country prefix (33) + number = 11 pos).
I understand the service is targeted at SF residents right now, but since it's available for "virtual" tasks, why be so restrictive?