HN Explorer

Ask HN: Does Advice as a Service exist, via micro-transactions?

11 points by personlurking ↗ HN
Living abroad and moving countries with a certain frequency, I've always run into moments when I wished I could 'poll a [insert nationality]' via crowdsourcing, or get advice very quickly on something that would otherwise be easy to answer for a local. Emphasis on 'very quickly', ie, within 60 seconds in most cases.

But the use case for such a service can cover all types of situations, not just mine. To keep things economically interesting for the person answering, the fee could be something like 50 cents or $1 per question (as opposed to a few cents per action, like most micro-transaction services I've seen).

8 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 26.1 ms ] thread
AznHisoka
There is Clarity. You can typically schedule calls w experts there on most business related topics.
bryanrasmussen
I guess minimum fee $1 per question - other rate per minute? Some questions will take more than a minute to answer.
personlurking
Sure, there could be variations in prices based on the complexity of the question. In essense, it'd take Quora, Stack Overflow, AMAs, etc, and add a fee, plus near-instant responses.

One possibility based on the travel sector is to be a virtual tour guide, via WhatsApp, with live location sharing of the tourist. The person traveling posts questions in the form of words, pictures, videos and audio and the local person responds in real-time. Each inquiry costs very little (or is part of a package with a fixed number of inquires allowed), and the local can provide the service to many people in any given time frame.

An extension of the above: how about the traveler can ask how to say a certain phrase (or ask how to get out of a certain situation) and the guide sends an audio message in that language which the traveler can play for someone standing in front of them.

Or something totally different. A 5-second video/audio of my car making a strange noise, sent to the app's car community, and someone answers what it could be. Or you baked something and it came out looking odd and you can ask the cooking community, "what did I do wrong?"

bryanrasmussen
I suppose there could be the technology built for doing the question answer etc. but an MVP for the virtual tour guide is probably more advanced than the MVP for a generic question/answer solution with a reasonable pricing model. Too many different communities at first causes you to loose focus, and will have different implementation requirements.
sp527
This model tends to work well at the upper end of the price range/credential spectrum. Various kinds of investment firms (particularly PE) incorporate 'expert calls' as a core component of their scoping process.

Harder to make work on the consumer side because the price that market will bear doesn't attract high-quality advisors.

verrecken
If you write a new question on Google Maps about a location, gmap users that visited the location in the past and accepted to be a "local guide" get notifications about the question. They get points for answering the questions that are not worth anything. This is only a small part of your idea, but the problem with making money with that would be the same: who will qualify the peoples answers ? Will the answerer be payed if the questioner says the answer is wrong or didn't help him(and what if the answer is actually right but the questioner don't want to pay) ? Who would pay for a answer if it could be wrong ? If you want a fast answer, how can you guarantee the quality of the answer as the answerer must also be fast to sell his answer ?
arisAlexis
made a version of this as an email paywall at www.veropost.com integrating with Bitcoin