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created about 1 year ago | Tagged: |
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Entrepreneurs now have a cheap way to get top-level business advice beyond the traditional channels. Dan Martell, a San Francisco-based Canadian who last year sold his social marketing firm Flowtown to enterprise software company Demandforce, is launching Clarity, an advice connections service centered around the humble phone call. The premise of Clarity is so deceptively simple that it’s surprising so few like it already exist. Essentially, the service links entrepreneurs to experts via a call-request service. Users, who sign up with Facebook Connect, can submit a question on a particular topic, and Clarity’s algorithms will search for relevant advisors. It then suggests three experts with whom users can request a private call. If an advisor is immediately available, they can accept the call right away. If not, the user gets added to a callback list. Advisors set the terms of the call and, if they choose, they can specify a per-minute billing rate. If they don’t need the cash, they can instead ask users to donate the fee to a charity of the advisor’s choice. Right now, all this is offered via a website, which is optimized for mobile, but an iOS app will hit the market in a matter of weeks. Clarity has been in private beta for four months, during which time it has signed up 1,200 advisors and helped place more than 4,000 calls. Big-name experts already offering their services through Clarity include Josh Elman, principal at Greylock Partners, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, and Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup. Mark Cuban has also signed up, offering his advice at $10,000 an hour. Martell estimates only about 15 percent of the advisors actually charge a fee. Of that number, he reckons, 80 percent donate their fee to charity.
