
Show HN: Officehours - karjaluoto
http://www.officehours.io
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elithius
I've held a few sessions as an advisor on Officehours.io and my experience has
been very positive. The ten-minute format fosters a succinct Q&A and to date
my sessions have been quite productive. It's yet to feel like a waste of time,
especially because I've set aside the time to participate. Since there's
inherent value in providing advice (as well as receiving it), charging for the
conversation hasn't even crossed my mind. I think the broad spectrum of
advisors (from well-known names to newcomers) helps to encourage interaction;
users who are intimidated by titles can get their feet wet with an advisor by
checking their knowledge stats alone. Mostly, I applaud the sentiment behind
the work, which draws on the design community's tradition of sharing what you
know.

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karjaluoto
We love having folks like you on Officehours. Thanks for being a part of it!

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jennylang
A lot of the people shown on the site seem pretty young and possibly
inexperienced. Are you letting just anyone be an "expert"?

~~~
karjaluoto
Yes—but the language needs to change.

Initially our plan was to vet each advisor before allowing them to offer
sessions. That said, we didn’t want to be the arbiters of who has good
feedback to share.

So, we opened up the option to be an advisor, to everyone. And what we’re
seeing, in doing so, is sort of interesting. Seems like some of the folks I
thought wouldn’t get any requests for sessions are. (So, probably good that we
don’t get in the way of these folks.)

That said, this approach means that we need to update the descriptions used on
the site—because the term expert is not always accurate, and can be difficult
to quantify. In the weeks to come, this word will be removed from the site.

~~~
jennylang
Yeah, I think you'll need to be more clear about that. Or maybe have an
"experts" section for those that are truly experts.

~~~
karjaluoto
Definitely. The copy change has already been set in the Sketch docs. We just
need to find some time to make all of these little changes. (So many things to
fix!)

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pavornyoh
Do you do a criminal background check of these so called "experts"? How
credible are these people giving advice? Just curious if you know what I mean.

~~~
karjaluoto
No—we don’t run criminal checks. (I can’t imagine how such a task would be
viable.) Instead, we expect that users will do their own due diligence in
researching the individual before asking for their feedback.

~~~
pavornyoh
I agree on the viable part. But I had to ask :). So how different are you from
clarify.fm?

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karjaluoto
Clarity is microconsulting and allows users to tap advice by paying for it, by
the minute.

Officehours is more of a community. If you need a hand with something, you can
ask someone—no charge. And when someone needs your help, you can return the
favor.

So, similar in function, but philosophically quite different.

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jteedo
Nice, but why would people give their time away for free? Time is valuable and
people want to get paid.

~~~
karjaluoto
There are services that work like that. Clarity.fm is perhaps the best
example. They take a sort of micro-consulting approach. This allows experts to
sell their time in 1 minute increments.

My problem with this approach is that the people who most need the help don’t
have the money; and those who can help the most don’t need the money. (I can’t
imagine many senior people actually wanting to squeeze money out of a college
student.)

I’ve met with a lot of young designers over the years—and I’m happy to lend a
hand. That said, it’s difficult for me to spend an hour or two with everyone
who asks.

So, for me Officehours is a way to still help, but much more efficiently. I
can offer 4 sessions in an hour, scheduling and time zones are all automated,
and so are notifications.

Admittedly, I’m biased (no wonder). But, this is really the reason we built
Officehours. We believe that a lot of people want to help others—but they want
a more convenient way to do so.

~~~
karjaluoto
The other aspect to this is reputation. We’re building karma/ratings into the
service. As such, those who help out the most, and get the best ratings will
rank higher on the site (and have more access to other advisors).

We think this will be a particularly handy way for early/mid-career folks to
showcase their expertise. (Sort of like a high Twitter following can.) Once we
have categories in place, visitors will be able to view by groupings like
Marketing, Design, NodeJS, what-have-you. Those who show up higher in these
listings will likely seem more credible, as a result.

The other interesting part is that this isn’t limited to a mentor/protégé
relationship. I helped a friend out with a question about switching from
Photoshop to Sketch, using Officehours, last week. These relationships are
important, and do a lot to build one’s reputation with other potential
partners/clients. :-)

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karjaluoto
It’s still early, but I wanted to quickly show what we’re working on. It
allows anyone to get/give 10 minutes of free advice. :-)

~~~
dc2
Looks pretty cool. One piece of advice that will IMHO make or break the
usability of the site: You are going to need to add tags and / or filtering
options for the skillsets of the advisors. Reading a one-to-two-sentence bio
of each advisor to find out what they do is not very workable.

~~~
dc2
Nice and good luck :)

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karjaluoto
Thank you—we’re putting everything we have into making this good! We certainly
have lots of work to do, but I feel like this thing could benefit a lot of
people. :-)

