
Lessons Learned Launching a Side Project in 48 Hours - ingve
https://medium.com/learning-new-stuff/creating-a-two-sided-marketplace-in-two-days-4482dfc1ead8
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myohan
Some ideas (take it with a grain of salt)

1) You should have a rating system for experts and award different level of
badges and users should write reviews also experts with high scores should
have a higher pay rate

2) interviewing experts is not going to scale not only you will not have the
time but you also need internal experts to interview the Become an expert"
applicants (you need some fast vetting process or rely on the rating system)

3) You should collect data from StackOverFlow and other sites and see which
questions novice folks are having a hard time getting answers to and try to
get experts on those topics (this could become your competitive advantage)

4) You can scale this to businesses - they would certainly appreciate the on-
demand help aspect of this thing. Businesses specially small ones may have
support account subscriptions with vendors like Red Hat, IBM, etc...which can
be costly for them. If your experts are reliable they would rather pay you
only when they need help instead of paying the vendors monthly/yearly.

5) As your experts are working the problems you should keep a very organized
knowledge base of the issue and resolution (maybe you can monetize this data
later on or it maybe useful somehow)

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mrborgen
Thanks for your input! The are a ton of challenges ahead, and scaling experts
is one of them. But as for now, getting demand is harder than supply. Although
the demand is surely affected by the quality of the experts.

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dhruvkar
Nice. So how do you handle scaling this up? Working a full-time job, how would
you expect to give this the man hours it needs, in order to determine if this
is a viable business model? This is the main issue facing my side projects.

~~~
mrborgen
That remains to be seen! Depends on the growth, definitely.

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Uptrenda
I think you should simplify the service and make it strictly about fixing bugs
in small programs. Why: because information is essentially perceived as
worthless by the majority and almost any question a person could hope to ask
is already one Google search or Stackoverflow question away from being
answered. This pervasiveness of information contributes to the assumption that
a person is entitled to it all for free (and that the person producing it
ought to do it for free) - which is one of the main reasons businesses models
built on content are so shitty.

"Please help me fix a very specific bug that's only in this one implementation
in this current universe" is a lot easier to monetize than "please teach me
how a for loop works." See what I mean?

~~~
kevinwang
I disagree that any question can be found on stack overflow. I see this
service as filling the niche of answering questions I have that stack overflow
ISN'T for. For example, when learning a new framework: "What's the idiomatic
way to do _____?", or "From the documentation, it seems like [this feature]
was accomplished with [this line of code], but in other tutorials, there's
[this line]. What's the difference?", or "This paragraph in the get-started
tutorial makes no sense. Could you explain this to me?" Just small lapses in
understanding for subtle concepts, or practices in the real-world.

This site is actually something I've wished for in the past, while reading and
learning new things online. I think the article explains it very elegantly:
the service is like raising your hand to ask a question. I'll bet I'm not the
only one who's wanted to raise their hand while learning by reading a guide or
documentation before.

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20years
I like this idea. I personally think you are charging too little though. I
know you want to make it affordable even for students but I feel that may only
open it up for lower level programmers who are okay with working for low
rates.

There is already a ton of help available online for low prices or free. I
would like to see a service that focuses on instant help like this but with
very experienced developers. I would have no problem paying over $60/hr or
even a $100+ per hour for a guarantee that my problem will be solved. I would
even fork out that kind of money for my employees to use a service like that.
Something that I can deposit a certain amount of money per month into my
employees account wallet which they can use towards live support issues and it
only gets deducted if the problem was solved.

I may not be the norm though so take what I say with a grain of salt ;)

~~~
codyb
I came here to say this as well. I could see enterprise uses for companies
with smaller budgets who can't hire a full time senior engineer but might need
or make good use of one's time for an hour.

You could potentially even add scheduling, so Dev X could be scheduled for an
hour every week with Client Y.

There's a lot of neat paths you could take, and there's some decent theories
about the science of choices and human decision making you could read up on if
you're interested.

Enjoyed the article, as someone with a near constantly full plate it's nice to
read about a very substantial start in a bite sized time frame and makes me
want to try to set aside a weekend as well.

~~~
mrborgen
Interesting idea regarding scheduling. That would require a bit strickter
rules for our experts though. As for now, one of the benefitd the experts like
is that it's 100 percent flexible. You answer chats only when your'e
interested.

Would love to hear about those human decision theories, got links?

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piyushco
Congratulations, a great example of MVP. Thanks for sharing learnings. very
helpful.

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sergiotapia
Yes, /r/programming is much more ruthless and honest in my experience. Listen
to their comments and give them a bit more weight than most other forums.

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maksimg
I'm confused -- does the hired developer make the $10/20min or does the site
creator get it? Or what's the split?

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asenna
Nice! I hope this project goes somewhere.

Me and a friend of mine built something similar a while back but never really
got to push it more. ([https://www.ladr.io](https://www.ladr.io))

We always thought there was a gap between Upwork and Stackoverflow.

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mrborgen
Hey, author of the article here. Let me know if you have any comments.

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swframe
What an odd coincidence? I had a similar idea yesterday. Except, I think your
solution should be more general; A site that lets anyone pay to talk to an
expert on any topic. The user should post their question and the experts
compete to be selected; it is important that only the experts that care about
the question are selected. Kind of like uber for conversations. I don't think
it should be a TaskRabbit clone. The experts only provide information; they
don't do the work.

For example, I want to talk to someone about selecting an alibaba manufacturer
for a specific niche. I also want to talk to someone about how to get products
into retails stores. And so on.

There are many related services. For example, you can have translators connect
people. I think there is also a need for translators for people with poorly
formed ideas; the translators would communicate with the experts who don't
want to deal with those people directly.

~~~
mrborgen
Great input!

However, it's quite hard to get that kind of product off the ground. Easier to
start with a niche and work our way out to broader subjects.

We actually started with ReactHelp.com, then went wider to HTML,CSS and JS.
And now, we have Ruby, Python & Java experts as well, so it's going in the
direction of more subjects.

