

Ask HN: Feedback on business models - chris_l

I'm looking at creating an online, part-time service business to fund my graduate math studies, possibly involving some colleagues.<p>The idea is a "virtual research assistant" service, i.e. you hire someone smart, highly-educated and comparatively cheap who can do the intellectual ground work for you. This would include things like background research/reading, preparing a decision with evaluation of products/technologies, on- and offline research for possible solutions the client is not aware of, discovering existing experts, report writing, ... The smallest unit you can buy is a single hour of research, for trial.<p>I can cover Software tech, CS, EE &#38; Mathematics and hope to add more subjects with collaborators. I realise that traditional consultancies fill this market, but they are usually quite expensive and invasive, so I suspect there might be room for a lower-cost, no-frills service like mine.<p>What do you think?
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skm
I think such a business may succeed. Your biggest challenge will be what I'll
call the "verification problem": How can a customer verify that you've
provided them with a "good" product for their money?

Consider selling programming services. The client can request an application
or website with certain functionality, and you use your superior expertise to
create that functionality. Even though the client can't code, their experience
from using the application/website can tell them that you delivered the goods.

Knowledge that is used to support strategic business decisions is not so easy
to verify, mainly because it doesn't have consequences that can be directly
experienced by non-experts.

So how do people get around this? Large consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain,
etc.) spend considerable resources building their reputations, alumni networks
(= potential clients), etc.

Small consulting firms usually build their reputations in local business and
social circles, relying on repeat business and referrals.

Concretely, I'd suggest thinking about one or more of: (i) specific, rare
domain expertise, (ii) finding one or a small handful of clients who can
become comfortable hiring you repeatedly, (iii) research services that can be
delivered in the form of data or code such that someone less expert than you
can verify the quality.

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nudge
What would an example project be? Be a little more specific on the services
you would be providing.

I don't see why there shouldn't be a market for such a thing, but you need to
be quite clear about what you can provide (your idea is a little fuzzy at the
moment - possibly because you can offer a variety of things, but clarity and
specificity are better for marketing)

~~~
chris_l
True, I'm still working on sharpening the idea. Here's a specific example
task, and at the upper end of the size/price spectrum:

Let's say you want to write a Twitter search engine and adopt existing FLOSS
software as far as possible (my position a few years back). You could ask us
to find, research, evaluate, possibly test components and fit them together
according to your requirements. You receive an overview of existing projects,
ranked by criteria such as maturity and completeness, all caveats for your
project and a draft architecture using the best parts (crawler, indexer,
front-end). This you can then hand to the implementation crew to get them
started in the right direction.

Or you just want us to find out if anyone knows how to reliably capture all
tweets from the system and try and get the information. I knew that back then,
but finding it out took a mixture of ingenuity and perseverance - hacker
skills :)

Here are a few rough ideas for a more specific service offering:

\- software intelligence service: as above, plus similar tasks

\- the scientific computing service: fixing bugs, improving display of
results/export functions, writing a module, all the way to creating an entire
solution (in Matlab, Mathematica, et. al.) In some sense this is an low-end IT
consultancy with experience in scientific computing.

\- "math-backup" service (for non-mathematicians in science and technology):
have us search for a result, apply it to your domain/conventions, check for
proper rigour in your work, find "bugs" in reasoning etc.

As RAs do a range of tasks in their positions, so could a VRA.

~~~
nudge
Sounds like a decent idea to me. Virtual research assistants work in a lot of
areas, and I don't see why this should be an exception. I could imagine myself
finding your services useful in the future. Some thoughts:

(1) If you're doing a lot of smallish jobs for people, the setting up of each
job could add to quite a lot of your work time.

(2) (1) suggests you'll need to bill high per-hour to cover for the time
you'll spend setting up, or try to do fewer, longer jobs (or ongoing series of
jobs with the same clients). Another advantage of doing more work for the same
person is that you will spend less time getting up to speed in a new area.

(3) This leads me to think the best way for you to structure it would be to
take on a small number of clients, each of whom is likely to give you work
fairly regularly. Not quite one-off, not quite employee. Freelance
intelligence-gathering etc.

(4) Think about who exactly will be your clients. Academics, probably not.
They have full time research assistants, if for no other reason than that's
how departmental finances work most of the time. Large companies, probably not
- they probably have interns and other such cheap sources of work-time. I
think the one-man/small startup scene might be your market. Think of Patrick
McKenzie (Bingo Card Creator - patio11 on HN) - he developed a relationship
with a woman somewhere to write his bingo cards, simply because it's a better
use of his time to pay her to do it. And he can trust her to do it
consistently well - so it's like I said, not an employee, but not one-off work
either (i.e. he will go to her, not look around for anyone).

(5) Perhaps you could frame your services in terms of competitor analysis
("Write me a report on all companies working on group microblogging"), which
can range from business details to technical implementations, and so on; and
also, as you suggest, possible relevant architectures for a project or feature
a client may be interested in.

It might be hard to pull it off, but I think it could be useful to some people
/ teams. My somewhat HN-intoxicated suggestion would be to write up some
example reports, whip up a website, and come back and offer your services. You
might be worth the money to some very busy small teams.

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jeb
It won't work. Do the calculation on the SIZE of your market, then do the
calculation on how you will REACH your market.

You'll discover that there is a problem.

~~~
chris_l
Care to elaborate? I'm not sure of the size, but there are 100.000+ related
monthly searches on Google (under $.20 per click), which is how I hope to
reach customers.

~~~
jeb
Searches for What?

~~~
chris_l
I guess that depends on the specialisation (see other thread in this post).
Maybe something like "software decision help", "scientific research service",
"professional math help", "software evaluation", "Matlab debugging"...

~~~
jeb
It's a pretty bad and unscalable idea. Don't follow it. It won't work. 100.000
searches is nothing, start breaking it down to how many are willing to pay,
and you see how small the market is. Unless you have an extra-ordinary passion
for this area, find something more immediately lucrative.

