There is a lot you can buy with $166. A wool coat for winter. A cheap plane ticket (one way) from Los Angeles to New York. Four nights of paying for all the beer your friends drink. Or spending a minute of time on the phone with Dallas Mavericks owner and investor Mark Cuban.
It’s a calculus you wouldn’t be forced to make, except for the rise of Clarity, a startup that pairs budding entrepreneurs with experts like Mark Cuban for a price. Fortunately, most of the experts are far cheaper than the famously self-important Mr. Cuban. Both angel investor Ariel Poler and serial entrepreneur James Siminoff charge $8.33 per minute.
Whatever the price, says founder Dan Martell, the whole point is to get help for would-be masters of the universe who don’t have access to an ecosystem of people who have been there before. “New entrepreneurs don’t always know the right people, and those with extensive business knowledge don’t always want to talk,” says Martell. “I create Clarity to link up the people who need advice with those who are willing to give it.”
Martell knows all about being left outside of the entrepreneurial hot spots. He grew up in a small Canadian town, with fewer than 70,000 residents. It’s no surprise then that when he started his first company at 18, he couldn’t find any other local startup entrepreneurs who could give him advice. After that company – and the one after it – failed, Martell decided that one day he’d figure out a way to connect seasoned entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and business advisers with budding business people, regardless of where they live. Clarity is the result.
When Martell launched the company in May 2012, he got 350 Silicon Valley hotshots and worldwide business experts to sign up to dole out free or paid advice. Seven months later, the site has grown to nearly 7,000 experts who offer pointers on real estate, marketing, legal issues, and fundraising to newly minted entrepreneurs. Clarity must have been paying attention to its own experts. It just raised a $1.6 million seed round from Mark Cuban (he invested after signing up as an expert), Baseline Ventures, Real Ventures, and 500 Startups, to name a few.
For Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur Omar Baig, Clarity replaces going to networking events and business lectures to hunt down an expert who might not even have a chance to talk. “This is 10 times better than that because I can get someone on the phone and get more than just advice.” Often, Baig says, those conversations lead to introductions to other experts and before you know it, you have an entire network of experts on your side. That’s more than worth the money, says Baig, who would gladly pay Mark Cuban’s $10,000-per-hour rate if he could afford it. (He’d ask Cuban for his top investor picks should he ever need to raise cash.)
It’s obvious why entrepreneurs would be all over an idea like Clarity – who doesn’t want advice from someone who’s already walked in your shoes? But advice-peddling experts like it too, because of the built-in privacy. Instead of giving out their already overloaded e-mail address or a phone number, they can give out a link to their Clarity profile and can control how people contact them, what they can talk about, and for how long.
Dan Waldschmidt (right), who owns his own business strategy firm in South Carolina, signed up for Clarity after Martell told him he could donate the money he made from his calls to charity. “I’m not interested in helping someone for a few hundred bucks an hour,” he says, “But if you connect it to my charity, I am willing to jump through a few more hoops to give money to a cause I care about.” He’ll talk to you about marketing, revenue growth, and business strategy, and donates the proceeds to To Write Love on Her Arms.
Clarity is a web app that can be used on any mobile or desktop browser. You can find your expert by first scrolling through categories like “Women Founders” and “Bootstrapping,” or search by topic, location, or specific person with whom you might want to talk. Starting today, advice-seekers can also post a summary of their questions and concerns and Clarity will suggest three to four experts who might be able to help.
Every experts has a profile with a photo, their location, a brief description of their expertise, and stats on their average response time and phone call length. If the expert chooses to charge for their time, you’ll also see their per-minute rate.
Once you find the right expert, you send them a request with a 140-character reason for the call and how much time – between 15 minutes and one hour – you want to chat. Your chosen expert gets either an e-mail or text message alert, accepts the request, and Clarity sets up a conference bridge at a scheduled time. Once the call is done, Clarity handles all the billing.
The average cost of a 15-minute call is $60 — $100 for 30 minutes — but the prices depends on how each expert values his or her time. Some experts don’t charge at all. New investor Mark Cuban charges the most on the site at $166.67 per minute, but the average rate is closer to 500 Startups’ Dave McClure‘s rate of $4.17 per minute. McClure, like many others on Clarity, gives his earnings to charity. The company takes the transaction cost, about 4 percent, on paid calls where the proceeds are donated to philanthropic causes. If the expert keeps the money for themselves, Clarity keeps 15 percent.
The idea of gathering independent experts is hardly novel. Knowledge brokerage firm Gerson Lehrman has several councils of experts who can offer business, legal, and accounting advice, though their membership process is more extensive than signing up with Facebook or LinkedIn (which is all you have to do with Clarity). There are also plenty of places to solicit advice on the internet, most popular of which is Quora. You can find Silicon Valley personalities like Ben Horowitz and Robert Scoble answering questions on the site, which has become like a refined Yahoo Answers for the tech community.
Clarity seems to sit between the two services; not as sophisticated or, with the exception of Cuban, as expensive as Gerson Lehrman, but more personal than Quora. The company understands the trend that entrepreneurs are popping up in every country and they can’t always get help from there local community. Martell’s starry-eyed goal for his company is to impact 1 billion people worldwide by 2022. But with a growing number of popular tech and business luminaries in Clarity’s back pocket, and the entrepreneurial bug spreading globally that might not be such a lofty goal for long.
For $10,000 an Hour You Can Talk to Mark Cuban Too
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For $10,000 an Hour You Can Talk to Mark Cuban Too
