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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I think Google will be shocked at how little usage this gets. Having founded a couple of ventures aimed at helping people make money online, I can conclusively say that it is much easier, for example, to convince someone to play a casual game online and waste their time than to convince them to join a site where they may be paid for their time. For whatever reason, it is incredibly difficult to get talented people interested in new ways to connect with people that will pay for those talents.

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Oh ye of little imagination.

I go to Google Search, and I type in some phrase. The search results happen to not really have any great answers. And down at the bottom of the page is this nice little link that says, "Can't find what you're looking for? Care to ask an Expert?" Out of curiosity, you click it, and it takes you to the Helpouts page.

If they allow people to set their price at $0, some people will just do it out of altruism / reputation. (Think of Stack Overflow karma and badges.)

I could picture Open Source projects using $0 Helpouts, to encourage use - in helping new users configure, in helping users solve problems, in helping developers contribute. It'd be like an IRC channel. Especially if we can invite multiple people to the Helpout, like we can with Hangouts.

I can see businesses using it, as a way to reach Customer Support, when another business or high-end consumer wants to ask a question that they're willing to pay for.

EDIT:

Picture this, "Carmack Thursdays." On Thursday evenings, John Carmack agrees to do $1000 Helpouts, and donates all of the proceeds to a charity of his choice.

Linus Torvalds, Bruce Schneier, Jim Carrey, Ron Paul doing fundraising for a campaign, Markus Persson, Jeff Atwood, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, James Lipton, Tyra Banks, Kevin Smith, Venture Capitalists like the Y-Combinator folks...

If they get the right people to do Helpouts, it could be huge.

Like a one-on-one Reddit Ask Me Anything, where you pay to get backstage passes.

Sounds nice, but this will mostly become a phone sex service and everyone knows it.

Like internet forums freed hookers from their pimps this will free camgirls from cam sites.

Actually, I'd wager otherwise. It'll be for psychics. Keen.com was this (voice only, all experts) back in the 90s. Ended up being entirely psychics.

so, Keen worked to model - it connected experts in getting money from people (psychics) with people having surplus money to get.

In a less snarky vein, if that's what people want to pay for, perhaps enabling that market in an honest way is what people should do? I know a guy that funded his telecom startup by selling custom prompts for phone sex lines.

For a brief period of time you were able to gift other Xbox Live users Microsoft Points.

It doesn't take much thinking to figure out why they pulled the feature shortly thereafter.

everything with a camera can be come phone sex and cam sex now. Take a look at FaceTime.

FaceTime doesn't have built-in payment options.

Is there a less snarky way of saying not all sex involved payment of currency on the spot?

https://clarity.fm/home

I'm sure I can find competitors for literally everything Google does.

Google tends to do many of them better than their competition.

Yes, then the competitors are forced out of market and close their activities.. and then Google shut down the service.. and then new competitors launch replacement services and then...

It's not like "DownandAbout" is saying the project will fail. But Google is closing down projects because they want to focus. For the guys building driverless cars, Google Glass and computers without monitors, a project like this would easily pass as their weekend hack.

I'm sure that's the problem. They aren't going to get 10,000,00 people a day trading skills and cash and that is where they will start preparing its' obituary

They want to focus on what, though?

I think that's the main problem that people are having - is they don't get what makes Google decide on what makes the cut and what doesn't. The decisions Google has made don't make sense to them, so they have nothing but fear.

> They aren't going to get 10,000,00 people a day trading skills and cash

If there's a $0 option, I'm not so sure you're right.

and if they are going to rely on $0 to get them 10,000,000 users daily I'm not sure they will be making sense by putting the product out in the first place

Here's a free Expert with 2 stars, and a paid Expert with 5 stars. Depending on your question, ask whomever you want to.

If they drive acceptance of the platform, they drive their revenue, as well.

I tend to agree. There is already a massive affiliate marketing industry around http://fiverr.com where for $5 you can get a pretty amazing amount of high quality work done.

Everyone is a specialist in their field. $5 Wordpress installs, plug-in's, custom code, logos, etc.

How much would you pay to get an hour of consultation with a YC partner?

(YC partners: what's your price?)

After the above comments about phone sex and prostitution I found this comment made me smile =)

So how much would you pay for just 1 hour of 'consultation' with a YC partner?

An hour seems excessive.

You're far more likely to get to the point and get a focused answer if you get it down to 5-10 minutes.

Fine! How much would you pay to pitch them?

(It can be $X to their chosen charity if you wish)

You know it's pretty easy to say something won't work. Most of the time you will be right. However, consider there are lots people who create Podcasts, videos on YouTube, and sites like skillshare.com who might be interested in this.

Finally, it's a lot more interesting to figure out ways to make things work than be "The Critic."

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7-it-is-not-the-critic-who-c...

It's not hard to get professionals to offer their services online. These sites already do it.

http://www.wello.com (health& fitness) , http://betterfly.com (everything) http://www.popexpert.com (coaching)- http://www.takelessons.com (music)

The hard part is getting clients that are willing AND able(have the tech/connection) to use the platform. Google will not be there to offer the support that these connections need, and it will fail unless support is outsourced.

Almost all of these sites offer both online and offline(in-person) to survive. These sites might actually do better when Google brings live-online-instruction to the public's attention, and then they go to one of the previous companies that actually cares about supporting the professional and client/student.

Yeah, and their pricing model isn't helping them either. It's a tough sell to get professional experts to hand over almost a quarter of their earnings before the taxman cometh.

Maybe if Google didn't fail pricing 101, they'd know something like 18.25% is more palatable to a consumer than a big round number like 20.

Yeah I guess this is why app stores never took off, with their Draconian 30%-off-the-top fee model.

I wouldn't use app stores as a positive example of what Helpouts could do for the services industry. There aren't many companies successfully making money selling software in app stores. And certainly no one is doing gangbusters.

The difference being that I can sell the time I'd spend on Helpouts as consulting time at $x per hour. There was no alternative to the appstore if you wanted to reach mobile devices.

Well, there was - web apps, but discovery/market outreach, payments management, versioning and distribution are all issues that the App Store assisted with/handled thus warranting most of the 30% cut.

In this case, there are other forums and other ways to get "helpouts" not to mention if it really does take off, expect other major sites to launch their own helpouts efforts and ignore Google's offerings.

Do you have any sense what a reasonable fee would be?

I am a math teacher, and I've seen math teachers make $80+/hr tutoring high school and college students. I'd consider trying this platform out, because it would take little effort to get started, and I'd have nothing to lose.

I'd be a little frustrated to see Google take 20% right off the top. But I am assuming that Google has the infrastructure to roll this out without needing to take 20% to maintain profitability on this. Does anyone have a sense of a reasonable fee for this service?

Well, I'd rather Google set a price, however unreasonable, at the beginning. Free services provided by Google have a tendency to be taken out back like Old Yeller, no matter how devout a following.

If friction is low, it seems like a decent deal to me. Finding clients and setting up contracts takes up a lot of time, and if (big if) Google can streamline that for these things, that would easily be worth 20%.

Very difficult but will Google put this in front of enough people, enough times, in enough different ways to build a tangible niche?

Google different than most of us in that they don't need to directly make money from this effort. The WebRTC analytics generated alone are likely enough to justify the costs.

Sometimes you just want/need to unwind and do something else even if you could be making a little more money.

Also doing paid stuff outside of work can feel like more work, wasted time might be necessary recreation time.

Maven.co's entire business model is "to get talented people interested in new ways to connect with people that will pay for those talents."

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