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Ask HN: How do you find an expert?

by blunte on 4/13/22, 12:22 AM with 6 comments

How do you find an expert? Your car has a strange sound. Your DNS over HTTP is rejecting you. Your CI pipeline is fragile and seems non-deterministic.

It feels like there's a business opportunity here to somehow connect the people who know with the people (like me) who are willing to pay for an hour or two of a proper expert's time.

In my most recent case, I have a pihole with cloudflared dns-over-https, and I get frequent rejections. Nobody likes being rejected, especially when it means your network is useless 25% of the time. But web searches lead nowhere. I would pay for proper help, but there's no obvious service to match the experts with the clients.

Is there one? If not, is there interest to build such a matchmaking service?

  • by pid-1 on 4/13/22, 12:57 AM

    I was contacted a few times by consulting firms to provide expert opinion to hedge funds and other investment business. But generally they didn't want to solve a particular problem, just an overview of some industry or technology.

    For more specific stuff, I think that's sort of what AWS IQ does in their domain.

    > I would pay for proper help

    Out of curiosity, how much?

  • by jryb on 4/13/22, 1:12 PM

    Many of my colleagues have gotten messages on linked in from consulting firms where they basically offer $300 for an hour long phone call with a client. I'm not sure how they're getting picked, but they all have PhDs and papers in the field the client is interested in.

    I definitely think there's something to the idea of making the discovery process easy. I would pay to chat with a doctor about a bunch of things that aren't related to my personal health, and to someone who works on industrial electrolyzers, just off the top of my head.

  • by atlasunshrugged on 4/13/22, 12:27 AM

    Totally depends on the industry. I've been called on as an expert a few times by GLG which seems to do this as a service https://glginsights.com but I don't think they cover everything and there are other companies in more specific verticals like tech support for companies (https://www.electric.ai/)