I love eBay. I just now went and bought some travel sick bags for car sick kids. Those were going to be one of my inventions-of-the-day, until I found out they were already invented. But mine would have been better and have jolly pictures on them.
Anyway… My invention today is for a site that’s similar to eBay, only instead of people trading goods, they trade help and advice - it’s an email mentoring service. There’d be a ton of categories, just like eBay, but instead of ‘baby clothes’ and ‘computer accesories’ there might be ‘weaning advice’ and ‘PC problems.’
Users could offer their services to make money, or buy them if they needed help, and everything would be priced on a ‘per email’ basis. There’d be some low stakes bit-of-fun stuff like, ‘dating advice’ – where you could email someone your online dating profile and get feedback from ‘lovequeen385′ or else there’d be more professional support services at a much higher price, like translation work, CV writing, proof reading, racing tips, health or legal advice. In the same way as eBay buyers and sellers give and receive feedback to ensure the deal is good, email mentors would be given feedback on their work. You could ensure you picked a mentor who’s well-qualified with a good response time by reading their profile and ratings.
The service could also be used for distance learning schools, perhaps you could enrol yourself on a creative writing course and take modules by email? Existing Distance Learning schools could get new customers by advertising their services on the site. Perhaps there could even be free mentoring services, volunteers helping people get over problems like eating disorders or addiction?
Another idea could be offering live chat support (using msn messenger) instead of just emails. And the site would of course make loads of money (like eBay) by charging a listing fee, or else taking a cut of each advice email sold.
I suppose I came up with this idea because I work in Customer Support. I help people with their poker problems by email, and I just think it would be great if you could email an expert for help with absolutely anything!
The closest thing to this idea is something like Yahoo Answers, but that’s free advice from members of the public with an opinion but no real expertise. I think you get what you pay for, and I’d be glad to pay for email support if I had a problem. I might even become an email mentor to make myself a few pennies. I might sell advice on..? Learning vegetarian cookery… at 10p a recipe! Writing a blog? Cat care…! I wonder if people could even become professional eMentors, a bit like people earning a living as eBay traders?
Anyway, I like this invention and wish I had the money to develop it. If there was an email mentoring service I might ask it’s ‘business ideas expert’ if it might be successful…
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May 10, 2008 at 6:57 pm
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