{"id":25311,"date":"2021-07-19T04:45:23","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T04:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rbsitsoftwaresolution.com\/blog\/anyone-is-building-a-marketplace-for-advice-one-5-minute-call-at-a-time.html"},"modified":"2021-07-19T04:45:23","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T04:45:23","slug":"anyone-is-building-a-marketplace-for-advice-one-5-minute-call-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/anyone-is-building-a-marketplace-for-advice-one-5-minute-call-at-a-time.html","title":{"rendered":"Anyone is building a marketplace for advice, one 5-minute call at a time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone<\/a>, an audio app that\u2019s building a \u201cmarketplace for advice\u201d one five-minute phone call at a time, is launching new versions of its iOS<\/a> and Android<\/a> apps today* and beginning large-scale onboarding after operating in a limited closed beta for the past six months.<\/p>\n

The app \u2014 which was founded around 18 months ago (so pre-pandemic) \u2014 has a simple premise: Advice is best delivered verbally, concisely and one-to-one, in a time-limited format.<\/p>\n

Video is distracting and a hassle to fit into busy people\u2019s schedules. Text is time-consuming and prone to misunderstandings. But a simple phone call can \u2014 quickly and usefully \u2014 cut through, is the thinking here.<\/p>\n

Hence the decision to hard stop at a five-minute phone call. The app automatically terminates each call at the five minute mark \u2014 no ifs, no buts (and, well, hopefully fewer time-nibbling \u201cums\u201d and \u201cahs\u201d too).<\/p>\n

To fund development of the marketplace, the team has raised around $4 million in total to date \u2014 mainly comprising a $3.6 million seed round led by Berlin-based Cavalry Ventures with participation from Supernode Global, Antler and a number of high-profile angel investors (contributing angels include Atomico\u2019s Sarah Drinkwater and Sameer Singh; <\/em>and ustwo\u2019s Matt \u201cMills\u201d Miller, among others).<\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, online audio has shown its staying power through a sustained podcast boom<\/a> and, more recently, a buzzy moment for social audio, via developments like Clubhouse<\/a> and Twitter Spaces<\/a> \u2014 which speak to a general sense of pandemic-struck \u201cZoom fatigue\u201d as remote workers max out on video calls at work yet still crave meaningful connections with other people at a time when opportunities to mingle in person are still limited versus pre-COVID-19.<\/p>\n

A lot of social audio can still be very noisy, though, and Anyone wants to be anything but. This is short-form, topic-specific audio.<\/p>\n

\n

Clubhouse closes an undisclosed $4B valuation Series C round, as tech giants\u2019 clones circle<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Why five minutes? It\u2019s short enough for a busy person to almost not have to think twice<\/em> about taking a cold call from someone they\u2019ve probably never spoken to before \u2014 while being just about long enough that some useful advice can be distilled and imparted across those 300 seconds of one-to-one connection.<\/p>\n

Naturally the short format does not allow for group\/conference calls. It\u2019s one-to-one only.<\/p>\n

Anyone\u2019s CEO also reckons this \u201cintimate,\u201d short-form audio<\/span> format could help drive diversity of advice by encouraging people whose voices may be underrepresented in traditional mentorship to feel more comfortable offering their time and knowledge to others. (He touts a current 50:50 user-split between men and women offering expertise through the app \u2014 and 25% people of color.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not about taking long-form meetings and compressing them \u2014 it\u2019s about taking those conversations that would never have happened \u2026 and making them happen,\u201d says CEO and co-founder David Orlic, pointing out that mainstream calendar apps have a default meeting slot that\u2019s set to half an hour or an hour. So the wider thesis is that our current tools\/infrastructure just aren\u2019t set up to help people give and grab bitesized advice. (And, well, on the internet anyone can claim to be an expert \u2014 but of course you can\u2019t rely on the quality of the \u201cadvice\u201d you find freely floating around online.)<\/p>\n

\u201cOur belief is that there are a lot of five minute problems that we could be solving \u2014 whereas there are a lot of 30 or 60 minute problems that have solutions designed for them already. So we\u2019re kind of building this for those conversations that aren\u2019t happening,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

Orlic hints that the intention is also to leave Anyone\u2019s callers a little hungry for more \u2014 to feed demand for more five-minute conversations and so fuel transactions across the marketplace.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at the demand side \u2014 the callers \u2014 there\u2019s always multiple calls involved. So people will call a lot of people and ask them basically the same question or bounce ideas. And then they will aggregate those insights into something that\u2019s much more valuable than one conversation,\u201d he continues. \u201cSo it\u2019s like building an advisory board for yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea for the platform came after Orlic and his co-founders realized they could trace key career decisions to a handful of short conversations \u2014 brief moments of advice that ended up profoundly influencing the trajectory of their working lives, to the point where they were still looking back on them years later.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of us in the founding team had any networks to speak of when we were growing up. And we had fairly little exposure to opportunity. Alfred is from a small village in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, I grew up in an immigrant family, and Sam is a working class bloke from Leeds. And looking back at our careers we could track them back to this handful of conversations \u2014 these haphazard moments when someone gave us a piece of critical advice,\u201d he tells TechCrunch. \u201cFor them it was just another five minute chat but for us it turned out to be life-changing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Alfred it was some quick advice on how he could land a job at Google which he managed to do and spent almost a decade there working as a growth guy on Google Chrome and other stuff; for Sam it was how to start a company; for me it was the suggestion that I as a creative should pursue an MBA \u2014 which I ended up doing. So we started thinking long and hard about the concept of advice, and we became obsessed with opening up these closed networks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The aim for Anyone\u2019s marketplace is to make similarly pivotal moments accessible to all sorts of people \u2014 by giving the app\u2019s users the chance to call any expertise provider on the network (provided they can afford the fee) and ask their question.<\/p>\n

A slogan on its website poses the question \u201cimagine if you could call anyone in the world\u201d \u2014 which is certainly a poetic-sounding moonshot to be shooting for, although the size of the user base remains far off that global vision at this early stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re building is really the phone book of the future,\u201d says Orlic, slotting his elevator pitch into our ~30-minute phone conversation. \u201cWe\u2019re building a place for unique, one-to-one, five minute experiences \u2014 which is something really different from most social audio plays.\u201d<\/p>\n

He points to a trend of other apps intentionally applying limits to change\/define the user experience in behavior-shaping ways (like Poparazzi<\/a>, a self-styled \u201canti-Instagram\u201d photo-sharing app that doesn\u2019t let you take selfies to make you take more pics of your friends and vice versa; or the dating app Thursday<\/a>, which limits users to one active day of use per week to prevent endless swiping and nudge matches toward going on an actual in-person date).<\/p>\n

The marketplace component of Anyone\u2019s app is another intentional limit too, of course. Calls are not free by default.<\/p>\n

Putting a price on Anyone\u2019s one-to-one advice is one way to try to weed out unserious (or indeed abusive) users from those genuinely seeking others\u2019 expertise on specific topics.<\/p>\n

But primarily it\u2019s there to provide an incentivize for people who have expertise worth sharing to make themselves available to take cold calls (even very short ones) from strangers\/those outside their existing contact networks.<\/p>\n

Pricing for a five-minute call is set by Anyone users. So the call fee can vary from nothing at all (if the user distributes a free voucher code) to as little as $5 or all the way up to $500 (!), which does sound pretty crazy expensive. But Orlic notes users can choose to donate their fee to a charity if they do not wish to financially benefit from the advice they\u2019re dishing out (so there may be instances where a high fee includes a philanthropic component).<\/p>\n

With such highly variable fees, the app will need to have a good safety mechanism to reconfirm a user really does want to be charged the specific fee. (And, god forbid, to avoid the risk of butt-dialling \u2026 \ud83d\ude2c)<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to connect with someone I think it\u2019s reasonable to put a cost on the scarcest resource on the planet which is someone\u2019s undivided attention,\u201d Orlic argues, suggesting that plenty of mainstream tech confuses transient \u201caccess\u201d with attention. \u201cWe can \u2018access\u2019 people everywhere \u2014 we can listen to them, read them, follow them. But that\u2019s not the same as attention \u2026 Someone\u2019s undivided attention is a remarkable, remarkable thing. And the five-minute cap forces you to be very clear and to the point about what you want to chat about.\u201d<\/p>\n

With its intentionally attention-slicing infrastructure \u2014 which manages ephemeral contacts into precisely measured and billed units \u2014 \u201call of a sudden you have all of these conversations that wouldn\u2019t have happened happening thanks to this manageable way of connecting with people,\u201d is the claim.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyone users wanting to list themselves on the marketplace to sell one-to-one advice will need to create a profile that specifies their availability to take calls and some basic details (name, career details, location, etc.), as well as setting their five minute fee.<\/p>\n

They also need to provide details of the \u201cconversation topics\u201d they\u2019re comfortable giving advice on.<\/p>\n

Co-founder Alfred Malmros\u2019 profile includes examples such as: \u201cMake the leap. Quitting a dream job to make it on your own\u201d; \u201cRising quickly in a large organisation \u2014 politics vs. talent\u201d; and \u201cIt takes a fool to remain sane. Thriving as an employee\u201d \u2014 so topic steerage looks intended to be not only specific but maybe also give a flavor of the individual\u2019s personality to further help advice-seekers decide if they want to shell out for five minutes of that particular person\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

The risk of imposters or low-quality advice is being managed by \u201cvetting and verification\u201d processing all advisers have to go through prior to being able to sell, per Orlic. \u201cBeyond verification, we put a lot of work into making sure that everyone on Anyone understands what constitutes good advice, how to avoid projection and biases in conversations, etc.,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

The platform also incorporates a rating system \u2014 again, in an attempt to keep quality up across the marketplace.<\/p>\n

Anyone\u2019s early users are a blend of creators, founders and investors, per Orlic \u2014 including a lot of first- and second-time founders, as you might expect, with the pandemic having limited in-person startup networking opportunities.<\/p>\n

He also says they\u2019ve attracted a lot of people midcareer, looking for advice on how to quit their jobs and pivot into something totally new \u2014 again, likely fuelled by the pandemic reconfiguring many things around how we work (and, more broadly, how we may be thinking about work-life balance).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re doing that kind of big life decision you really want to connect with a lot of people and ask around,\u201d he suggests on the interest from established professionals looking for advice on a career switch. \u201cAlso there\u2019s a high willingness to pay, I\u2019d argue, when you\u2019re in that position.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness is a huge thing as a marketplace for advice,\u201d Orlic adds, noting that a record number of businesses started in the last year too. \u201cInvestors \u2014 by the way \u2014 love this for deal flow because they can speed date a lot of founders and then pick who they continue with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parents are another community of early users he highlights \u2014 saying they\u2019ve been both offering and soliciting advice during the early test phase. He says one of the best pieces of advice he\u2019s personally gained through the network was a conversation about parenting, adding: \u201cI\u2019ve had some really profound conversations with other dads. People that know a lot more about parenting than I do \u2014 where I\u2019ve gotten really actionable advice and support. So that has been a big thing for me personally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orlic also says he\u2019s excited about potential in the area of mental health \u2014 suggesting the short-form format could be helpful to get people to have conversations about therapy which, since they\u2019re so bitesized and bounded, may be a non-intimidating introduction toward taking up more sustained support.<\/p>\n

He also mentions that he\u2019s excited about the potential for civic society to make use of the platform as a tool for driving public engagement and awareness around issues and campaigns.<\/p>\n

Appropriately enough, Anyone\u2019s team has been dogfooding by using the app to get advice to help build the startup. Orlic admits he asked someone on the network how to get TechCrunch\u2019s attention and was advised, by the unnamed investor, to pitch this reporter \u2014 so it sounds like he got some solid advice there \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

The app has had around 1,000 test users during the closed beta period \u2014 with some 12,000 on the waitlist that Orlic says they\u2019ll be onboarding over the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

Network building \u2014 so growing the size of the user base on both the expertise and demand sides \u2014 is clearly going to be a key challenge here. (And notably Orlic emphases the network effects expertise<\/a> of its angel backer, Singh.)<\/p>\n

Anyone\u2019s five-minute format may be bitesize enough to encourage users to spread the word of any good experiences they have on the platform to their (wider) social graphs on mainstream social networks. Although the calls themselves must surely remain private between the two interlocutors \u2014 so there are some hard limits on the app content being able to go viral.<\/p>\n

(At the time of writing, a link to Anyone\u2019s privacy policy wasn\u2019t working so we asked for a confirm on the privacy of calls \u2014 and Orlic told us: \u201cAll calls on the new app are completely e2e encrypted, and there\u2019s no way to listen in on an ongoing conversation. For user safety, calls are recorded, anonymised and stored in a secure environment for maximum 30 days. So in case a user reports a specific call in the app and wants a refund, or if an adviser flags up harassment or other serious issues, we can deal with that in a sustainable way.\u201d)<\/p>\n

At the same time it\u2019s not hard to imagine a platform like Twitter (or, indeed, LinkedIn) seeing value in offering a similar one-to-one user call capability \u2014 and bolting it on as a feature on an established network where users have already built up extensive social graphs. So If Anyone\u2019s idea really takes off the risk of cloning could get very real \u2014 which means it will have to balance network building\/growth with attention to the quality of the community it\u2019s building and innovating to keep its users happily stuck to its own (inevitably smaller) network.<\/p>\n

Commenting on backing the app in a statement, Claude Ritter, managing partner at Cavalry Ventures, said: \u201cWhat sets Anyone apart from other audio apps is the quality and connection of 1:1 advice. The team saw the potential of audio and the emergence of the creator economy long before the hype. We\u2019re impressed by what they\u2019ve accomplished to date and by their mission to build the phone book of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around 9,000 five-minute calls have been made via Anyone\u2019s platform so far, per Orlic \u2014 who says the goal they\u2019re shooting for as they open up access now is to get to 100,000 calls within a year.<\/p>\n

The business model for now is to take a straightforward 20% cut of the advice fee.<\/p>\n

On the fee side there\u2019s also potential for things to get bumpy if momentum builds around the concept \u2014 given that platform giants have been known to take a predatory approach to pricing when trying to close down creator-supporting upstart competition via their own fast-following clones. (See, for example, Facebook\u2019s recent dive into offering a newsletter platform<\/a> \u2014 for which it\u2019s both paying writers upfront for contributions and, at least initially, not taking any cut of their subscriptions.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that Anyone will need to pay particular attention to the quality of the advice and community it\u2019s building. It may even end up needing to hone in on serving particular niches and specialisms in order to leverage differentiation versus larger, more generalist networks that have the advantage of larger user bases should they decide to move in on the same \u201cquick call\u201d turf.<\/p>\n

At the same time, there are signs that some of the buzz around social audio may be fading away to more of a hmm as the hype dies down and app users tire of all the noise. But again, that\u2019s why Anyone keeping the audio side intentionally short looks smart.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel that we are part of a movement that is rebuilding the internet as we know it and building something that is more sustainable and healthy \u2014 and really creating value,\u201d says Orlic, discussing the changing landscape around social apps. \u201cClosed social is a topic that I\u2019m really excited by. We\u2019ve seen this for years, with Slack channels and WhatsApp groups. We\u2019ve seen social closing off because of a tonne of different reasons \u2014 and with Geneva<\/a> and a lot of new really cool startups and platforms we\u2019re seeing everything focus around communities. People building communities around specific verticals and then monetizing them in different ways. So we\u2019re definitely a part of that wave.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of our most active users are people who have built audiences around specific topics and want more meaningful connections with those audiences \u2014 the Substack writers that use us as a way to both connect with their existing readers but also gaining new superfans, if you will, because when you\u2019ve had a five minute chat with someone and then sign up to read their Substack, you will read everything they write after that kind of intro. So we\u2019re definitely a part of that closed social. But as a business we are a marketplace \u2014 because again we\u2019re obsessed with that idea of someone\u2019s undivided attention being a very scarce resource and the fact that we\u2019re seeing the \u2018Cameo-ification\u2019 of everything and everyone. And that is also here to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMonetization \u2014 in one way \u2014 sounds like a really crass and cynical concept but at the end of the day we want people to build income streams around things they\u2019re passionate and know a lot about. At the end of the day that is a wonderful, wonderful thing,\u201d he adds. \u201cA creator middle class is a very exciting concept because looking at all the big platforms, old social media, we know where the money is going \u2014 it\u2019s going to the top 0.1% of influencers and creators. Whereas small and midtier creators are not making money to sustain themselves off their passion. For that you have all of these cohort-based courses through Maven. And platforms like us \u2014 that enable people to connect directly with each other in a one-to-one setting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think it\u2019s very cool that we\u2019re doing an opinionated, one-to-one, five-minute, audio-only platform because that gives us a unique positioning. And this is what excites the team. Seeing these stories come out of it \u2014 and those stories would not come out of it if it was just another broadcasting or Clubhouse thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is of course no small irony that it\u2019s exactly because of the proliferation of mobile connectivity and apps \u2014 which have driven increased utility by providing people with on-demand access to so much data (and people) \u2014 that the traditional \u2018quick call\u2019 of old has been derailed, creating conditions where a startup feels there\u2019s an opportunity to build a dedicated marketplace for scheduled quick phone calls. (Albeit, one that\u2019s aiming to scale to a far wider network that the average person would have had in their phone book back in the 1980s, say.)<\/p>\n

But as software and connectivity keeps eating the world, enforcing tech upgrades and reconfiguring learned behaviors, it\u2019s clear that the resulting disruption can recreate the right conditions for new tools to come in and repackage some of the old convenience \u2014 which maybe got a bit lost in the noise.<\/p>\n

*App Store review gods willing<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\n

Social networking app for women, Peanut, adds live audio rooms<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\n

LinkedIn confirms it\u2019s working on a Clubhouse rival, too<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/5jNr--gGBLo\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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