You should let your advisors charge what they want and take either a percentage or a fixed fee + percentage. That allows you to bypass your pricing problem and fixes the image problem that your current pricing model creates.

Im a huge fan of this concept, and may sign up as an adviser in the future as I field these types of questions every day. Props to you for putting it on 2+2 and working well with all of the flaming.

Henry, your under evaluation of '$2 is too low' is quite hilarious, considering people in these types of positions have open house days, volunteer and in general want to promote people to work in their industry for free. $2 may seem trivial, but i would find it more gratifying giving people career advice and the money is just a bonus.

If im in your Shoes, I would roll with the following:

- Find local bars around local universities and sponsor each beer, i.e. At 7pm every night, Shyne will pay $1 towards your beer. Its a cheap marketing tool, considering you can get 1k beers for a whopping $1k spent
- Run a free sausage/BBQ at local sporting events, don't just run these at the university, run them at every single sporting event, be it Hockey/Soccer/baseball tournaments for under 5s -> Under 20s
- Start pushing for more contacts in relation to Mothers/fathers blogs, groups and activities/websites, your target demographic is the student, but if you get the parental element working you could easily get more hits based off "Mum told me to call you"

Some advice on the advisors:

- Give some feedback on what they want to discuss, rather then say $2/min have some general information on their day to day running, let them express some personality. Right now it looks very phone line style, with very limited profile, your target audience wants to know what this person can provide.
- At minimum have some general topics that they can provide guidance on, Instead of saying: "Venture capitalist focused on technology investments, specifically in SaaS. "
Maybe change it to: "If you are looking at getting into the VC field, I can give you advice on what and how to structure your courses, some do's and don'ts on the field and generally just give you a daily run down of what its like being a VC"

Ill provide some more info later,

If you read my post I said he would be better off appealing to a sense of mentoring and trying to get people to do it for free. You could even try to promote it as a way to recruit talent -- at least until the mentors realize the only graduates using the service are people they don't want to recruit. I know I would have zero interest in what a big law mentor who was willing to sell his time for so little had to tell me and big law is at least a rung or two under investment banking.

I mentioned this to my GF and even she would not be willing to do this for $2/min although she suggested instead of compensating the bankers -- donate that money to charity so that they get two feel good things out of it -- mentoring and charity.

#1. Lack of repeat business from users.
#2. Domain extension. (No one is going to remember .io)
#3. Team members. 3 founders/ceo/cto for a small smartup? Too dragging.

This is a great idea. Would nab some of the mid level people who might never take a phone call from a fresh grad for $50 but would for charity / altruism.

Have several well known charities to choose from. Amazon smile has some solid ones (St. Judes, Charity Water, Donors Choose, Kiva, etc.).

In fact you can make that your whole model... become a B corp.

Trustworthy looking site and very easy navigation - good job!

My 2 cents - I am 30 and not looking to move jobs, however, it would be great to discuss ideas/problems I have in my current role with product managers/marketing managers at leading internet and startup companies and I'd be happy to pay for this.

Could this be an additional revenue stream? Marketing instead as 'Looking to start your career? Working but need someone to bounce ideas off? From only $2/minute speak with experts from Facebook, Google, etc'.

Whilst there would likely be advisor employment contract issues of giving advice to other companies, it could be a very useful service for people such as myself.

Effectively a replacement for consultants who come in and charge mega bucks, instead informal calls on the weekend at a mutually beneficial price.

agree with either letting advisor set pricing and taking a cut or taking the mentoring/charity angle

if you start paying people you get them into the market mindset, and they'll view a bit of money as being underpaid (and 2$/min seems underpaid to me) not as a nice extra. if they do it for free they will focus on the other benefits. or pay them full market rate, that also works. basicly, don't mix (and google israel day care study)

*edit* just wanted to say that i think this is a great idea

I like the advisor setting pricing idea.

In addition, think about approaching this like task rabbit once you have a solid database of people. They have a buyer set his criteria such as type of job, how much they are willing to pay and then see offers from sellers who are in their range. This will give buyers more accurate / relevant results.

Re $2 being low. For lower level employees, aka recent hires / people with free time, it may not be too low.

People who participate in the sharing economy for some extra income will often take less then market rates.

But the higher up the chain you go the less free time people have... They have families or are busy i.e. an associate at a corporate law firm or similar in banking is working 80 hr or more weeks during deals and barely has any free time. They probably won't pass up the extremely limited free time they have for an extra $50 to shoot the **** with a stranger... they're already making 150k+...

What sort of practical advice could I expect an advisor to give to me?

We saw one big issue during testing when we let Advisors set their own price: they tend to grossly overprice themselves, so much that most people wouldn't be willing to pay for them. That's the reason we came up with a set scale (depending on their years of work experience).

If you:

1) Wanted to speak to someone at Facebook, Amazon, etc to know what it's like to work there
2) Wanted interview tips on how to prepare for/pass an interview for a Project Manager job, tech startup job, etc.
3) Career advice on how someone became a manager, etc
4) Wanted to learn more skills for your position by speaking to someone in the same field
5) Wanted general career mentorship, salary negotiation help, etc.

Basically any help except a direct referral into the company.

Such a bunch of buffoons in this thread. OP was asking for marketing advice, not asking everyone to critique his business model or the idea. People slamming him saying all kinds of silly things that don't make sense.

I can actually see a market for this. A lot of students have just spend thousands of dollars on education and are about to begin their job hunt. They want advice and to speak to someone who was in their shoes not that long ago and to give them advice. yes there is demand.

In regards to marketing, I think it might be smart to pitch it to some professors/career counselors at schools. Also I would approach the the clubs such as the investing club, finance club, etc. A lot of the kids joining these clubs because they are looking to make connections and hope to improve their resume to land a job. Possibly see if you can promote this on wall street oasis (Although I think they might have some competing product).