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Ask HN: Where to find domain experts for 1:1 tutoring?

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Re: Ask HN: Where to find domain experts for 1:1 tutoring?

#61

Post by oefrha »

tworats wrote: post #21

I've had great luck with graduate students (and sometimes even ungrads): I'll find a grad student who knows the topic, often by searching for lesser known content creators on youtube/blogs, and reach out with an offer to pay for their time to explain a particular topic. So far it's worked out great, and I've created relationships with smart up and coming people in the field - they make meaningful money, I accelerate…

I wonder how you word your cold emails so that people bother to respond. Do you offer an hourly rate upfront in the first email? Thing is as someone who’s quite frequently on the receiving end of cold emails, I respond to companies looking for contracting/consulting because I know they probably have an at least passable rate in mind, whereas the few times I responded to individuals offering to pay for mentoring or feature development in my open source projects, after a few back and forth I realized they expected to pay one to two orders of magnitudes less than what I normally charge (e.g. $50 for about a week’s work, true story), it’s frankly embarrassing, so now I no longer respond to this sort of individual requests.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find domain experts for 1:1 tutoring?

#63

Post by rrr_oh_man »

Founder82836 wrote: post #20
tomashertus wrote: post #4

Heh, a couple of years ago, I had an idea for an "Uber for Experts." It would provide a similar experience to Uber, but instead of a ride, you'd get 30 minutes with a domain expert of your choosing. I never got around to working on it, but there might still be an opportunity for something like this.

Remember that for any startup idea, there is reasonable chance that Google launched it and already killed it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Helpouts

There can be more than one pizza restaurant.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find domain experts for 1:1 tutoring?

#64

Post by latexr »

Founder82836 wrote: post #20
tomashertus wrote: post #4

Heh, a couple of years ago, I had an idea for an "Uber for Experts." It would provide a similar experience to Uber, but instead of a ride, you'd get 30 minutes with a domain expert of your choosing. I never got around to working on it, but there might still be an opportunity for something like this.

Remember that for any startup idea, there is reasonable chance that Google launched it and already killed it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Helpouts

That is more indicative of Google’s culture and lack of focus than the viability of the idea. With the death of Google Reader, plenty of RSS aggregators popped up and are still kicking.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find domain experts for 1:1 tutoring?

#65

Post by jll29 »

fhd2 wrote: post #56

Have you tried LinkedIn? From my anecdotal evidence, AI experts are the largest group there right now. Irony aside, finding an expert for anything is difficult. Not because they don't exist, but because there's a lot of charlatans aiming to profit from the non-expert not really being able to tell. Do not underestimate their ability to BS even smart people, at least for a while. My approach is usually to just ask arou…

If I were to look for an expert, I'd consult

- authors of leading textbooks or (open source or commercial) (hardware or software) systems;

- people that have many patents to their name in the respective area;

- scientists that have many peer-reviewed conference and journal publication to their name that are cited often;

- people that have or had O1 visa status ("outstanding scientist") or that served in committees for scientific bodies or governments, or as expert witnesses at trials.

I occasionally provide advice as a commercial service to find the right specialist for corporate clients for any given topic (knowledge brokerage).

I also offer a 1:1 "AI consultation" to CXOs in my own fields of expertise (machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, software engineering), pay per use or retainer when on the board of scientific advisors.

There is an ocean of tutorial videos out there, too, it all depends on how specific your need is.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find domain experts for 1:1 tutoring?

#68

Post by codingdave »

ilaksh wrote: post #57

Why do you keep posting this exact same thing? Are you a recruiter? I am going to flag it.

It wasn't a repost - the mods sometimes refresh a story to give it a second chance at more engagement. When you see the same post come back a day or two later, with the same comments, all with their timestamps updated to the current time, you can be confident this is what occurred. You can also tell by looking at the post history of OP - it shows an original posting date of 4 days ago, even though this post shows as a few hours ago. Not a bug, not someone spamming this site... this is a normal and fairly cool feature of HN.

Re: Ask HN: Where to find domain experts for 1:1 tutoring?

#70

Post by tndibona »

Microsoft startup founders hub. I needed to get up to speed on RAG and Fine tuning. I shot about 40 introductory messages to their “Connect with an expert” network. I found a data scientist guy from Egypt who responded. He gave me a one hour crash course on RAG. I didn’t use his suggested methods but he set me up go and figure it out. I’m now caught up using haystack, chromaDB, DuckDB, and Mistral for my RAG needs.
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