The business model for Dan Martell’s current company, Clarity, was inspired by human kindness. As a fledgling 26-year-old tech entrepreneur living near New Brunswick, Canada, finding like-minded people to help him grow Spheric Technologies, his enterprise portal company, wasn't an easy task. On December 26, 2006, Martell cold emailed the first person he could think of.
“I sent an email to Frank McKenna, the former prime minister of New Brunswick, asking him if he knew any other startup founders or people who could help me,” says Martell. “He wrote me back right away and gave me three names. I was floored.”
McKenna’s contacts came through, pointing Martell in the right direction and spurring him on to sell his company a few years later.
Martell never forgot the kindness he experienced from those good-hearted strangers. Five years later, now a serial tech entrepreneur living in San Francisco with a large following of his own, Martell found himself on the receiving end of similar advice-seeking emails.
That's when it hit him: "‘What if I created a call management tool that would queue up calls so I could talk to people needing advice one after another?’” he thought. Martell created such a program in two weeks and tweeted a link to his thousands of followers; he was immediately inundated with requests.
“I went up to my roof and spent the next two and a half hours talking to 20 or 30 people from around the world that needed startup help,” he says. “When I hung up, I was on this high."
Even though Martell was only two months into a 12-month payout contract with another tech company he’d just sold, he decided to quit his job and lose out on his due in order to "do this for real.”
The result was Clarity, a company that connects experts with advice-seekers for pay-per-minute phone calls. Martell launched the company in May 2012 and started signing up experts like billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban to help struggling business owners.
So far Clarity has facilitated more than 30,000 calls across 52 countries. Martell moved back to New Brunswick in late 2012 and now runs the company from there with a team of four colleagues (“I like small, high potent teams,” he explains). Martell spoke with OPEN Forum about Clarity's path and the importance of asking for advice when starting a business.
Let's get right down to the important stuff. How much does Mark Cuban charge for a phone call?
[Laughs] Mark charges around $166 per minute, I think. He heard about us from our press launch last year. Any expert can sign up, but we verify all of them before they go on the site. I remember getting an email saying Mark Cuban had signed up. I looked into it, saw that it was really him and thought, "Holy crap."
Do you only have famous people on Clarity or can lesser-known experts sign up to offer advice?
We have a lot of experts who aren’t traditionally famous. Today, we have more than 20,000 experts on the site who charge much less than Mark [$1 to $3 per minute, on average]. We want to disrupt consulting by allowing anyone to be a micro-consultant. A lot of our experts make around $1,500 to $2,000 per month on our platform. We take 15 percent of every call.
What kinds of challenges did you face starting out?
I didn’t realize what I was building. I was just using Clarity as a tool to route calls to people who wanted advice. We eventually transitioned into a marketplace for advice, which meant that we needed to divide our users into members versus experts. It was hard because we had about 7,000 users at the time. After careful evaluation of experts, only 30 percent made the cut. It was hard to explain that to everyone.
What does the future hold for Clarity?
We focused on bringing in tech and marketing advice experts over the past 18 months; now we are focusing on other industries such as food and beverage, manufacturing and legal.
We also recently launched Clarity Answers, an interface that allows anyone to ask a question for free. We invite experts to answer and, so far, we’ve had more than 500 questions asked and around three answers per question. Our experts are getting a 5 to 6 percent call request conversation rate from their answers because it allows them to demonstrate their expertise upfront.
What advice would you give entrepreneurs just getting their start in business?
Find people who have been [where you are now] and spend time with them. That is what I did when I was 26, and it catapulted my career.
What’s next for you? As a serial entrepreneur, are you already scoping out your next move?
Not at all [laughs]. I have a 13 month old and a 6 week old—true Irish twins. Between Clarity and my children, I don’t have time to think about anything else.
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