Imagine I come along, and find an expert to help me sort my toe-nail clippings. I pay for an hour and we chat. To facilitate that chat, we’ve stepped outside AnyFu’s walled garden and into Skype or email or the phone system.

I get my issue sorted out and carry on my merry way. The invoice is paid and everyone is happy.

But avast! I’ve now realised I need to deal with a brand new issue. And I know my expert would be able to help me. And it’s just the tiniest of questions. It will only take him 30 seconds to reply to an email. Oh and he’s on Skype right now!

So I send him an email or phone his Skype. He replies. But that leads to another question. So, being the nice guy I am, I offer to pay him the same consult fee I paid the first time.

We spend another hour on the phone and I pay him and .. hang on .. not everyone is happy. The client and expert are happy. But you’re not. AnyFu just missed out on revenue that is rightfully theirs.

You talked about only being interested in the short consults, but you will only get the first consult. After that, any pairing you introduced will go offline.

Effectively your service is now an introduction service where the price of introduction is whatever time/rate the initial consult runs to.

If this is your goal, then charge an introduction fee rather than a consult fee. The client wants an experts time, they request an introduction, the expert agrees and AnyFu gets some cash. After the introduction fee, all monies are the responsibilities of the introduced pair.

* * *

Second scenario: The expert is contacted after the first consult, but this time he feels that it’s an imposition. He’ll respond and then wonder if AnyFu was worth the effort and not take up any further clients. Or maybe he’ll ignore the request. Or maybe he’ll respond tersely. None of these is a good outcome for AnyFu.

Imagine instead if he was required by the terms of AnyFu to insist that all small consulting contact post the initial discussion goes through AnyFu. “Hey, I don’t want to be rude, but AnyFu requires me to get you to go back through them. If I don’t, they can terminate my account”

Include in the agreement that this requirement is about short consults only. Offers of extended work (define it as .. anything longer than four hours?) aren’t within the scope of AnyFu and clients and experts are free to come to arrangements outside that.

It’s not worth suing anyone, and it’s certainly not worth $1500 to break the agreement. So just make the agreement sensible and make it so the expert is protected. After all your experts are your most precious resource.

Benefits:

* Live like a king
* Yellow fever!

1.) Store your sessions in MySQL and then query for the cookie on every request, once you hit critical mass move the session table to Redis or Memcached.

2.) Just use on cookie for session and remember me and set the expiration in your database and for the cookie out say two weeks.

The other advantage of storing your sessions in MySQL is that you can run round-robin load balancing and the sessions are in once place.

here is a link : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8dmjoqOOQo

keep-up the good work.

Thanks for another great installment. I really enjoy the banter and more so the interviews. Any planned for next show?

I was a little surprised by the discussion this episode around Anyfu. I haven’t listened to the early episodes but what formal brainstorming and idea evaluation have you undertaken to develop the product?

I kinda agree with Justin’s questioning on customers side stepping AnyFu and arranging agreements directly. While you may have made some money from the initial meeting, you would lose any future income from later work carried out. This is surely why eLance have the exit fee Justin described? I think the negative consequences Jason was implying may not be as bad as you think, especially if you customers are using your site to get access to really great people.

Just some thoughts. Keep up the good work.

Just wanted to mention that Jason’s ‘surface area of luck’ reminds me of Taleb’s:
“This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.” (From The Black Swan)

Especially in light of all the hoopla around Codecademy etc. would you consider doing an episode around learning how to code?
Best,
JohnH

Also, I think @Stewart Robinson’s prescription (which is inline with your advice) sounds like the simplest and most affordable way to implement a robust failover solution for a MySQL-based application.

“Not rude, just an American”, “Freaked out cat and litter box on a back seat”, grinds and princes….

I was listening to it during drive to work and I can tell you – when I finally got to the office, there was no one in a better mood than me 🙂

Thanks guys!

PS. @Jason I admire your reasoning about letting people do what they want after using AnyFu… It just seems fair and you can not stop it even if you try 😉

PPS. Sorry, Itunes is a deal breaker for me to… Would have given you a heart turning, raise from the dead, give me your daughter kind of podcast review ! 😉

A. You can’t charge “derivative value”. Same thing if the consulting work lead to an exit or options plan or whatever.

B. Really, if Any-fu becomes the ideal platform for head-hunting? You will disrupt a lucrative market and charge a nice commission on A LOT of transactions. What can you ask for more!

The way the discussion usually goes is that Justin will either ask Jason a question or make a suggestion about how something on AnyFu should work. Nine times out of ten Jason will then proceed to explain why Justin is apparently wrong! Most amusing. Justin often quickly agrees with Jason’s reasoning, especially when the answers are “common sense”. All very good and nice to hear the discussion and the thought process.

However, it often occurs to me that a lot of Jason’s reasoning is simply not empirically backed-up. You appear to be making a lot of assumptions about AnyFu and I worry that you haven’t made any attempts to ‘test your hypotheses’. For reference I am borrowing heavily from the “Lean Startup” way of thinking which stresses the importance of making sure you can test your assumptions so that you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

So I would like to know how you are testing your hypotheses? How are you validating your assumptions? Or do you hoping that “if you build it, they will come?”

It’s up to you to make AnyFu so good/convenient/attractive that people prefer to do their second, third, etc. interactions there rather than elsewhere.

I don’t know how you do that, though…

If you want to keep a copy of the db safe for rehosting pluggio then in my opinion the safest and easiest way to configure this is to configure MySQL replication. It is trivial to set up and point it at another cheap VPS elsewhere that is waiting to pick it up. Its probably best to have it go over SSH.

You mentioned logging queries e.t.c. That is how MySQL replication works. It stores a binary log of queries or row changes depending on how you configure it and your MySQL version.

Stew