Personal service

Preamble

Introducing TipMeet to the audience of Habrahabr for the first time, I hinted that the name for our project was not chosen by chance. The moment has come when it is time to explain what's what.

It is not necessary to possess super-erudition in order to understand the meaning of two simple English words. Tip - help, advice; Meet - a meeting. Thus, you can understand the meaning of our name, TipMeet is not just a site that allows you to communicate for free on the network, but also a consulting platform, which will be discussed.

Since many people on the Internet discovered the phenomenon of “freelance,” people have realized the fact that a home workplace, in general, can be quite equivalent to a place in the office. Designers, programmers, system administrators, in short - anyone, can earn money for a long time without leaving their apartment. In the words of the hero of the famous comedy: “Forge the iron without leaving the box office”. But if, as a result of the work of these comrades, a product appears, then there is another layer of people: lawyers, teachers, consultants who could very well make money online, but until recently there was no place where their services would be standardized. By services we mean consultations, lessons, courses, everything that people pay the same living money for, looking for people in the real world, closer to their home.

Good news, everyone! Now you can not leave the house. Neither those who are looking for a teacher, or a person with unique knowledge and experience, nor the last. Today we officially put our “Personal Service” on the rails, enabling anyone to organize their online consulting office.

Plot

What are the pros? I will explain with a real example. Suppose you want to learn English online. At your home computer, in video mode, taking money per minute or per hour. By registering on TipMeet and creating your own personal service, its public page will be automatically created. Having visited it, your future client will see the type of activity, qualifications, working hours and, of course, the value currently set per minute. In order to avoid all sorts of fraud and dishonest game, we established the so-called “Free threshold." This is one minute of a free conversation with a service provider, playing the role of a “probe” of human knowledge, abilities and experience. If the person calling you is satisfied with the quality of the services provided, then from the second minute of the conversation, funds in your favor will automatically be debited from his account, including the cost of that very first minute. If the client is not happy with something, he calmly hangs up, remaining with his own.

So, let’s say, specifically, I have excellent knowledge and experience on how to flush anyone’s brain. I estimate the cost of this knowledge at 0.30 USD per minute of conversation. By clicking on the call button (note - the visitor does not need to install absolutely anything, just make one click on my public pageor by the service button installed on my site), I’ll be connected to the caller, and for the first minute I will peck his brain at him, clearly showing how cool I can do it. If both of us are satisfied with the cost and quality of the services I provide, this person will come back to me next time in order to learn how to peck a brain to a boss. And I will give him this consultation. At the same time, the price of a minute of conversation with me is strictly fixed and I can not interfere with the card, changing the cost at fantastic intervals in order to rip off three callers from the callers.

Of course, having a donut hole in your account, you will not be able to call the owner of the paid service. Firstly, anyone who does not have a substantive interest will not distract the service provider, and secondly, the provider must be sure of the solvency of the client. It makes no sense to the person who will provide legal advice after talking with the person for a couple of minutes to find out that the person in the wallet did not have enough money in order to receive complete and detailed information. Thus, parity is maintained between both parties.

Summarizing all of the above, we can add that now any consulting services can be provided online, regardless of what exactly you do - study Chinese, explain the peculiarities of feng shui or wave bangs in front of a webcam, receiving money for this in real time. This solution is not only for individual users, but also for large companies that do not have representative offices in all cities. The client, like the provider, needs only a headset and a webcam in order to successfully and profitably fulfill its mission.