By: Alon Cohen
At the end of 2005, we started a journey with few partners and investors to create a nice web site to help people in the community, which are in need of human advice, and financially reward those who are willing to provide the advice.
The concept was simple but challenging in many ways. We set a directory of advisors arranged by ranking. We provided a solution to facilitate payment while evading fraud. We included a mechanism by which the advisor can chat, talk over the phone or do a video session with the client, while we measure the duration of the call and at the end, charge one user, and pay the other.
It was all good until we hit a speed bump. We found that it was hard to explain to the advisors that placing a page on a site is only the start of creating a business. It was hard to explain that an online virtual business is not much different from a physical business. I use to tell advisors that if you hang up a shiny plate on your bedroom door stating, “I am a certified consultant”, you will not get much action going. As in any other business, you have to go out and find ways to bring clients. To solve the problem, we gathered some online resources and communicated those to the advisors so they can use those tools to bring clients.
Our ranking system was a topic by itself, and the company is still perfecting it. It takes into consideration the positive and negative comments an advisor receives, but also the amount of money that the advisor made over time. We took the finical gains of the advisor as an indication that this advisor is providing a service valued by the community.
Moving few years forward and passing through a rough patch in the global economy, we noticed that the people that kept on moving up the ranks are not the Lawyers, not the Registered Dietitians, not the Travel Advisors, not the Doctors or Computer Support people. What we saw is that the most productive people are those who provide an online psychic reading. We also noticed that the bigger spenders are those who are not afraid, and that is most open to learning about the future.
Maybe Wall Street should learn from that, and use some of the advisors on the BitWine site to figure out where the things are going, and use that valuable insight to save the economy.
We did our part already and change the BitWine home page to point to our most productive people the Psychics.
Check this out you may discover something you already know.