Clarity Product Review
Clarity.fm is a platform that empowers experts on a range of startup and business topics to get paid to to share their knowledge with advice seekers. The value of Clarity is pretty apparent: people seeking advice on topics like SaaS, content marketing, startup funding and more can get direct input from verified experts in these fields. In many cases these experts would otherwise be inaccessible to the average person, but Clarity makes it worth their while by charging users a per minute fee for live phone consultations.
As a long time expert on the platform, I've personally experienced the magic that occurs on both sides of the table. I've spent decades becoming proficient in my given fields, often through failure, and sometimes from success. I regularly advise friends and colleagues on SaaS, startups, product management, content marketing, vc funding and more. But I generally don't have the time to let just anyone "pick my brain" as people like to say.
Clarity gives me a way to scale my advice giving with minimal effort and good compensation for my time. Looking at my profile on Clarity, one can see I've done hundreds of calls and have over 300 5-star reviews.
Of course, I don't know everything about everything, so I've also found myself tapping other experts on Clarity for help with topics I don't know, like SEO, accounting, contracts, eCommerce and more. So I can attest to the power of Clarity for experts and advice seekers alike.
The true magic of the platform however is this. Clarity makes people feel heard.
That might seem trite, but it's not. As an expert, there is nothing less satisfying than giving your hard earned feedback to someone who doesn't appreciate it. Or worse, doesn't even hear you. When I give away my experience for free I often find that the recipient isn't actually listening. They are really just asking to hear themselves and not hear me. It's easy to tell. When someone asks for my advice and they immediately share their own advice to the same inquiry, they aren't listening. On the flip side, when someone asks for my guidance and internalizes what I'm saying, they generally have follow up questions. I know this because I've done almost 500 calls on Clarity and hundreds of calls or coffee meetings with people not on Clarity. My experience with these conversations is very consistent.
Either they hear me or they don't.
Moreover, the solution works both ways. Advice seekers also feel heard. When I'm on a Clarity call, and I'm getting paid for it, I'm really listening to the person on the other end. I'm not thinking about what else I need to be doing or how else I could be spending my time. For those 15 minutes I'm all-in on helping that person navigate a tough or impactful situation. And when Clarity users feel heard, they do a better job at processing a situation and coming to a logical decision.
Now that doesn't mean that everyone takes my advice. And frankly I don't think that's what advice is actually for. Hearing experience from someone that has already done what you want to do is very valuable, but my feeling is that it should be used to guide someone to the best decision he or she can make.
Another thing I've realized that Clarity does well is matching up two entrepreneurs who have worked on (the expert) and are working on (the advice seeker) similar challenges. Much research has been done around personal growth stemming from conversations between two like minded people (example here). The concept of mentorship works for the mentee and the mentor because both parties get value. When two people with a shared experience talk one-on-one they tend to relate and are more likely to take actions that lead to positive results.
Today I'm digging back into SaaS trying to transform a busy competitive landscape in the screenshot and annotation space with Markup Hero. I'm excited to get back into content marketing, an approach that worked well for me on past startups, but something I've been a little out of practice on. Once again I've turned to Clarity for some advice. I continue to be surprised how much value comes from a 15 minute call with an expert. Specifically, I learned from a Clarity expert some key tactics to identify long tail search phrases that are both trending up and have lower competition; a strategy that is already generating results.
I wonder if Dan realized that his expert advice tool would actually have the impact it does when he first envisioned it. Or did he just think "hey, there's all these smart people with tons of experience out there. And there's even more people who could benefit from expert advice — there should be a platform for that." Either way, Clarity has grown to be a useful, money making and extremely gratifying tool for me.
Give it a try and see how it works for you.
