Need business advice? No one is replying to your cold emails? Then our app can help.
Thanks to the startup Intro, aspiring entrepreneurs can book a 30-minute session with a venture capitalist from Andreessen Horowitz for $2,500, or a 90-minute session with a hypnosis coach “focused on quickly breaking through underlying trauma” for $1,250, or ask an interior designer for advice on how to redecorate a room for $900 for 15 minutes.
Silicon Valley has long operated on a pay-for-service mentality: people introduce their friends and acquaintances to others in their networks who might have advice to offer. Intro monetizes these interactions by giving people access to those rare networks and the opportunity to book time with an expert for advice, for a fee, of course.
“If you live in Silicon Valley and have the luxury of being able to go to a coffee shop and strike up a serendipitous conversation, that’s great, but a lot of people don’t live in Silicon Valley,” says Raad Mobrem, founder and CEO of Intro. Mobrem still has casual conversations with people he’s been introduced to in his life, but now even people who don’t know him can talk to him on Intro for $350 per 15-minute session.
Intro has about 1,200 participants from all walks of life. It basically works like the popular celebrity messaging app Cameo, but offers career and life advice. Moblem said he was inspired to start the company after a chance meeting with Kinko’s founder Paul Orfela, who offered to talk to him about starting a business. Orfela is now part of Intro, and charges $875 for a 30-minute session.
Suzanne Gillett, an astrologer who has also been featured on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, offers 15-minute sessions that include mini astrology readings and love and career advice for $79.
“I’ve met some really amazing people,” says Gillett, who does intro sessions a few times each week. Recently, a musician booked the sessions and asked for psychic readings for each song on his upcoming album. “A lot of those people end up coming back.”
Moblem said customers have completed about 30,000 sessions with Intro so far. Nearly half of customers, about 45 percent, return for more sessions after their first. He understands the skepticism about the cost, but likens the upfront cost to a long-term investment.
“From a consumer perspective, it’s certainly expensive,” he said. “If you have a session that costs $500, is the information you get out of that session going to help you make 10 times that amount of money or help you save 10 times that amount?”
Dan Mohr, who runs the online product design course Design Systems University, said he first tried Intro last December. Mohr paid about $700 for a 30-minute lesson with Justin Welsh, an entrepreneur who regularly posts about how to grow a business as the only employee.
“That’s a lot of money to talk to someone for 30 minutes,” Mohr said, but he went with specific questions because he wanted to hear Welsh’s thoughts on his content business.
“I’ve probably made six figures through his recommendations,” Mohr said, “and it’s given me a new perspective on how to get my message across to customers and prospects that I would never have thought about otherwise.”
Still, Mohr said he was drawn to the specific people he met through Intro, rather than the service itself. He doesn’t think he’ll use Intro again. “I wouldn’t choose Intro as a way to meet my heroes,” he said.
How much insight can you really get from 15 minutes? For some people, not much.
“You just couldn’t have a meaningful conversation,” said Ronak Shah, founder of Bizly, which uses AI to plan events. Given the time constraints, Shah tried to keep it brief by booking a 15-minute conference call for $150 with a CEO who had sold startups. But he found a bigger problem than schedule constraints.
“The spirit of Silicon Valley is based on the free and open sharing of ideas,” he said. “Turning that into a transactional model is not consistent with the spirit that made Silicon Valley great.”
Then there are the poseurs.
“There are so many people now creating Intro accounts just to make themselves look important,” Shah said, adding that these “experts” elevate themselves by appearing next to well-known figures like Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and an investor in Intro.
“I don’t need to spend $500 to spend 15 minutes with a founder who gives me crappy advice and doesn’t know my business,” Shah said.
After all, everyone wants to be seen as an expert. Intro has a waiting list of 14,000 people who have applied to become consultants on the platform. Moblem says his 10-person team vets each applicant to make sure they are, in fact, an authority in their field.
Usually, that’s obvious, but if not, Intro runs a kind of trial version: it sends applicants a personal Intro link to send to potential clients, but doesn’t feature it on the main website.
“If they make enough money with the tool, we invite them onto the marketplace,” Moblem said. Most people graduate once they get enough bookings and positive reviews, and their photos end up on Intro’s Experts page.
Mr. Moblem denies criticism that some of the experts on his platform don’t meet standards. He sold his previous startup, Lettuce, to Intuit for $30 million. Still, “I consider myself several levels less successful than Alexis Ohanian. Am I a fake? I don’t think so,” he said.
He highlighted the benefit of a transactional model like Intro’s, where both parties feel pressured to be prepared and provide value. Intro takes a commission from each call: 10% if the customer books through a direct link to the expert’s page, 30% if the customer finds the consultant through Intro’s website directory, and 50% if the booking is made through a social media ad. Some experts, including Ohanian, note in their profiles that all proceeds from Intro bookings go to charity.
One power user who has found a niche on Intro is Nikita Bier, founder of social media apps Gas and TBH, which were acquired by Discord and Meta, respectively. Last August, he tweeted that he’d made more than $122,000 from 95 Intro bookings.
Currently, Beer, who did not respond to multiple interview requests, offers video consultations starting at $1,400 for 15 minutes and going up to $11,699 per month for a “Build a Viral App” package that includes unlimited one-on-one chats, assistance with fundraising plans and live design reviews.
“Sometimes I forget I’m an OnlyFans girl for tech founders,” he tweeted in January.
In April, Moblem tweeted that thanks to Beer’s help, a startup he met with had reached a $1 billion valuation.
“To me, that’s really cool,” Moblem says. “People who don’t use Intro are always like, ‘What can you do in 15 minutes?’ But the majority of people who use Intro say they can do an incredible amount.”
