Need business advice? Can’t get anyone to answer your cold emails? Now, there’s an app for that.
Thanks to the startup Intro, aspiring entrepreneurs can book a half-hour with an Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist for $2,500. Or 90 minutes with a hypnotic coach “focused on breaking through root traumas quickly” for $1,250. Or ask an interior designer for advice on how to revamp a room, at a rate of $900 for 15 minutes.
Silicon Valley has long run on an ethos of pay-it-forward generosity, where people connect friends or acquaintances to others in their network who might be able to offer advice. Intro is monetizing those interactions by giving folks access to that rarefied network and the opportunity to book time and pick an expert’s brain—for a consultation fee, of course.
“If you have the luxury of living in Silicon Valley where you can go to a coffee shop and strike up a serendipitous conversation, that’s amazing. But there are a lot of people who don’t live in Silicon Valley,” said Raad Mobrem, Intro’s founder and CEO. In his own life, Mobrem still does informal chats with those he is introduced to, but now someone who doesn’t know him can talk with him, too—for $350 per 15-minute session on Intro.
Around 1,200 experts of all stripes are on Intro, which essentially functions like the better-known celebrity-messaging app, Cameo, but for professional or life advice. Mobrem said he was inspired to start the company after running into the founder of Kinko’s, Paul Orfalea, who took the time to speak with him about entrepreneurship. Orfalea is now on Intro, too, charging $875 for a 30-minute session.
Suzanne Guillette, an astrologer who has been featured by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, offers a 15-minute session that includes a mini-astrology reading and romance or career guidance for $79.
“It has put me in touch with some really amazing people,” said Guillette, who does a handful of Intro sessions weekly. She said a musician recently booked a session with her and asked her to perform psychic readings for each track for his upcoming album. “A lot of those people end up becoming repeat clients.”
Customers have completed about 30,000 sessions on Intro so far, Mobrem said. Nearly half of customers—about 45%—return for more after their first session. He said he understands some of the skepticism around the cost but compared the initial fee to a long-term investment.
“If you’re looking at it as a consumer, it totally is expensive,” he said. “If there is a session that costs $500, will the information you learn from that session help you make 10x that amount in revenue or help you save 10x that amount in savings?”
‘An OnlyFans girl but for tech founders’
Dan Mall, who runs Design System University, an online product-design course, said he first tried Intro last December. He paid around $700 for a half-hour with Justin Welsh, an entrepreneur who regularly posts about growing a business as the sole employee.
“That’s a lot of money to talk to somebody for half an hour,” Mall said, but he knew he wanted Welsh’s take on his content business, so he went in with specific questions.
“I probably made six figures off the stuff he recommended to me,” Mall said. “It gave me some new angles for how I wanted to message my customers and prospects that I don’t think I would have thought about otherwise.”
Still, Mall said, he was more sold on the specific person he connected with through Intro, rather than the service itself. He doesn’t think he’d use it again. “I would not pick it as a way to meet my heroes,” Mall said.
How much insight can you really glean in 15 minutes? For some, not much.
“We weren’t able to get into anything meaningful,” said Ronak Shah, the founder of Bizly, which uses AI to plan events. Shah booked a 15-minute call for $150 with a chief executive who had sold a startup before, aiming to keep things concise because of the tight window. But Shah found a bigger problem than the constrained schedule.
“The whole spirit of Silicon Valley is based on free and open sharing of ideas,” he said. “Turning that into a transactional model is not aligned with the ethos of what has made Silicon Valley great.”
Then there are the poseurs.
“There are so many people that are now creating Intro accounts just to seem like they’re important,” Shah said. He added these “experts” are elevating themselves by appearing next to luminaries such as Reddit cofounder and Intro investor Alexis Ohanian.
“I don’t need to spend $500 on 15 min with some founder who’s going to give me bullshit advice because they don’t even know my business,” Shah said.
It turns out, everyone wants to look like an expert: Intro has a waitlist of 14,000 people who have applied to become consultants on the platform. Mobrem said his 10-person team vets each applicant to make sure they are actually authorities in their listed craft.
Usually, it’s obvious. But when it’s not, Intro does a try-out of sorts. It sends the applicant a personal Intro link to send to potential clients, but won’t feature them on the main website.
“Make enough money through that tool, we’ll invite you to be in the marketplace,” Mobrem said. Most people end up accruing enough bookings and positive reviews to graduate and have their photo included on Intro’s expert pages.
Mobrem dismissed the criticism that some experts on his platform aren’t up to snuff. He sold his previous startup, Lettuce, to Intuit for $30 million. Still, “I consider myself multiple levels lower in success than Alexis Ohanian. Am I a poser? I don’t think so.”
He touted what he considers a benefit to a transactional model like Intro: both sides feel pressure to be prepared and provide value. Intro takes a cut from each call—10% if the customer booked via a direct link to the expert’s page, 30% if the client found the consultant via Intro’s website directory, or 50% if the booking was made via a social media ad. Some of the experts, including Ohanian, note on their profiles that all proceeds from Intro bookings will go to charity.
One power-user who has found a niche on Intro is Nikita Bier, who founded Gas and TBH, social media apps acquired by Discord and Meta, respectively. Last August, he tweeted that he had made more than $122,000 across 95 Intro bookings.
Now, Bier, who did not respond to multiple interview requests, offers video consults starting at $1,400 for 15 minutes, going up to $11,699 a month for a “building a viral app” package with unlimited one-on-one chats, help planning how to fundraise and live reviews of designs.
“Sometimes I forget that I’m an OnlyFans girl but for tech founders,” he tweeted in January.
In April, Mobrem tweeted that thanks to Bier’s help, one startup that booked time with him had notched a $1 billion valuation.
“That’s so freaking cool to me,” Mobrem said. “People who don’t use Intro are always the ones who are like, what can you get done in 15 minutes? People who do use Intro, the majority say it’s unbelievable what you can get done.”