Tap Chief
Tap Chief is a marketplace where experts sell one-to-one phone consultations to students, professionals, and businesses, taking a small commission on each paid session. Launched in February 2016 and live in India, it had about 5,000 experts, roughly 20% of whom had booked at least one consultation, and about 75,000 minutes of total interactions. The company said it had raised about $150,000 and was focused on growing interaction minutes rather than monetization.
Shashank Morley wanted to democratize knowledge sharing by letting people monetize their expertise through one-to-one consultations. The platform was built after his earlier work on an on-demand tutoring app, Hash Learn.
- •Shaping the model around paid phone consultations with a commission lets revenue scale with the platform's transaction volume rather than with headcount.
- •Allowing experts to also book other experts creates a self-reinforcing loop in which earnings fund further learning, which keeps supply and demand circulating within the network.
- •Roughly 40% of experts offering their time pro bono suggests a strong community motivation that helps sustain supply even before monetization matures.
- •Early B2B white-label deals, where partners pay $15 to $25 per session to power their own one-to-one interactions, show that the underlying matching and calling infrastructure has value beyond the consumer marketplace.
- 1.Launch a two-sided marketplace where experts set their own consultation prices and the platform takes a small percentage of each paid session.
- 2.Treat each expert profile as a key conversion page and give experts tools and tips to improve their profiles and search ranking, since most experts do not book without them.
- 3.Track a usage metric such as total interaction minutes per month as the primary growth signal while monetization is still early.
- 4.Package the matching and call-handling technology as a white-label service for online course providers and other organizations that want one-to-one sessions without building their own expert network.
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