There's such a flood of these invisible apps now! (Cue @rrhoover with another plug for the article he's writing. ;P) I'm excited for a year from now when some of them will have differentiated and the use cases are more clear. Right now, it seems like everyone who uses them are doing it for the novelty, not the actual utility.
That said, the examples offered on the Stanford Nerd landing page are really interesting. The "expertise at your fingertips" service model seems like a nice bridge between freelancing and specialized service companies. It feels like there'd be less friction in using a service like Nerd than there would be in both calling up a data science research firm or finding (and trusting) a data science consultant.
It's also interesting to think about the precursors to the invisible app. Uber? TaskRabbit? Those services still feel a little more reliable/trustworthy than these "text me to do x" models. Why?
It'd be great if they pulled back the curtain a little bit to shed some light on their operations...maybe describe how they distribute the questions, or who they have answering. I love the concept, but it sorta feels like a weekend project that'll be gone by May.
I'm a Stanford Student. My initial intuition is that it will be difficult to scale this VERY quickly. The workload at Stanford is tough, and many students are not motivated/don't need money. Beyond 5-10 regular customers, this will hit a cap real fast. Great idea though.
I think perhaps the most valuable part of this is the physical connection to Stanford. I can't distribute materials to a bunch of Stanford students very easily... But these guys can.
I can YouTube Khan Academy for math help. Can't really finagle my way into the hands of a bunch of smart Stanford folks.
(Hey MIT students... Clone this idea please.)
Nerd gives you access to brilliant Stanford students. Get whatever help you need. Send them a message and they’ll have great minds working to answer you. Great examples on the site.
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I like the idea, and absolutely love the trend of these direct sms services. well done, great initiative
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