Ethos / askethos investor here: AMA + PLEASE share your experiences with user features, company responsiveness, pros/cons compared to other AI expert networks, anything!
Looking for user feedback! I may not immediately respond, but I value your input tremendously and will reply. Please also comment after the official AMA “open session” has ended. For context:
This caught my attention on r/ExperiencedFounders (and not in the best way, coming from founder James Lo, who worked as an entry-level analyst at McKinsey for 2 years after uni. This surely isn’t what I learned there, but everyone’s experience is different):
From Ethos founder u/jameslo-ethos —link in comments:
“As a consultant you basically collect as much data as possible and do a ton of analysis and package it into a bunch of potential decisions for somebody else, that's basically consulting.
Entrepreneurship is basically the polar opposite of that, you're in a situation where you have no data and you can't any analysis because usually it's just going to slow you down so you have to constantly make blind decisions yourself and experiment different stuff until something works. Very, very different.
In a lot of ways it's just the polar opposite, you need to learn how to stop bullshitting people and most importantly stop bullshitting yourself.”
👇
And so did this more thoughtful follow up question on r/askethos —link in comments (this is on par with a certain McKinsey partner, so I think I may know you, anonymous poster 😉):
“I’m trying to reconcile several marketplace numbers you’ve shared publicly here. Could you provide the actual marketplace funnel?
- Total number of registered experts
- Number of monthly active experts
- Number and percentage of registered experts who have ever received at least $1 in payment
- Percentage of applicants who ultimately receive a paid engagement
- Median monthly earnings among experts actively seeking work, including $0 earners
- Median monthly earnings among experts who receive at least one opportunity, again including those whose opportunities don’t convert
- Median time from registration to first paid engagement
You’ve said Ethos is adding roughly 35,000 experts per week, receives tens of thousands of applications for each opportunity, and has paid experts more than $20M YTD.
You’ve also said that experts on Ethos earn an extra ~£4,500/month on average, with the top 10% earning £7,000+/month.
Those numbers may all be accurate, but without the underlying denominators, the earnings claims are difficult to interpret. In particular, “average expert earnings” can mean something very different depending on whether the population includes everyone seeking work or only people who successfully obtained paid engagements.”
Thank you all!