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Pay people to take your call.You pay only if they say yes.

For founders and sales teams who want time with busy people. We send the people you pick a paid offer, like $300 for a 30-minute call.

How it works

  1. Typing a description of people to reach and getting a list back

    Say who you want to talk to.

    Type something like “controllers at construction firms.” We find the people who fit.

  2. Raising the offer per person, setting a total cap, and sending

    Set your price.

    Pick what each person gets for a 30-minute call. Each comes with a suggested price, and our fee is added on top.

  3. A recipient booking a paid call and the sender being notified

    They book a call.

    Each person gets your note and the offer. You’re charged only if they book, and refunded if they don’t show.

Refunds and no-show rules: how it works

Who it’s for

Founders

  • Customer discovery calls
  • Finding your first design partners
  • User testing with the right people

Sales teams

  • First meetings at your top accounts
  • Working a lead list you already have
  • Testing a new buyer persona

Questions

Is this an expert network?

No. Expert networks sell calls with people who signed up to be paid advisors. We reach the specific people you choose, most of whom have never heard of you or us, and offer to pay them for their time. See how we compare →

Who gets the money?

The person you invite gets the full offer, and our fee is added on top (20% of what you pay): an $80 offer costs you $100. They can take the money by direct deposit or gift card, or donate it to charity.

What happens if they don’t respond?

You pay nothing. Sending puts a hold on your card for the priciest person’s price, fee included, and it’s released when the invitations expire after 7 days. Declines cost nothing either.

What if I already know who I want to talk to?

Paste their LinkedIn URLs or emails (up to 100 at a time), or upload a CSV from Apollo, HubSpot or Salesforce. We fill in contact details where they’re missing. Import a list →

Doesn’t paying people skew what they tell you?

Probably a little, in that the people who accept are usually the ones who value their time (which is kind of the point). We wrote up the tradeoffs and how to handle them. Read our answers →

Can I use it from ChatGPT or Claude?

Yes. Instant Expert works as an MCP server, so your assistant can search, import a list and draft requests for you. Set it up →

AI broke cold email.

Cold outreach used to require real effort. A thoughtful email took real research to prove you actually thought about who you were writing to. That effort was important: it signaled to the recipient whether you were worth their time.

ChatGPT made that effort meaningless. Today, anyone can send 10,000 emails that read like a real person wrote them, essentially free.

Buyers can’t tell the real emails from the AI ones, so they just ignore all of them — including the ones they might have wanted to say yes to.

We believe that there’s one signal that’s hard to fake: money. Companies already spend tens of billions of dollars a year on bus ads, Meta/Google/LinkedIn marketing, lead databases, and outreach tools. But none of that money reaches the person you’re actually trying to reach. It just pays middlemen.

We think that money should go to the person whose attention you want. Pay them their rate for a real reply, and they keep the money or donate it. Outreach finally stops being a tax on the recipient and starts being a paycheck.

Max Kolysh

Max is a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator. He spent seven years building Dover, a recruiting platform used by Stripe and Scale to make 2,000+ hard hires — so he has seen cold outreach from every angle.

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