Knowledge as an addictive drug—an investor’s guide to the expert network industry

Think of us as a LinkedIn focused on what you know, rather than who you know or where you‘ve worked in the past.

There is a bit of “a rising tide lifts all boats” dynamic in the expert network industry. Given the aforementioned macro trends and fundamentally addictive nature of the product, it’s a good industry in general to be in. And there are more and more new customers, non-traditional users of expert networks, such as Fortune 500s, start-ups and market r... See more

The core product is a paid 1 hour phone call between a customer (often an investor or a consultant) and an industry professional with several years of experience.

The barrier to entry to starting an expert network is relatively low.

DeepBench will be the go-to tool that people visit to learn things that aren’t easily discoverable via Google.

Expert networks are a marketplace for knowledge.

The core group of traditional expert users are investors and consulting firms, who make up 70–80% of traditional expert network demand today. And this group is well covered by entrenched market incumbents.

DeepBench’s approach: Our company is approaching the expert network industry from two unique directions. First, we are licensing software to help other organizations build their own knowledge networks. Second, we are focused on reducing costs and expanding the market for paid knowledge exchange.

Not a lot of capital is required. All you really need is one employee with an internet connection. However, there are a lot of nuances to connecting expertise as the business scales.

As the world becomes more complex, existing data platforms cannot keep up — and a lot of valuable knowledge remains trapped and not written down anywhere. Not even Google can index what is in our minds (not yet anyway). Some of the most valuable data in the world is the unstructured, tacit insights in our heads.