Clarity, the Moncton-based online marketplace for entrepreneurial advice, is welcoming a few new employees to its office today, bringing its total number of staff to six. It’s another small sign that serial entrepreneur Dan Martell is driving another enterprise toward success.
A consummate networker, Martell is a Moncton native who has successfully exited two companies in the last four years, and divides his time between Moncton and San Francisco. In December, he launched Clarity.fm as an online resource that allows people to find experts to tap for advice for a fee.
The company’s main audience so far is entrepreneurs who are looking for help in such areas as finance, funding, structure, legal issues, marketing and hiring. Clarity.fm has an international directory of experts in these fields, and entrepreneurs can select an adviser based on their expertise and price level to help find resolution for tricky issues.
In seven months, the company has handled about 10,000 calls across 42 countries – a metric far more important than the number of employees. The advisers are largely past and present entrepreneurs across North America, whereas the people seeking advice are mainly entrepreneurs, from fifteen-year-old kids to first-timers in their fifties. Martell said they tend not to be in the startup hotspots, so clarity is a perfect place to find advice.
Martell himself has handled 700 of these calls, which is not surprising given his passion for giving entrepreneurial advice. He shows up regularly on Startup North, has answered more than 1,200 questions on Sprouter, and operates the site maplebutter.com, which provides an interchange of ideas and advice between entrepreneurs.
Speaking as he returned to Moncton Saturday from a race at the Atlantic Motorsport Park in Shubenacadie, N.S., Martell said he established Clarity because no one in New Brunswick has ever really developed a successful consumer internet company. His ambition is that clarity.fm, with its ability to crowd-source expertise, will fill that gap. He said his development team is adding new features “just about every other day” and will continue to do so in order to meet clients’ needs.
“We need to make it a magical experience for our users,” said Martell. “If we can get just that one user who went on Clarity to have a magical experience and did, then we win.”
Martell sold his first venture, Spheric Technologies in 2008, and then moved to California, though he’s remained part of the tech community in New Brunswick.
In October, Martell and his co-founder sold Flowtown, a San Francisco online gift marketing enterprise, to San Francisco-based Demandforce for an undisclosed price. A group of angels sank $750,000 into Flowtown just 13 months beforehand.
Now with Clarity, he is letting all the passion he exudes in his writing and speaking engagements flow into his latest venture. The goal is for 1 billion people worldwide to have a positive experience through Clarity by 2022.
“As an entrepreneur, you want to wake up every morning and build the world that you want to live in,” he said.