Skillpocket lets you book a meeting with Google engineer for some quick advice

Imagine pulling out an app on your phone and booking a one-hour call with Google Glass’s head of UI design as easily as calling up your mom for help with the washing machine.

That’s exactly what Skillpocket, a startup that launched its iOS app on Wednesday at the Demo conference, wants to help entrepreneurs do.

Skillpocket’s idea came out of the founders’ own experiences working on education-focused startups in Russia. Every so often, they would run into challenges or have questions about things like handling payments. They wished they could quickly pay for some help from an expert for a hour or two. And so they built Skillpocket.

With an interface similar to Tinder or Weave (swiping left or right to indicate whether someone matches your interests or not), Skillpocket shows you available experts that fit the skills you need. Once you find one you want to connect with, you message them privately to arrange to hire them.

Right now, only the payment is done through Skillpocket, but eventually, the team plans to build features to facilitate with all the coordination within the app. Skillpocket takes a 15 percent cut from every transaction, with three percent going to its payment processing partner.

Skillpocket’s pool of experts includes both well-established professionals — such as the mobile product lead for Google’s Inbox — as well as professionals you might not have heard of, but who can offer great expertise and likely a lower price.

“You might not want to hire Mark Cuban over the phone for $1,000,” said cofounder Frederik Trovatten in an interview with VentureBeat. So there might be a lesser-known expert available for a price within your budget.

And because not every expert will have a well-known brand, Skillpocket wants give experts ways to showcase their expertise and reputation. It now has about 1,000 experts signed up in its network.

“We want to take the reputation you have on other networks,” such as GitHub, Behance, LinkedIn, and allow you to leverage that reputation on Skillpocket.

And as for disputes, in case an expert doesn’t show up or have all the skills they say they have, Trovatten said Skillpocket will evaluate each dispute on a case-by-case basis, and always seek to keep its customers happy with their experience on Skillpocket.

Currently, other alternatives include Clarity, Helpouts, freelancer marketplaces like Elance, or professional networks like LinkedIn.

So far, the team has been bootstrapping Skillpocket, but is looking to raise funding to add more features and make Skillpocket as widely available as possible.

“A year from now, what we want to see is that every entrepreneur has this in his pocket,” Trovatten said.