Have you ever found yourself wanting to jump start your professional knowledge on a niche topic <i>and</i> wanted to pay X hundred USD to pick a professional's brain for an hour? Has anyone found a community that facilitates this?<p>An example might be wanting to understand the deep nuanced differences between practical applications of two distributed SQL engines (which wouldn't be answerable on Quora, Stack Overflow, etc.).
There are a lot of professors who have public contact info, and many would be happy to answer your questions about their area of research. It wouldn't hurt to ask!