So let me just explain something to you. Raising money for startups can be very easy. You know, if you’re at the right place at the right time. Like if you happen to crack an invite onto Branson’s island and, over dinner, you tell him about some clever idea. If it’s really good and he genuinely digs it, there’s every chance he could give you a few bar (only really a couple hundred thousand dollars) to help get you started.

But you’re unlikely to ever find yourself on his island, so if you wanted to approach him with an idea, you’d have to jump through so many hoops and adhere to so many requirements to submit proposals, it might just kill you.

The same is true when dealing with venture capital companies. There is no chance in hell they’ll even see you, let alone consider an idea of yours, without you putting together a presentation, a deck, and a large number of graphs that resemble the shape of a hockey stick.

But let’s say you found yourself at dinner next to someone like Justin Stanford (below), who heads up 4DI Capital – probably the most well-known and respected SA tech venture capital firm. Just like with Branson, you could at the very least get his immediate opinion on your tech startup idea. If he digs it as much as you do, you’ve saved yourself a lot of blood sweat and tears, getting the idea in front of him.

Even more importantly, he could tell you what’s wrong with your idea, or if it’s been done before and why it failed.

So what I want to say to anyone out there with a startup idea – particularly online or tech startups – is that there IS a shortcut you can take to save yourself a lot of heartache. Justin Stanford is one of the hundreds of experts available for an immediate voice or text chat on the new TIMON app. It’s basically like WhatsApp for the gig economy.

You can literally call him right now and ask him if he thinks your idea sucks. If he can’t talk right now, the app lets him request a delay (say 30 minutes), and then a countdown clock starts on both phones and you’ll be notified when the call kicks off.

TIMON lets you call any expert on their system, whenever you want. They’ve got business leaders, sportsmen, lawyers, famous musicians, models and more. You pay a Rand amount per minute, which the expert (‘guru’) decides they want to charge. You’ll probably need to practice your ‘elevator pitch’ before you call.

You can either voice chat or text chat through the app. Then, at the end of the call, you both rate each other.

You enter your card details once, before you first call, and then you are automatically charged at the end of each call from then on. Like Uber.

Read about TIMON here and download the app for Android and iOS.