A part time secretary of some sort... any startups doing this?
I'm not a total cheapskate (obviously, im considering using this crazy service), but I'm also fairly concerned about getting the best deal/value I can for things.
They were good at matching user preferences on simple stuff (get me a pizza), and had a healthy reluctance to go outside your stated preferences ("what with?" "surprise me" "are you sure, any specifics?"). The markup was substantial on a small purchase, but that's irrelevant for the hourly service. On the other hand, "get me a plane ticket from X to Y on Z day" quickly snowballed into enough expense and difficulty that my friend abandoned it and booked himself.
Regarding markup, their FAQ even says the following:
> There is no markup on the purchases you make through Magic. You are charged the exact cost of the items plus the credit card processing fee. We find you the best deals that we can on every purchase, and we negotiate strongly with vendors. Often you will save more money using Magic than if you had done things yourself.
I get the sense that they wanted to be a contract personal assistant and did the one-off thing to expose people to the service. Certainly it was a bit awkward since it required spending a bunch of time getting them set up with your info.
That's not going to get your grocery shopping done, but 10 hours/week seems like it would comfortably cover many people's paperwork/bureaucracy hassles.
These people could have like 3 or 4 clients a piece.
In fact, that person probably wouldn't do everything but would help "administer" it, eg. hire a CPA to do taxes (and audit them quarterly), occasionally book a flight or find a hotel, come in once a week to spend a few hours to sort through mail, etc.
I hear a lot about "virtual assistants" but I imagine this person could fit in 4-5 clients per month which could mean $5K/month and that translates to a pretty good salary.
The jury is still out on whether it is actually worth that value; in many of the countries, a workspace membership and acceptable housing can be found for $600-900 / month. They attempt to make up the rest of the value in the community that they provide.
If someone can figure out a decent (dietary restricted) meal plan and get me the food in a box every week, I would not mind paying that $1K for it (as it would be cheaper than what I currently pay).
A lot of the food box services that are out there currently are either more expensive than the store (and still charge on top of it for the service) or have a super crappy selection, or just not enough food.
There is one service that I continuously used until I moved and dropped $150/week on it and that was Houston's "Rawfully Organic" because it was on par with store prices, really good variety, and awesome community.
I see menu planning and grocery shopping as completely unnecessary pain (and honestly, people are bad at it).
The hope for the service is to basically make it where it makes the menu and orders the groceries then all you need to do is cook it. :)
It isn't a subscription box, it makes customized menus but I definitely see the strong benefits of Blue Apron and the like, I just see them as unnecessarily rigid.
The biggest factor for us is dietary restrictions. For example, my wife is going through a "elimination" plan right now trying to find what foods are triggering health problems. One ingredient that is off our table is garlic. It is hard finding a variety of meals that don't include garlic. A service would be welcome!
Currently working on a product (shameless plug: pantryplan.io) which I am currently building dietary restriction into.
Grocery delivery is in the roadmap but just trying to get the "meal planning" bit down first.
But yes, For us it is more about allergies than vegan, kosher, etc...
Yeah, lactose intolerance / no dairy is definitely going to be in there. I am lactose-intolerant, my SO is lactose-intolerant plus they are also allergic to gluten, soy and nuts! (I feel so bad for them. :))
Just polling to see what people are more interested in seeing touched.
I likely won't be touching a lot more complex exemptions like vegan or kosher any time soon but I might see if it can be crowd-sourced.
Thanks!
I would pay a lot of money for a tool that actually works, updates its database, and has companies other than the IBM/mega corporation.
I guess for 1k a month I'd want something more than that. I know HOW to workout and eat right...I just don't. I need a willpower pill. :\
Personal trainers can be excellent, but the low end is "dangerously incompetent". The only requirement for starting a service, or getting hired at many gyms, is being buff and knowing how to look competent on some machines. As a result, there are plenty of PTs peddling junk-science nutrition, or giving out plausible-but-harmful workout routines that undervalue stretching or produce dangerous imbalances and overextensions.
Assuming you don't need someone teaching you how to be healthy, though, things get easier. Some trainers focus on education and drop unmotivated clients, but some offer "willpower pill" as a decent chunk of what you're paying for. Knowing that someone expects you at the gym at 7PM, and will pump you up to not bail early, can do a lot of good.
12 sessions for $828
20 sessions for $1280
[0] - https://www.24hourfitness.com/training/trainer_finder/clubs/... click on Check Prices
Ferris' 4-Hour Body Slow Carb diet seems to be v2.0 of that diet.
I still want to lose another 20 and that's been tough. I just hired a nutritionist and the key seems to be a balanced diet - eating (almost) all food groups with each meal. My body has been in shock because of how different my food is from meal to meal.
I work from home and generally enjoy it. But living and working along side my wife in a small one bedroom apartment in New York City presents its challenges. There are plenty of coworking spaces but none close enough that I can walk to and I refuse to become a slave of the commute. I simply need a tiny room with a door I can close, wifi, a desk and a chair.
I currently pay the equivalent of $650/mo to park my car, catch a train, then a subway to get to my office. But the trains are frequently standing room only, delayed, and noisy.
My alternative is to pay around $300/mo to park my car, take a coach, then a subway. The coach is more pleasant (seating! WiFi! Power sockets!) but takes longer due to the various stops around town.
In both cases, the services are infrequent.
When I've worked in India or ZA, it's quite common to have a chauffeur. But that only works with the massive disparity in wages. That's less likely in the industrialised world.
I could rideshare - but that's fraught with risk. I could take a taxi, but that would quadruple my cost.
So, if you can find a way to make autonomous cars work in the UK - and can charge a per-journey fare - let me know!
Presumably there will be a lot of people who still want to own a car (e.g. for weekend trips), but no longer need to park near their office or a train station. If you have a short commute or predictable schedule, it'd be far easier to just send your car "home", or even pay for remote parking somewhere you don't live and use it like a privately-owned Uber. Great for reducing parking demand, but with the potential to create a weird reverse-commute of empty cars streaming out of cities just after 9:00AM.
And on a similar note, there's a possibility of more congestion from circling traffic. "I'm just popping into the store quick, drive around empty until I get back". Exactly what someone with a chauffeur might do today, but cheap and easy.
Hell, will we see a HOV-lane-equivalent arise on highways where non-empty cars get priority status? Or a reverse solution, where empty cars are low priority and have to keep right like semis?
...I've completely abandoned your point, but there are so many questions! It's going to be fascinating to see how universal-chauffeur traffic works.
I would pay 1k/mo (scaling far higher with volume) for a solution that is implemented by a (reasonably) on-site team over the course of a few weeks that can interact with the various teams responsible to integrate (dev) and use (marketing/support/management) it.
I would sacrifice features, which seems to be the de-facto differentiator in these classes, for a product which supports an opinionated but well thought out product development strategy. One based on the current norms for iterating products based on feedback from customers and funnel data.
- I work in payments / e-comm
Google "back pain specialist" in your area, it's covered by health insurance most of the time. Strangely, back pain specialists have a big patient education problem. Nobody knows they exist even though so many people have back pain.
Child rearing takes a lot of your time!
I also pay about 1/10 of this to membership to a non-profit hackerspace where I have access to a 3d printer, electronics bench, laser cutter, etc.
Other than that... if one of my side project takeoff, I would pay an outsourced programmer to work on my side projects that I don't have time to fix myself. (I'm a programmer myself but there are only so many hours in the day)
Still. A good food service for 1k/month could be a nice business. Lots of dependencies though.
...does this happen with B2B software pricing? Jira probably isn't expensive enough, but are there lots of companies doing elaborate limbo to keep their user count for a service just under a pricing threshold?
i would easily pay you 25 bucks per person.
EDIT : i would start with Phabricators codebase and go from there.
All other feature are all already available, right now.
business: certain high-end dev environments & tool suites, contract automation
Want to take a taxi from Manchester to London because you hate the train or want to arrive overnight? Fantastic, that'll be £50, even cheaper than taking the train and you don't have to take a taxi from the train station.
Need to same-day-deliver 50 tons of Plywood? Fantastic, I'll order 50 ubers and we'll move it a hundred KG per taxi and have it done by the end of the day, how does £250 sound? Cheap enough?
The power of the word "unlimited" is almost magical. Of course, Uber would go out of business pretty quickly so £1,000 / month wouldn't get them very far, but to me, it doesn't sound too overpriced. I just hope there's no fine-print.
I remember being pretty disappointed when I learned that deals like "unlimited candy" generally just deliver more candy than is healthy for one person to eat. I also remembering being floored by the story of American Airlines offering actually-unlimited flights for $250,000. And as you point out, that turned out to be a stunningly bad deal for the company.
http://business.time.com/2012/05/08/the-250000-airline-pass-...