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Comment by larsberg | Hacker News Reader

Are administrative assistants either really expensive or ineffective at meal purchasing in the SF area? This seems like a tasty service and all, but back-of-envelope I would think it hard to compete with ~an hour a day of $15-20/hour labor. Especially since even with this service I still need to pay my admin a half hour for door open/setup/cleanup.

Unless this service is targeted mainly at companies that eschew personal assistant-style employment? I'll admit I've only run teams or worked at companies in the Seattle and Chicago area, where there is an abundance of "young liberal arts grads" to handle straightforward tasks.

I've never done the startup thing, so please feel free to correct me if C-levels are really handling this sort of work themselves (as the testimonials seem to hint).

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The people ordering food usually also end up responsible for every other miscellaneous task, so are very happy to have someone take care of one of their least important, but most time consuming jobs. One of the most frequent reactions from new signups we see is a big sigh of relief.

The second issue is that someone responsible for ordering food part time isn't going to do it as well as someone who's concerned with nothing else. It's specialization of labor.

There's definitely a period in a startup where founders or management end up handling a lot of minor tasks like this, before hiring admin support staff. I personally would rather pay for services (garbage collection, catering, copier repair, etc.) vs. hiring an admin person to do this, because managing yet another employee (and one from a different background than engineers) adds stress to my life.

If I had a great candidate for admin/manager, maybe I'd consider it, but I could easily see getting to 20-30 employees before doing so.

That makes sense, and follows with my general experience: once your team reaches >= 8 people, there will always be one of them having a Major Life Issue (cancer, drugs, burnout, divorce, etc.) that will consume incredible amounts of your time too.

If you're stuck hiring them on your own (i.e. not part of a big company that has its own infra for hiring and training staff employees), several of my buddies who have started smaller companies swear by temp agencies. Quickly scan a few resumes, do a couple of chats, and then bring them onboard for a few weeks or a month in a try-before-you-buy role.

Also, if your admin does not _remove_ stress from your life, they're doing it wrong. Having had both decent and great admins, I can say that a great admin is an incredible enabler. Need your schedule to always have a three hour block of uninterrupted work time? Hate responding to urgent-but-unimportant crises that people always email you about? A professional, organized, and utterly ruthless admin is net positive w.r.t. your time and stress far more than they will ever be paid.

I can second this. The person who orders food at my company reports it's a huge time sink. We're 50 people and it was taking her hours a day with everything that can go wrong.

Yup. We use you guys and totally agree with this statement. You guys have been awesome, and Loggly <3s you!

ZeroCater can promise good restaurants consistent volume and negotiate better pricing than a single business on its own. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to provide the service for cheaper than a PA could, not even counting his/her salary. They may not be doing this currently, but at scale it could be interesting.

a) We're a customer. Congratulations!

b) One major problem that this solves is the randomness factor. We don't have to decide what we want, and if we don't like what we get on a particular day, we can just ask not to have that anymore. It's awesome.

Thanks!

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