Show HN: We built a crowd-powered virtual assistant | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We built a crowd-powered virtual assistant

premier.mobileworks.com

85 pointsanandkulkarni56 comments

I like the concept. We're just starting to use VAs effectively, and it would be nice to have a utility-billed VA service instead of having to go to fiverr or oDesk.

I don't like the pricing model. I was hoping for an a la carte VA service; I don't want to pick a plan!

But if you stick with plans, I have 2 small suggestions for the sales page:

1) "Starting at $6/hour" threw me off. That's the price of the biggest plan, which is 40/hours a week! If I have 40/week of VA work, I'll just hire a VA from oDesk!

Instead I would list the price you expect me to pay (with the most popular plan). It looks like that's $10/hour here. Otherwise I've anchored at $6/hour and its going to be an uphill battle to sell me on a 2x increase.

2) Make one of the plans the "default"! The pricing table has 4 options, but none are highlighted as the most popular/suggested/default. The little flag actually makes Ultra look like the default at first glance, which I don't think is the intention.

Hope that helps! It looks like a very compelling service.

Thanks. This is really helpful.

>"Starting at $6/hour" threw me off. That's the price of the biggest plan, which is 40/hours a week! If I have 40/week of VA work, I'll just hire a VA from oDesk!

We think it is better to use Premier than using a dedicated VA. Since you get assigned a team of staffers. This means that Premier is on 24/7. If you need to temporarily increase the size of the team you can do it by just sending an email. Also there are no weekends since the team rotates. You can also have the most suited person in the team do your project (a person who is an expert at Powerpoint will create your presentation while another person who is great at qualifying leads would handle your leads).

The big advantages of a dedicated VA are trust and communcation. In other words, after a dedicated VA and a customer have worked together for a few months, it is more likely that they will have achieved high levels of mutual trust and high levels of the "common reference frame" essential for effective communication than if the dedicated VA were replaced with a team that is also serving other customers.

Disclaimer: I have not actually used a VA.

>The big advantages of a dedicated VA are trust and communcation

Thats a great point. From what we have seen with Premier, some users start referring the project to the team member that has been taking care of their projects. So instead of saying,

Premier,

Please take care of 'x' for me.

They will write:

Joane,

Please do 'x' like it was done last time.

And then Joane will then make sure that the project is done perfectly. In this case, it becomes Joane's responsibility that the work is done perfectly.

The big advantage of a rotating cast of competent VAs is forcing you to learn to write a good spec. :)

Getting good at writing specs is a great way to multiply your effectiveness. Outsourcing is a cheap and excellent way to learn.

He's right, "starting at $6/hour" threw me off as well. I initially thought $6/hour gets me an average person and $30/hour gets me an expert. The "starter" plan starts at $15/hr, so that's really where it "starts".

It should say something more honest, like "Costs $10/hour, or even less in bulk".

This is super helpful feedback on pricing. Thanks!

From my experience VA are really difficult to pick. I usually get tasks done by 2-3 people at the same time.

The tricky aspect is, that while it is cheap, it takes quite some time to train people to do stuff "right". Even if it is just simple stuff, like find x and add it to an excel file, there are huge discrepancies between different VAs.

If you don't have at least to people on one task, the question is if you really want to make somebody understand what their errors were, or if you just pay another person in the hopes they have half a brain and get things right.

But the effort of finding the right person is definitely worth it if you can establish an ongoing relationship. If this is not an option, it is almost pointless.

Yep, that's where we see a core value add; it's painful to find good assistants, and we think we've solved that part of the problem by cultivating a core group from our backend.

This service looks really well thought out.

I am currently looking for a service exactly like this however, rather than a pay by week service, I'd really like to pay per task or to be able to buy blocks of time, maybe 10 hours at a time.

I realise that may mean I am not your target market, but I feel that getting to the bottom of my current to do list may only take 10 hours of someones time. So I don't really want to sign up to a pay weekly type service and have to remember to cancel.

Also - I would not want to have to split my tasks into ones to sort out this week and ones for next week. I'd like to get them all done at once.

We used to have an "hourly" model, and may bring it back. Would this be of interest to you?

The reason we do a weekly model is that it lets us plan capacity.

Personally, I would prefer it, but I realise it may be confusing to your customers to have two totally different pricing methods.

How did the hourly model perform when you used it before?

It was reasonably popular, but difficult to predict usage. You can still see it there - it's not labeled as such, but it's the "Starter" plan -- this will bill you per hour, with a minimum of one per week.

I'd be interested in hiring for hourly work, but I'm not sure how much work I need to send out per week. I suspect others are like me. It would be nice if we could pay a monthly maintenance fee and then just pay $10/hr, or whatever. It would be even better if we could just pay $15/hr during spike times.

For $6 an hour, how is this profitable? How easy can it be to find intelligent, English-fluent people with bachelor's degrees, anywhere in the world, who are willing to work for the fraction of that sum which is left after overhead costs and profit margin are taken out?

From what I've heard, a VA starts at around $250 per month for dedicated service if you source them yourself. If they're really good, you can retain them for $400 per month. $400 per month is $100 per week which is $2.50 per hour. They can make a profit in that space.

My guess is that there is some amount of quota that goes unused. You pay for 40 hours, you end up using 30. That probably helps a little, but still... how is this profitable? I'm with you.

I noticed they don't talk about where they get their virtual assistants from. Do they hire them themselves, or do they recruit them from another agency? How do I sign up to work as a virtual assistant for them?

Oh well, I guess that's part of their trade secrets.

We can definitely share this information. We are a crowdsourcing company and have tens of thousands of people in our crowd in more than 55 countries with variety of backgrounds and education. We also have a history of what kind of work a crowd member is suited for. We scout our crowd to find the most suitable members of Premier, we then train them, test them and after a brief vetting period they become a full premier member.

We occasionally hire from outside of the crowd too but our crowd has such diverse talents its great to channel that talents and have them interact with clients directly.

When you say crowdsourcing, how exactly do you crowdsource? Are you pulling from people who sign up online somewhere? Or is it just euphemism for outsourcing?

We have a platform where people can sign-up, get trained and work. We launched it about 1.5 years ago and have partnerships with both government and non-government agencies. You can read more about the platform at www.mobileworks.com

Could you please link to that platform?

I did in the previous post. https://www.mobileworks.com

My apologies I thought you were linking to the same site. Didn't notice the "premier" subdomain.

I haven't used this service from MW in particular, but I did use the pay-as-you-go one for web research stuff a few times and had excellent results. They were quick, and gave me exactly what I asked for. Good customer service too.

Thank you very much. I am glad you like the service. We have taken it up another notch with Premier. So if you need more web research stuff premier will take care of it.

Very cool. I was skeptical but your page did a nice job of showing benefits and differentiating yourself from other providers. Thanks for sharing and good luck. I'll be sure to try it out in the near future.

Thanks a bunch! Look forward to seeing you.

I'm not familiar with the virtual assistant space, but my question is:

Let's say I have the Lite plan, 5 hours/week. I then ask to get something done, like one of your examples:

"Please create a professional powerpoint presentation from the attached research paper with no more than 12 slides."

Do I also tell you how long to spend time on it as well? I might think I could get 10 tasks done with my lite plan, only to find out that the PowerPoint presentation takes 5 hours to complete. How do I budget what tasks can be done within my plan?

>Do I also tell you how long to spend time on it as well? I might think I could get 10 tasks done with my lite plan, only to find out that the PowerPoint presentation takes 5 hours to complete. How do I budget what tasks can be done within my plan?

The Premier team will give you an estimate of the time it will take them to do the project. A lot of our clients have give a deadline for the project. Something on the lines of "Don't spend more than 1.5 hours on this." The staffes then scope the project accordingly.

http://help.mobileworks.com/customer/portal/articles/952047-... #10 has typo: s/reesults/results/

Fixed. Thanks.

I have had a full time VA for many years now and she does all sorts of things for me, including purchasing items using my credit cards, research in buying a new couch ... and on-going research and promotional work for our business.

I'm hesitant about the concept of having multiple different people working on your tasks. I think this is ok for standardised tasks where there is a process that is followed every time. It's difficult if you have varied tasks. How can you develop trust in the relationship with a VA?

I think the key advantage here is that it's not different folks each time. We allocate the same pool of people to collaborate on your work whenever possible, so you can train them and develop a trusted relationship.

Our thinking is that this gives you many of the same advantages of a VA, while having a staff to draw from and higher availability.

I see where you'e going with this, but I might change your examples a little bit. There's a very fine line between just a simple Google search and a lot of what you're showing there. It might make sense to demonstrate something that requires more human intervention. The file conversion example is a good one, and maybe expand more on assembling trip itineraries, etc. IOTW, things that actually would take up a lot of time, where the value of the site would be more clearly demonstrated.

Hmm, that's really good feedback. In reality, most of the things people have used it for have been truly complex multi-hour projects.

ie: Input: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=nzW2Fmpx Output: https://docs.google.com/a/fairtradework.com/document/d/1jzhw...

We'll update the examples to make them more robust. Thanks!

Nice service! Seems similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. You can find more examples here as well: http://aws.amazon.com/mturk/#bus-case

Most of the requests seem made up, thats just my opinion though.

I sent in the "I am including a link to zipped file which has a bunch of files. The files are pdfs and images of business cards with corresponding contact information. Please transcribe them: first and last name, title, address, email, and phone number" request.

Premier did an awesome job. Quick, accurate, and affordable. The best part was that I just submitted the request by email and got results back by email instead of having to spend time figuring out another web interface!

They're actually all real requests people sent in. What do you think could make it more apparent? Perhaps we could show the results?

You could credit them to anonymous people, and use quotation marks.

"I'm looking for help booking a trip for a family of 4 to France." - A Satisfied Customer from California, USA

"Help! My domain name for my website expires in a few days and I need to renew it." - A Satisfied Customer from London, UK

Yeah, I think without the results those requests just don't offer much to a potential user.

This a sample of the anonymized history of projects that Premier has done in the past.

I didn't have my window maximized when I clicked "pricing" and this happened:

http://i.imgur.com/w7IAIyD.png

Can I use this as an API for govt bureaucracy?

Eg, provide documents with directives and have my taxes filed, my companies incorporated, etc etc?

Yes, actually. Because a lot of the early users were entrepreneurs, Premier has some experience in navigating the paperwork requirements for this material -- and there's some state, so they'll learn and share strategies over time.

Pretty interesting use case; an email-to-crowd system can act as a soft API for a lot of things that don't have APIs yet.

Send it in and give it a try!

Looks very nice. Look forward to trying it soon.

Thanks! The email-to-post is the easiest way to try it out. Just send work to premier@mobileworks.com and it'll get done.

I just sent an email to try it out. Fingers crossed it works well.

This looks great!

Nice work guys!

''Single assistant shared amount multiple clients'' instead of among.

Who are the VAs?

Looks like they hold on to your Credit Card info FOREVER in ETERNITY! = Shady. What else could "pause" mean?

From their FAQ Page:

Can I cancel my account? Yes. Just sign in and pause your account. We will stop charging you from the next billing cycle going forward.

We actually don't hold your credit card information at all. We use Stripe and only save your customer id. The credit card info is saved by stripe and they do not support its deletion.

https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-do-you-clear-or-del...

That's a good answer.

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