

Show HN: Perssist – on-demand assistants to burn through your to-do list - ebozzone
http://www.perssist.com/?ref=HN

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ebozzone
One common question is, how is this different than any other virtual assistant
business?

Firstly, one thing we're conscious of is avoiding being placed in the same
bucket as the multitude of sites where you can hire an overseas VA. We want
customers to see us as a service that solves their problems, rather than
another option for a place to hire a virtual assistant. It shouldn't matter to
a customer how we're solving their problems, as long as it's being done well
and they're getting their requests completed in a way they're happy with. This
may sound like a subtle difference so I'd be curious to hear other people's
thoughts on this.

We did some surveys and found that around 50% of Americans over 18 would be
willing to pay $10/hour or more to have someone take care of tasks on their
to-do list. A very small portion of those people have actually gone out and
found a service or even could name one. We're currently targeting those types
of people, though we're still figuring out if that's the right approach.

But when it comes to actually comparing Perssist to other options out there:
-Quality at this price point. We hire less than 3% of the VAs that we
interview. We've already filtered through mountains of assistants for the
customer. -Accessibility. 24/7 availability, no vacations, no sick days, no
disappearing acts -Flexibility. Some services targeting customers charge by
the task rather than by the amount of time it takes. This prevents them from
accepting many types of requests (e.g. vacation research), and also encourages
their assistants to rush work, leading to lower quality.

