
Solo founder or small team? Fix your life with a real-life non-virtual assistant - robfitz
http://blog.thestartuptoolkit.com/2011/10/small-team-fix-your-life-with-a-non-virtual-assistant/
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caseysoftware
Completely agreed.

A few years ago, I tried a virtual assistant and it never worked out. The
types of tasks that I needed a hand with were not easily breakable without
detailed explanations.

Then I was at an event last month and a flock of friends recommended one
assistant in particular. I emailed her about availability and listed out the
problems and roadblocks that I've hit recently. A few days later, we met over
coffee and she pitched me on solving _one_ of those problems for now with a
hook to work on a few others as time goes on.

Three weeks in and it's working beautifully. Everything I've handed her just
gets done. It's not a huge amount at this point, but it's a start.

If you're in Austin and looking for an assistant, drop me a note and I'll pass
along contact info.

~~~
bobbles
Any hints as to what kind of work you're able to pass over to the assistant? I
just can't see myself working something like that into my life.. but it could
be interesting.

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caseysoftware
My particular task was logging business cards, collecting my notes into my
CRM, and then flagging each one for follow up.

Life changing? Probably not.. but immensely helpful. And now I don't have that
growing stack of business cards staring at me.

~~~
bobbles
No that sounds like a great use of an assistant.. I guess all those litle
things that just build up over time can be unloaded fairly easily.

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sunir
Getting an assistant makes a lot of sense in most cases, but there is one area
that you should never use an assistant.

Never let an assistant mediate meetings or contacts with clients, partners,
investors, or anyone else. If you're at a start up, book your own meetings.
Everyone else can do it, so can you.

Why?

1\. It's rude. They wanted to talk to you but you've punted them to an
assistant. For a tiny company, you aren't that important.

2\. It cools the relationship before it started. Relationships are the core
asset of any business. Prioritize them.

3\. It distances you from the market. As a startup, you should be as close to
the market as possible. Actively disintermediating from people around you is a
bad sign of how out of touch you likely are.

~~~
jholman
As a minor nit-pick, you have confused intermediating and disintermediating.
Disintermediating is removing intermediaries, which is good for being in
touch.

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larrik
Okay, this is only tangentially related to the post, but this is the second
article I've read on that site, and I keep running into an issue on Chrome in
Linux:

<http://www.larrikj.com/media/images/ss.png>

I have the text not staying in the designated areas, and text overlaying other
text. This happens on quite a few blogs I read on HN, so it's probably me and
not them, but it doesn't seem to happen on most other sites.

Does anyone else see these issues? Did I break something in my install or
settings (or extensions)?

~~~
hbar
I've been seeing it as well, but have never spent any time digging to find out
why.

