

Ask HN: what do you know about virtual assistants? - ujeezy

I am interested in getting a VA to do fairly basic market research for me.  It would be along the lines of, "use Google and Twitter to find people who have complained about Home Owner Association (aka HOA) fees in the past 2 weeks.  Please include the source URL and the person's email or Twitter handle".<p>Have you had success with VAs or VA agencies? Are they good for work like this?<p>I am particularly curious about the bang-for-buck you get from India- and Philippines-based agencies, and what techniques you use to manage VAs.<p>Thanks HN!
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belehe
I made pretty good experience with a VA from India (no agency), currently
working with the same guy for over 1 year now.

Regarding success: If you picked a reliable person, I think one of the most
important things is how well you describe a task (unambiguous, measurable
results). And you should have done the task before by yourself, so that you
can estimate the effort and the difficulties of the task.

Usually I describe the task to the VA in form of sequential steps like a use
case. When I am not sure how much time it needs, I tell him to invest 1-2
hours and then get back to me so that I can see how far he got. By this
approach, I avoid to waste time and money.

For the quality assurance, I always tell him to do first 2-3 examples of the
task and then get back to me. Then I check it, and if everything is fine, he
proceeds with the task. This also saves me from wasting time and money.

I found the VA through mturk. After I completed my tasks there, he mailed me
and asked whether I got some more tasks. In retrospecitve, I think this was a
pretty good quality filter since only the really motivated guys write you an
email and asking for more. Of course, this is not a scalabe approach but on a
small level, it worked for me.

And I recommend building a working relationship and see him as partner, not as
cheap assistant. This is something that you do rather indirectly, by how you
communicate and express yourself in the emails, etc... From my experience,
veing a nice person will have a big impact on the quality of the work. But
that's actually valid in any field.

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tectonic
Outsourcing isn't too hard. Just remember that you are still hiring someone,
so you should take the time to actually interview a number of candidates and
find a good fit. I recommend oDesk, but have had decent experiences with
eLance as well. Many offers on these sites will come from outsourcing
companies in India, the Philippines, and China. I'm sure that some of these
companies do good work, and they do offer the advantage of having people in-
house with many skill sets; however, I try to hire people who are independent
consultants because I prefer to develop a personal relationship with the
contractor.

I recommend interviewing over AIM or Google Chat and having candidates answer
some questions or send you written work to help evaluate how well they know
English. For example, I interviewed 8-10 people before I found my current
assistant. I had them each write an example document, and I also told each of
them what kind of affiliate links are appropriate for Freebie Finder (one of
my websites - <http://absurdlycool.com>), then had them each pick the best
affiliate link from an example set of links. This tested their comprehension
and ability to learn from example, and I found it to be a revealing metric. I
narrowed my candidates down from about 10 to a couple of candidates then chose
my current assistant, who lives in the Philippines and speaks English very
well. She has done excellent work and I gave her a raise at Christmas from
about $3 to $4 per hour (25% raise over her bid hourly rate), and I am going
to be giving her another raise soon. I've had outsourcers disappear on me more
than once in the past, so I try hard to treat them well and to have backup
plans. For the current assistant, I took the time to write detailed and
reusable google docs about her responsibilities, so that the next training
should hopefully be easier. But so far she's been great! (I am conflicted
about globalization and outsourcing, but I think that if I pay more than
someone bids, and treat them well, I can't really be causing harm.)

A few other thoughts:

* You usually get what you pay for, but I've gotten good assistant work for $4 an hour and a pretty solid web design for $75 total. It can be hit or miss, but once you form relationships they can be very valuable. You can probably get good copy editing and preliminary research for $7-$10 an hour. For more skilled labor, you will likely need to pay more, or do a more extensive interview search.

* Be clear about what you need and spend the time to train contractors.

* Get them to recite back to you what they will do in order to check their understanding. It can be hard to get people to admit that they don't understand you, so tease it out, at least until you get to know them.

You should post a couple of job positions on odesk and interview and give it a
try! Let us know how it goes!

~~~
patrickgzill
A note about being conflicted: if you are paying $300 USD or more per month to
someone in the Philippines, that is already a good (though not "great") wage.
IBM pays about $350-400 USD per month to start, for example.

Outside the country earnings are not taxable to the person doing the work
(under Philippines tax laws), and anywhere outside of metro Manila (say Quezon
City to Sucat and anything in between) you can stretch your dollar even
further.

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byoung2
I've had great results for projects like these using my team in the
Philippines. I recently had a project where I needed information for all
websites in a certain niche (~500 sites). I gave them the specs and created a
Google Spreadsheet with all of the columns I needed. Within an hour or so I
could see the data being populated, and the next morning the project was done.

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augustflanagan
I've spent a good deal of time over the last year hunting for good VAs. Here's
what I've learned.

1\. Hire three of four to start. Give each of them a chunk of the same job (if
it's research) and see who does best. Then use that person to either finish
the project, or give them a couple of new tasks and see how they do on those.

2\. Don't go for the cheapest out there. Earlier today I was hiring someone
for a research position and I literally had multiple people bidding $0.50/hr.
You don't want them.

I usually try to stick with people in the $4.00-$8.00 range. I can't really
afford more than that, and anyone I have ever hired for less than $4.00 has
not worked out at all.

3\. ODesk has a lot of people to choose from. There are quite a few
outsourcing services out there, and I have used a few to find people with
different skill sets. IMO for simple VA tasks odesk is a great place to find
people.

4\. Individuals are better than firms. Obviously there are benefits to both,
but I have tried two Indian firms in the last year and both were a complete
waste of time. Basically there were so many people in the chain between me and
the people doing the actual tasks that what I asked for and what I got were
quite different things. I have had three different filpinos work for me, and
have been really pleased by the results I've gotten.

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michaelaiello
I've been using eLance.com to source VAs for the last 5 years. Went through
the full cycle (trying to do it as cheaply as possible and getting burned.. to
now paying a reasonable rate for a US based VA who I can pick up the phone,
speak with and understand well) Great success with one VA who I hired on a as
a remote sales assistant after working with her for 1 year.

Tips: 1\. If you are paying less than $10 an hour, only assign
operational/procedural tasks. The incentives in this range are to demonstrate
they can "work quickly" so that you keep assigning work. Quality suffers

2\. Expect to pay $500 to $1000 and between 10 and 20 hours of your time
"trying out" a VA.

3\. Create a wiki with lists of commonly asked questions / answers /
information. Have the VA update this with any question that you ask so that
you are only asked questions once. This becomes enormously valuable!

4\. Ask and give feedback reguarly (what can your VA be doing better, and what
can you do better in your business) I've been really suprised by how much
insight someone actually dealing with customers email every day has. I changed
an entire product line because of this.

5\. Do not, under any circumstance, have a VA do fulfilment for you. Pay a
profesional fulfilment service to do it.

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onwardly
A lot of the other comments are spot on. Namely hire selectively, treat it as
you would any relationship, be clear in your instructions and get a sample of
each task before having them spend 10 hours doing the wrong thing.

A lot depends on the kind of work you want them to do, but I recommend hiring
two at a time. One in the $10-15/hr range, and one in the $3/hr range.

The higher paid one is for things that require critical thought, good english,
and reliable judgment. Writing emails, filtering out the useless info provided
by VA#2, managing other tasks.

The $3/hr one is for pure menial labor. For instance, you want to find a group
of blogs on snowboarding to contact regarding your snowboarding product. Have
them return an excel file with the blog name, blogger's first name, blogger's
last name, blog address, link to relevant article. Stuff like that.

The fact is that you're outsourcing work, but not all of that work is the
same. Don't pay someone $15/hr to do stuff that someone can do for $3/hr. And
don't waste your time and money by paying the cheaper VA to do tasks that they
can't do well.

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kljensen
Much more success in philippines than india for me. Used craigslist in both.
In long term work relationship with two people in PI, both amazing. (Happy to
offer more advice if needed.)

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raffi
I tried GetFriday and don't recommend hiring out to an agency like that.

Recently I paid $25 for an ad on Craigslist and hired a marketing assistant to
do tasks similar to the one you're describing. I'm still pretty early into my
business relationship with the person I've contracted. We'll see how it goes.

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iamelgringo
A friend of mine recently hired a PA in San Jose off of Craigslist. He made a
post for a 10 hour a week, Admin/PA that had solid bookeeping skills and knew
their way around QuickBooks. He offered $10 an hour, and at the bottom of the
posting, he said, "And, just to make sure that you've read this entire job
posting, please include the word, 'snap' in your cover letter".

Within 24 hours, he had recieved 120 resumes. 36 of them had actually placed
the word 'snap' in the cover letter. He picked the top 4 of those, and hired
the first one that seemed great.

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fjabre
Shouldn't a virtual assistant by definition be virtual, i.e. a bot or piece of
software that has some AI baked in?

I rather like the idea of "virtual" assistants but you're talking about
outsourcing to cheap offshore labor.

Why can't software do what you describe?

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SteveMorin
Interesting question on VA's has anyone tried crowdflower?

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iamdave
Can I ask why you're opting out of nearshore VA options?

~~~
ujeezy
I'm actually not at all, but figured that places like India and the
Philippines would be cheaper. Do you think the ROI for native English speakers
is higher? I'm absolutely open to all suggestions.

~~~
davidedicillo
My girlfriend found an american VA for $6/h, she was a retired woman with
great experience in the tax sector (my gf was looking for help with her tax
accounting business). I'm sure for that kind of task you could even find high
school students looking for some works. For $5/h much better search on Twitter
than flipping burgers...

~~~
patio11
You can hire American SAHM (stay at home moms) with graduate degrees in almost
any field of your choice for ~$10 an hour.

~~~
derwiki
Do you recommend any sites to help put you in touch with these SAHMs, or just
Craigslist?

~~~
patio11
I'll take a personal introduction over Craigslist any day of the week. Your
relationship is more likely to convert to actually receiving work (people are,
on average, flakes), it will last longer, and on average you'll get better
work done.

You almost have to be a fascist with posting writing jobs on Craigslist
because any solicitation will receive hundreds of applications, many of whom
having writing skills that would be overpriced at "free". You spend as much
time weeding through solicitations as managing your relationship with the
people actually contributing useful work.

That said, some SEO buddies of mine have had success with Craigslist.

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Charuru
For a task like:

>use Google and Twitter to find people who have complained about Home Owner
Association (aka HOA) fees in the past 2 weeks. Please include the source URL
and the person's email or Twitter handle

I have had good experiences with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Maybe you'll find
that helpful too.

~~~
derwiki
Watch out for bots on Mechanical Turk -- I'd add some sort of qualification
test and a good way to reject bad work from people. We were using it to
process 1000s of HITs a day, and the quality got to be so bad that we had to
turn it off.

Charuru, could you speak to your positive experiences? (maybe types of tasks /
HIT volume)

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ddemchuk
Go register an account at onlinejobs.ph and put up a job posting. Clearly list
out what you need done and put together a small test project as their tryout.
Base their wage on similar job postings.

Va's aregreat but you need to respect them and do a great job of managing
them. They aren't wizards nor are they slave labor so respect them and train
them and they can very efficiently help you scale your business.

