

Show HN: We built a crowd-powered virtual assistant - anandkulkarni
https://premier.mobileworks.com

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qeorge
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.

~~~
prayag
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).

~~~
hollerith
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.

~~~
prayag
>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.

------
stfu
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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
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.

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jonwinstanley
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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
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.

~~~
jonwinstanley
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?

~~~
anandkulkarni
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.

~~~
_lex
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.

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idiot900
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?

~~~
unreal37
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.

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joshaidan
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.

~~~
prayag
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.

~~~
ajiang
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?

~~~
prayag
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

~~~
aymeric
Could you please link to that platform?

~~~
prayag
I did in the previous post. <https://www.mobileworks.com>

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

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digisth
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.

~~~
prayag
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.

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morganb180
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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
Thanks a bunch! Look forward to seeing you.

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eggbrain
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?

~~~
prayag
>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.

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cpfohl
[http://help.mobileworks.com/customer/portal/articles/952047-...](http://help.mobileworks.com/customer/portal/articles/952047-faq?t=233980)
#10 has typo: s/reesults/results/

~~~
prayag
Fixed. Thanks.

------
timedoctor
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?

~~~
anandkulkarni
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.

------
sl4yerr
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.

~~~
anandkulkarni
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...](https://docs.google.com/a/fairtradework.com/document/d/1jzhwWDXTCHxXFsK94NLKbYeEtqHTkHw0G_t8kzxq6QI/edit#)

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

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

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

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

~~~
unreal37
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

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

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

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btbuildem
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?

~~~
anandkulkarni
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!

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eclipxe
Looks very nice. Look forward to trying it soon.

~~~
anandkulkarni
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.

~~~
unreal37
I just sent an email to try it out. Fingers crossed it works well.

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amip17
This looks great!

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MediaSquirrel
Nice work guys!

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

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omarchowdhury
Who are the VAs?

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vaprem911
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.

~~~
prayag
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...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-do-you-clear-or-delete-the-
customer-object-s-active-card)

~~~
unreal37
That's a good answer.

