
Show HN: Make Me Work – a solution to procrastination - sixhobbits
https://make-me-work.com
======
sixhobbits
Hey HN, creator here. I've been thinking about remote personal assistants for
a while, but it's quite a bit to get off the ground. After publishing a book
recently and realising how important the role of my editor was, mainly just in
her role of checking that I was writing, and helping me set short-term
deadlines, I decided on productivity assistants instead.

I hope to grow the idea into a full-blown PA service (people who can organize
phonecalls and other admin tasks for you), but for now these people will be
around to talk to you and help keep you productive.

Feedback on the idea, site, or anything else would be highly appreciated.

Specifically:

\- Do you see the need for a service like this?

\- Do _you_ need a service like this?

\- How much would you be willing to pay for a service like this?

As mentioned in the pricing page, I'm giving a trial of the service free for
the first 5 members (1 month each), so feel free to be one of those five if
you're working on a project at the moment and battling to find motivation to
put in the hours.

~~~
magic_beans
The site's design is very lovely EXCEPT for the drawer menu. I spent a couple
minutes looking for more information before I finally realized I ought to
click the menu drawer. It was frustrating after committing the time to read
through the front page.

Design suggestion: put your 4 drawer items into the main nav so a user can
immediately find more detail after reading the intro page.

~~~
novium
Possibly a call-to-action-like button or something similar would be nice as
well.

Otherwise I certainly like the idea

~~~
brudgers
I would say a call-to-action button is a necessary change if a high priority
goal is to be a business.

~~~
sixhobbits
Thanks for the feedback! As I'm running this solo and on the side for now, the
priority for me is experimentation and to see if I can find even 5 people who
would be keen on the idea. If it goes well I'll definitely completely change
the pricing page and add a call-to-action on the main page.

~~~
geoelectric
Just make sure you know what you're getting into. The type of coaching you
describe is something people typically get training for. It goes past simple
project management skills since you're dealing 1:1 with their personalities
and other life considerations as well.

Even if you don't bring those into the conversation they'll play hell with the
results--that may mean it's unavoidable to bring them into the conversation as
"blockers" or "risks" and that potentially opens a can of worms.

One suggestion I'd throw out is to do the market research to figure out how
many people have severe enough procrastination issues to benefit from your
services, but who are otherwise sufficiently well-adjusted to not be more than
you could handle. How many people out there really do just need another pair
of eyes and a nudge, but are sufficiently isolated that they would have to
turn to this kind of service to get them?

Otherwise you might find yourself in a non-existent niche between people who
just needed a todo program and people who actually need serious help. If you
don't screen out that second type somehow, assuming you're not set up to
handle them, they'll potentially confound your scaling calculations by being
exceedingly high maintenance and they'll have a bad experience as well.

~~~
sixhobbits
Very good point. I definitely don't want (in the extreme case) suicidal
customers who expect me to fix their problems! The "market research" I've done
has been extremely informal and involved me describing the idea to some
academics (mainly master's/PhD candidates and a couple of freelancers). I've
had mainly positive feedback on the idea -- from people who lean more towards
your "just need a todo program" than "need serious help". I'll definitely put
some thought into screening out the latter group, as neither I nor the PAs
will be qualified to deal with them.

------
andrewfromx
why use a dot com domain and dashes? There are so many new top level domain
options now. What about dowork.club or procrast.stopper just anything other
than .com and dashes in the domain! You might as well have a "the" in there
too :)

~~~
sixhobbits
A few other people (outside of hn) have complained about the dashes :) I'm
considering alternatives!

I do still think that .com is preferable, both because it's the first thing a
lot of people try if they only remember the name and not the TLD, and because
a lot of the new TLDs (especially .club and others that you can get on
namecheap's 88c deal) are being used for pretty crummy businesses. Obviously
if I can get to top of Google results for a couple of decent queries, neither
problem matters too much.

~~~
andrewfromx
i really like the people running [http://get.club](http://get.club) they are
helping us at every step. Lot of professional sports people moving to dot
club.

------
rmasis
I think it is definitely a neat idea! I would use this-- but not right now.

