

Outsource Tasks, GMail, Yahoo!, ZipCar, etc to India - $30/mo - Coupon BETA for a free month - vlad
http://www.asksunday.com

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rms
I've got a different capital intensive idea that could be very profitable.
It's in biotech which has a lot of things that truly are capital intensive,
like proving product safety to the government.

Synthesize 7-hydroxy-mitragynine and get it approved by the FDA for the
treatment of severe chronic pain. It takes many millions of dollars but
there's an enormous market for a new painkiller that is as powerful as
fentanyl and measurably less addictive.

Oxycontin is pretty much taboo after the enormous settlement they paid.
There's always money in the legal drugs business. The patent holder for
formulations of 7-hydroxy-mitragynine would need to be much more responsible
about marketing than the Oxycontin suppliers. Mitragynine alkaloids are
atypical opiates that are less addictive than the opiates in the poppy plant.

7-hydroxy-mitragynine is the main active alkaloid in kratom, but kratom is not
currently approved for sale as a drug or supplement in America. Getting it
approved as a supplement would take millions which no kratom vendor other than
wholesaleshamanicherbs has.

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martin
It may be worth noting that other well-established companies like Your Man In
India have been offering remote personal assistant services for some time.
Timothy Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Work Week" has an entire chapter on how to
outsource your life to India. Pretty entertaining. $30/mo is an attractive
price point, though.

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sbraford
I tried something similar a while back.

Results were quite lackluster.

Perhaps these companies make the service much more enticing by providing
necessary training on the other side of the world?

From my experience:

Was paying an Indian guy $10/hour to find potential advertisers for one of my
sites. (not rocket surgery by any means) It took the guy 1 hour (or so he
says) to do what I could do in 15 minutes. That's a real rate of $40/hour,
quite expensive for an entry-level American of course.

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swhnorton
While USD $30 is only 1200 INR, one agent can probably handle more than six or
seven clients.

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sudhirc
$30/mo=INR1200/mo

India is not that cheap yet ...

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rms
Starting this company required a significant capital investment.

What's the best thing for someone with a capital intensive idea to do?

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vlad
I don't know too much about them (I'm about to sign up right now) but I think
one could start a similar service on a YCombinator investment.

~~~
rms
did you save the much longer post you had here before?

I think filling out a Y Combinator application for a company building a
platform that allows the outsourcing of simple tasks that require an
email/phone call would be a great exercise. That app would be the best place
to put ideas about why an improved copy of this company could be very
profitable/liquid.

Beyond personal assistants, you can create interchangeable overseas office
workers.

Email's in my profile, anyone can email me that would like to collaborate on
said app. I think we could try and build a demo screencast for YC app
submission. We'd assign equity in any resulting company by using the Cambrian
House model of defining specific tasks that give you a certain amount of
equity.

~~~
vlad
Yes, I wrote 12 paragraphs that you must have seen, but I then edited down to
one sentence. It wasn't edited properly and I had no time to do it. The point
of it was basically the same thing you just said.

(I apologize for the lack of editing) I don't know too much about them (I'm
about to sign up right now) but I think one could start a similar service on a
YCombinator investment. If I were to do something like this, I'd create the
web site and back-end for customers, support agents, and admins so customers
could sign up and store account info, agents see questions and customer
history and could reply via the web site when they're done, and admins could
track quality of service. You would have two or three founders answer the
e-mails from other YCombinator companies to get a feel on the most-common
requested tasks/services.

During a 1 month period after private launch where you track what people ask
for, you would also code a system where only trusted agents would actually
have access to the client's files, such as logging in to their yahoo! account,
and then pass the data the user wanted to another support agent who
specializes in generic, non-sensitive data who themselves could be outsourced
eventually.

For example, when somebody asks for a Contact's map and directions in their
Yahoo! account that they forgot to print out, an American would find that
e-mail and send it to the 2nd level assistant who works for much less (on
premises or outsourced) to finish the task.

After a few months, you'd identify higher-profit niches like those companies
who use Google Office and cater to those companies via Google's API, setting
higher prices and better/faster support. For example, transcribing a document
via phone into Google Writely, making it look nice, saving it and attaching it
to an e-mail via Google Mail. Eventually, you'd automate that aspect, too.

Another example might be listing a bunch of items on eBay every day from a
spreadsheet with titles and descriptions pulled from similar items already on
eBay.

Since the company, at root, would be a software company, it could come out
with way more automation and plug-n-play support for latest API's than a
regular staffing company.

The benefit to society is that any foreign person who wants to improve their
life and have a computer job, and save customers time and money, will be able
to be plugged into the system.

The fun of life is to improve, not to have. Americans would outsource to
Indians. Indians could use this to outsource to others. The buck might be
passed down to those who use the $100 laptops in undeveloped countries
eventually.

Everybody learns, everybody improves, everybody focuses on productivity, not
face-time.

Those for whom the dollar would make a big difference, proudly earn money, buy
clean water, move to a city, etc, and start their own competitive businesses.
Those for whom saving 30 minutes is more important than a few dollars also
benefit. Everybody advances.

Instead of getting money from charities, those in 3rd world countries would
learn math and computer skills by working for their money which goes a long
way. Giving somebody a buck doesn't teach them anything. On the other hand,
very few people in America don't have access to clean water, or things like
that. Instead of spending an hour researching a good $1,000 television to buy,
people could save that time and pay $5-20 for the research. All of a sudden,
you just helped someone pay their electric and internet bill for the entire
month, and all without the hassles of charities or needing to be rich to make
a change in the world.

You'd get bought out by Google for 50 million dollars by March of next year.
What do you think, pg and paul?

