Make The Most Of Your Startup With A Virtual Personal Assistant
If you are working on your startup, and wish you weren’t plagued by innumerable pesky tasks, there is a new way to outsource small tasks to Virtual Personal Assistants without spending a lot of money. Amazon's Mechanical Turk lets you find helpers for small tasks, get unbiased participants for a survey you might otherwise spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to fund, or have small projects completed to satisfaction.
Basically, your time suckers can become someone else’s bread and butter. Lindsay Harper spent $28.00 surveying 200 people about her business concept. She asked questions of her survey subjects, such as whether they would ever use the service she was considering providing, and give an example of how they saw themselves using it. Besides her request for feedback, she was able to gather demographic information to better identify her target market.
“The Information I got back for my $27.50 was invaluable. I found from that one survey, how to basically build my product for launch,” she writes. “What features I had to have based on how users would use the service. I also realized that I could basically cut my current feature set in half because what I thought people would want, wasn’t even mentioned. “
Rob Walling, author of Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup
In it, he notes, “The value propositions of a VA deals with how you monetize your time. If you monetize it at $50 per hour and you can pay a VA $6 per hour to handle administrative tasks, this frees up time for you to create real value in your business by developing new features or expanding marketing efforts. Performing tasks you could pay someone else $6 to accomplish is a foolish use of an entrepreneur’s time.”
Walling agrees with Harper regarding her money saving strategy of putting Mechanical Turk to work for her. He goes on to offer many excellent tips about how to find and easily evaluate virtual assistants. “My first piece of advice is to avoid spending too much time worrying about screening your VA before you hire them. In the end, how well they work out depends entirely on how well they accomplish their tasks.” Hiring a VA will allow you to judge their reliability as well as their efficiency firsthand. Walling suggests you assign the first task with the following tasks:
- Provide screenshots, or clear, detailed instructions about what you want
- Back everything you send up
- Do time box requests to your VA, but assume that a new VA will not be as quick as you are.
- Provide a clear, attainable timeline.
If you hire a virtual assistant who doesn’t work out for you, get another one. Most people find a suitable VA after a short amount of time working through the process.
Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup
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