Ask YC: How to hire a good virtual assistant for a startup?

[deltapoint]

I am looking to hire a virtual assistant or work with an outsourcing company like brickworkindia.com or getfriday.com. Does anybody have any particular suggestions? On either the best company to work with or the best manner to work with a virtual assistant? Thanks.

[Cmccann7]

I've used several virtual assistants from oDesk in the past 3 months for time sensitive tasks and couldn't have been happier.

With oDesk the quality of VA is a lot more variable so I would make sure to check out their ratings and past reviews.

Also a quick hack I used is hire 10 VA's for 1 hours each to do a small project or piece of a larger project. Review their work and pick the one who did it the best with the least self direction.

[deltapoint]

Good idea... I am definitely planning on microtesting the different possibilities...

Do you think oDesk and the like is suitable for larger projects or would going with an agency?

Also, did you do anything on your end to ensure that you could get the best work out of them?

[raffi]

I tried getfriday.com for a week and then let them go. I used my VA primarily for research tasks.

One task I tried: find me a plain-text format wordlist of technology jargon. Specifically, I want a flat text file with each word on its own line. She billed several hours and provided me with websites I initially found on a google search.

When I started with getfriday.com, my access to their customer interface wasn't working. I tried calling their toll-free support number and received a "beep" rather than a greeting from a business. When I wrote in to cancel my account, the VA manager contacted me and I let him know about these issues. He was very attentive on the phone, but ultimately... I closed my account.

To their credit, getfriday.com let me close my account with zero hassle and they didn't charge me for the trial period.

YMMV.

[dotBen]

I think it very much depends on what you want them to do... However I have friends who have contracted with great success VA-type work to people who live locally (San Francisco in this instance but it could be anywhere you happen to live/work).

They're still 'virtual' in that they work from home - but the benefit is they are on the same timezone, understand local requests ("book me a table at that fish restaurant on the embarcadero") and can easily deal with the logistics of processing receipts/paperwork etc (better delivered locally than sent abroad or have to be scanned in).

I think the VA's tend to be stay-at-home mom types, etc and are found through contact network.

It's probably more expensive than paying someone in Vietnam $2/hr but allows them to be 'customer facing' if needs be.

[mahipal]

What kinds of things could a VA do for a startup?

EDIT: After Googling around to answer my own question, I'm still not sure about start-up specific tasks. But you might find the results of this survey useful:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/06/the-personal...

[mkull]

HR, scheduling, to name a couple

[timesvr]

you can try TimeSvr out (timesvr.com). We're fast, cheap,efficient and 24/7. Different packages to choose from for different needs, a quick google should give you an idea of our service.

TimeSvr - Save Time Get Things Done

[jaredhansen]

www.solvate.com. Like odesk/elance, but curated so as not to suck. I'm not affiliated with them but I'm a very happy (so far) customer, since April '10 on a variety of projects. Good luck.

[iamdave]

Check my profile for email. This is practically what I do for a living.

[jonsen]

Shouldn't you know then, that @ is not shift+2 on all keyboards ;-)