[ahmed_ds]

I will try my best to not make this sound like a veiled promotion.

Short answer is you need a VA. What I do mostly act as a filter. I have seen this happen with my clients. People often think that it is just too much hassle to running a small sideproject and not worth the time. But geez man, do you have to do everything?? Why bother with the grunt work. You have caught the lightening in the bottle, but for the rest do not invest any more in terms of emotional commitment.

These are grunt work, you need a task monkey essentially. What I do is just translate this communication in binary response or options to pick. After you made your first dime from a sideproject, you need to outsource support. Everyone complains about bad support on everything they use, but the reality is that you can not afford to commit yourself to do support work. Being entrepreneur means you have to create barrier between things that require emotional investment. You may think hiring a 7 dollar an hour dude from a random country is a risk, but it is worth the gamble if you have a business that is profitable. And the risk is not a big risk. I am not self depracating myself but the reality is VAs like me are "disposable". You try out a VA for a week, see if that person solves your problem, if not try another one.

[meiraleal]

Every grunt work you outsource in place of creating a system to fix it you lose grip of the business you are creating. In your example you used VA but change it for sales. Many technical founders go looking for someone to sell without having any clue about what sales mean. They will have a terrible time finding a reliable partner because they have no clue about the thing they are outsourcing. The same goes for outsourcing the grunt work of developing a successful business. You need to know that, you need to do that. Looking for shortcuts before you succeed is a recipe for failure.

[ahmed_ds]

The issue with sales in particular is that, if you can't figure out sales, don't expect a miracle by partnering up with someone. The sales-technical partnerships I have seen usually start with a great pre-business relationship. And those who have profitable bootstrapped business actually do hire salespeople like they hire me.... as disposable. You give them the initial pitch of what is the product, and you have them on commission-based pay. After the onboarding period ends, you make binary decisions of keeping and firing. Sounds unhealthy from the employees' side but that is side projects and bootstraps work.

[fragmede]

which is to say, the best thing about running a business is that you can just pay someone else to deal with the problems you don't want to. hate invoicing? there's a service for that. hate doing the books? get a bookkeeper.

[ahmed_ds]

I think the difference between a VA and conventional employee is the idea of specialization and frequency. Doing VA work I have to do all things ranging from graphics design to support to crm stuff. Now, I am not the best guy out there to be great at one thing but I will try to be adaquete. The lack of specialization is made up by the fact that VAs are cheap, and you do not have to have that commitment to keep paying for them. If it is a 5 hour work week that will do.

These days, I just have my clients on whatsapp. They give me a random task, I give a deliverable time.

[lofenfew]

VA in this context meaning?

[ahmed_ds]

It is "virtual assistant". Essentially, I as a VA do office work, data entry, design, social media, support, sales stuff etc.

You assign a task to me, and you pay hourly for that task. Or you can just get a weekly contract.

[alxlu]

i think it is "virtual assistant"