Show HN: We built a crowd-powered virtual assistant

I like the concept. We're just starting to use VAs effectively, and it would be nice to have a utility-billed VA service instead of having to go to fiverr or oDesk.<p>I don't like the pricing model. I was hoping for an a la carte VA service; I don't want to pick a plan!<p>But if you stick with plans, I have 2 small suggestions for the sales page:<p>1) "Starting at $6/hour" threw me off. That's the price of the biggest plan, which is 40/hours a week! If I have 40/week of VA work, I'll just hire a VA from oDesk!<p>Instead I would list the price you expect me to pay (with the most popular plan). It looks like that's $10/hour here. Otherwise I've anchored at $6/hour and its going to be an uphill battle to sell me on a 2x increase.<p>2) Make one of the plans the "default"! The pricing table has 4 options, but none are highlighted as the most popular/suggested/default. The little flag actually makes Ultra look like the default at first glance, which I don't think is the intention.<p>Hope that helps! It looks like a very compelling service.

From my experience VA are really difficult to pick. I usually get tasks done by 2-3 people at the same time.<p>The tricky aspect is, that while it is cheap, it takes quite some time to train people to do stuff "right". Even if it is just simple stuff, like find x and add it to an excel file, there are huge discrepancies between different VAs.<p>If you don't have at least to people on one task, the question is if you really want to make somebody understand what their errors were, or if you just pay another person in the hopes they have half a brain and get things right.<p>But the effort of finding the right person is definitely worth it if you can establish an ongoing relationship. If this is not an option, it is almost pointless.

This service looks really well thought out.<p>I am currently looking for a service exactly like this however, rather than a pay by week service, I'd really like to pay per task or to be able to buy blocks of time, maybe 10 hours at a time.<p>I realise that may mean I am not your target market, but I feel that getting to the bottom of my current to do list may only take 10 hours of someones time. So I don't really want to sign up to a pay weekly type service and have to remember to cancel.<p>Also - I would not want to have to split my tasks into ones to sort out this week and ones for next week. I'd like to get them all done at once.

For $6 an hour, how is this profitable? How easy can it be to find <i>intelligent</i>, <i>English-fluent</i> people with bachelor's degrees, anywhere in the world, who are willing to work for the fraction of that sum which is left after overhead costs and profit margin are taken out?

I noticed they don't talk about where they get their virtual assistants from. Do they hire them themselves, or do they recruit them from another agency? How do I sign up to work as a virtual assistant for them?<p>Oh well, I guess that's part of their trade secrets.

I haven't used this service from MW in particular, but I did use the pay-as-you-go one for web research stuff a few times and had excellent results. They were quick, and gave me exactly what I asked for. Good customer service too.

Very cool. I was skeptical but your page did a nice job of showing benefits and differentiating yourself from other providers. Thanks for sharing and good luck. I'll be sure to try it out in the near future.

I'm not familiar with the virtual assistant space, but my question is:<p>Let's say I have the Lite plan, 5 hours/week. I then ask to get something done, like one of your examples:<p>"Please create a professional powerpoint presentation from the attached research paper with no more than 12 slides."<p>Do I also tell you how long to spend time on it as well? I might think I could get 10 tasks done with my lite plan, only to find out that the PowerPoint presentation takes 5 hours to complete. How do I budget what tasks can be done within my plan?

<a href="http://help.mobileworks.com/customer/portal/articles/952047-faq?t=233980" rel="nofollow">http://help.mobileworks.com/customer/portal/articles/952047-...</a> #10 has typo: s/reesults/results/

I have had a full time VA for many years now and she does all sorts of things for me, including purchasing items using my credit cards, research in buying a new couch ... and on-going research and promotional work for our business.<p>I'm hesitant about the concept of having multiple different people working on your tasks. I think this is ok for standardised tasks where there is a process that is followed every time. It's difficult if you have varied tasks. How can you develop trust in the relationship with a VA?

I see where you'e going with this, but I might change your examples a little bit. There's a very fine line between just a simple Google search and a lot of what you're showing there. It might make sense to demonstrate something that requires more human intervention. The file conversion example is a good one, and maybe expand more on assembling trip itineraries, etc. IOTW, things that actually would take up a lot of time, where the value of the site would be more clearly demonstrated.

Most of the requests seem made up, thats just my opinion though.

I didn't have my window maximized when I clicked "pricing" and this happened:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/w7IAIyD.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/w7IAIyD.png</a>

Can I use this as an API for govt bureaucracy?<p>Eg, provide documents with directives and have my taxes filed, my companies incorporated, etc etc?

Looks very nice. Look forward to trying it soon.

This looks great!

Nice work guys!

''Single assistant shared amount multiple clients'' instead of among.

Who are the VAs?

Looks like they hold on to your Credit Card info FOREVER in ETERNITY! = Shady. What else could "pause" mean?<p>From their FAQ Page:<p>Can I cancel my account? Yes. Just sign in and pause your account. We will stop charging you from the next billing cycle going forward.