After a few mishaps with Sahnaz, we’ve been thinking about that value we’re getting out of our offshore assistant. While there are certainly some entertaining articles about offshore assistants, we have yet to see them become part of the everyday fabric of how people “get things done.” Our experiments with Sahnaz have required us to be pretty thoughtful about structuring tasks, and they have required a high tolerance for mistakes. While this has definitely been entertaining and insightful for us, more recently we have found ourselves asking ourselves if it’s really worth it. The story that follows is a good illustration:

Brooke asked Sahnaz to make a simple purchase - a gift membership to the Tate museum for some newlywed friends. On day 1, Sahnaz told Brooke that the task had been successfully performed (yay!). On day 2, Sahnaz emailed Brooke to say that she had called the Tate to confirm that the purchase had gone through (a thoughtful gesture), and that by coincidence our friend had also purchased a membership the day prior as well. Now, we’re all about strange coincidences - but this just seemed highly unlikely. So Brooke emailed our friends to find out if this was true (it wasn’t). In the meantime, she checked her bank account to find that two memberships had been charged to her. What followed were many back-and-forth emails. The issue was ultimately resolved - but it definitely would have taken less time and hassle for Brooke to have made this purchase herself. Additionally, the surprise of the present wouldn’t have been ruined.

There are two big issues that emerge from this:

1) Sahnaz didn’t identify the possibility that she had accidentally purchased two memberships - instead she simply responded to things she was told (without questioning the accuracy or logic of them)

2) An online purchase is a pretty straightforward task - if this can’t be successfully accomplished on a regular basis, it seems as though the value that offshore assistants (or at least Get Friday) can create is limited

This example, and a few others, have really caused us to identify some fundamental challenges with personal offshore assistants - we don’t believe these challenges are insurmountable, but we do think that until they are resolved the use of offshore assistants will be quite limited:

The internet makes it so easy to do things yourself, do you really need any help at all? - I could have made the Tate purchase on my own in about 10 minutes (only a couple minutes more than what it took me to instruct Sahnaz). Clicking “purchase” can often be easier than telling somebody what to do

So maybe offshore assistants are best used for researching purchasing decisions (versus making the purchases) - that may very well be true. However, offshore assistants lack the local knowledge often needed to get the full scoop. Some readers may remember the turducken - we ultimately purchased a turducken from a place in San Francisco that a friend knew about rather than one of the non-local companies Sahnaz found for us. Yes, websites like Yelp can help - but this doesn’t eliminate the need to develop a clear research question for an offshore assistant to answer. For example, I wouldn’t feel confident in sending Sahnaz a description of my brother and asking her to think about birthday presents for him. I would need to first develop a pretty good idea of what exactly I was looking for, and then have her research it. I think there’s a lot of possibility here for offshore assistants - but it’s important not to underestimate the importance of local knowledge when doing this kind of research

Limited hours means that you often don’t get an immediate response. We don’t count on Sahnaz to respond to a request immediately - we generally give her up to a day to respond. This means that we can’t really use her for emergency situations. Part of this is because Sahnaz has other clients (we don’t have enough work for her to work full time only for us) - but regardless of reason, this poses a limitation

Not physically in the same place. We hear this one a lot. People would like assistants - but they want assistants that can also pick up their dry cleaning. Obviously, this can’t be done from afar. But it does make us wonder if there isn’t a model whereby there are local personal assistants use offshore assistants in order to expand their capacity and drive down costs (thereby broadening the type of client they can serve). This could achieve the “best of both worlds” - cheap research but the option of getting you dry cleaning picked up

Not actually all that cheap. Get Friday isn’t dirt cheap - it’s ~$9 per hour for us (and possibly more for new customers), with a 10-hour per month commitment. That’s about the same as the minimum wage in California. Granted, this rate includes all overhead, recruiting (we don’t have to find talent), some data security, and some protection against fraud (though through Indian law, so we’re not sure how much that holds), etc. - it’s our “all in” cost. That being said, we believe that there are a lot of workers in the U.S. making the minimum wage who are similarly or perhaps more qualified than the people at Get Friday. Additionally, $9 began to sound like a lot to us when we realized that Claudia, our Argentinian web designer, charges a much lower hourly rate for much higher skilled work

At this point, we feel like we’re ready to take on some other personal outsourcing experiments in order to help develop our thinking in this area. For example, might we be able to find an assistant in Argentina - perhaps even through Claudia? What about trying out Brooke’s sister, Cassidy?

We welcome any suggestions or ideas - after all, this blog is about experiments. And we think that we have enough data about the Get Friday experience to be able to speak about it in an informed way. We’re ready for a new experiment!

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