Work at GetFriday can’t get any more hectic. Sign ups happening by the minute and everyone working round the clock and against it to assign assistants to clients on or before the announced deadline of 3 weeks. That has pretty much been the scenario everyday over the last month.
On American Independance Day, our staffers on the US shift are taking a welcome break from work and hopefully should come back refreshed.
Lot of reviews / blog posts about GetFriday have appeared on the web recently! Most of them nice and a few brickbats too, especially about our slow sign up process. We fixed a part of the problem by allowing people to download the sign up form, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of not having enough capacity. We are working on it.
The other issue was that people got confused with our YourManInIndia (YMII) service and posted random tasks and even paid in advance there. Tim Ferriss for some reason continued to think of YMII for virtual assistance when he wrote the book, though GetFriday(Sister Concern of YMII) has been in existence for the last 22 months. The people in that division (YMII) handle a different set of things and aren’t equipped to handle virtual assistance and that caused a lot of confusion and delay in response to prospective client queries. We actually zeroed in on the particular task in YMII where people were ordering and put a clear sign saying ‘For virtual assistance, please go to GetFriday, kindly don’t post your requirement here’. That seemed to have worked.
To put the record straight, YMII is a concierge service in India which is capable of handling any kind of tasks (that require physical presence) in India. Typically clients are NRIs (Non Resident Indians) and sometimes could be people of any nationality wanting to get something done in India.
GetFriday, on the other hand is the sister service of YMII that provides virtual assistant service to global clients. Any thing that can be handled by a graduate VA and does not require our physical presence in the place where task is executed is game for GetFriday. At present we offer only a English language service, but there are many inquiries for German and French services. We may look at providing those in the future.
Our web tracking team found these perspectives about Outsourcing or GetFriday, interesting or useful.
1) 50 ways to increase your productivity – Kim Roach at LifeHack.org
2) 10 Ways of overcoming Outsourcing objections – Jon Symons at ArtofMoney.org
(Incidentally, Jon posted 10 reasons why he won’t outsource a few days earlier before he become a convert to outsourcing)
3) Case study on outsourcing – Ryan Norbauer at NotRocketSurgery.com
4) Hired an assistant – Tony Rush on WAHM.com
5) Hiring a virtual PA – Ryan Carson on Carsonified.com
6) The Optimized Life – ‘Sparky looking young woman’ at TheOptimizedLife.com.
7) Four Hour Workweek for Parents – Amy Tiemann at CNET Blogs.
8 ) How to more efficiently make money online – MonetizeTraffic.com
9) Outsource or die – HarryBrelsford/SMB Nation on CAworld.com. (pdf file)
10) GetFriday : The Online Assistant – Adam at OutsideTheValley.com
11) Killer Startups – KillerStartups.com
With the wave of interest in this service, there are bound to be cases where we can’t or don’t possibly meet the expectation of clients despite best efforts. You can be sure that GetFriday will analyze all such occurances and work towards rectifying them, sooner than later.
Happy Independance Day to all our American clients and folks.
-GetFriday Team
