I am a big advocate of low-cost virtual assistant program Fancyhands: $35 per month for up to 15 tasks requested by email. I’ve posted some pretty complicated requests over the last 6 months or so that I’ve been subscribed. People ask me about the service often, so I thought I’d show readers here how it’s been going over the last few months. It’s been interesting. Like so many things in life, I think you may get out of it what you take the time to put in.
Below is a picture of my email inbox, with a search for the Fancyhands threads. Below that is a more detailed discussion of each request, but the high level take-aways seem to be: I’m not remembering to use anywhere near my full quota, many of the tasks I request aren’t working out so well but the ones that are working out have been great.
You might think: Marshall, you need to make simpler requests – those are the ones that get the best results. But you’d be surprised at the crazy requests I’ve gotten great results from in months past! Like: send me a spreadsheet of every daily newspaper in the US, its name, its location and its URL. No problem! That was great. I think it depends largely on who happens to answer my request on the other end. I’ve gotten some really sophisticated responses and some really frustrating ones.
1. Most recently I asked the Fancies to find out the name of a browser that Hilary Mason told me about and that my friend Tyler Gillies knew about too, but I couldn’t remember the name of. I said it was a browser that developer types used that let you download all the text on a page in a scrape-type dump. The reply I got back: most developers use Firefox. So…that one didn’t work out so well. I’ve gotten great replies from Fancyhands before for questions like this though.
2. I asked for an OPML file (a bundle of RSS feeds) of the blogs of the top 15 tech incubators in the US, as determined by an analyst firm whose list I sent in my email. This is unusual: it took two weeks to get the results! They worked out great though and I really appreciate it. Good thing I wasn’t in a hurry 🙂 To be honest the file needed some cleaning up too before I could use it. It looked like someone had Googled for how to create an OPML file, found my own directions from this blog and then done a fairly clumsy job of it. Hey, it was almost free and I didn’t have to do it myself!
3. In this request, I had this crazy idea that someone had built a Greasemonkey script or that there might be some javascript out there that I could tweak that would let me hover over the linked-to Twitter messages now posted on Techmeme and preview them in some sort of pop-up, without having to load a whole new page. This was a fairly freaky request and sure enough, it didn’t end so well. The person who responded at Fancyhands said they sent multiple email requests for help to Twitter Headquarters! LOL. I wrote back, as calmly as I could, and asked “you didn’t mention my name in those emails, did you?” Thankfully, they said they did not. I let that thread end right there.
4. Twitter usernames for the same top 15 tech incubators mentioned above: boom – one day, perfect results. Way to go Fancies.
5. Taking dogs to Europe: what are the rules and restrictions? Quarantine required, etc? Got a real succinct, helpful answer that same evening. Someone Googled and summarized, so I didn’t have to. Worked out great.
6. Customer reviews of retirement communities, and one in particular. This basically doesn’t exist, it appears. Neither I nor the Fancies could find any good sites for this. Next week I will ask Fancyhands to build me just such a site. Kidding!
7. Twitter list of music service employees. This one worked out really well. I used this as a foundation to build one of my favorite Twitter lists and to write this blog post.
8. Please make a Twitter list out of Time Magazine’s Top Twitter Accounts to Follow. This worked out great. Same day, good results.
9. Sprint news summary. I was headed to a telecom conference and asked the Fancies to summarize top news stories over the last 6 months about Sprint. They had done a real good job on a related background research request earlier and had some hopes for this request. Unfortunately, the respondent sent me back 5 crappy links that weren’t good for much and were barely on topic. I said so in an email response and they emailed me back Google News search result URLs for 5 different search terms on the topic. Not so hot.
In summary: It looks like I got 6 solid enough responses over the last 2 months, out of 9 attempts. That means I paid a little over $10 per successful response. I can live with that, for now. I should have thought about more requests to make, as I paid for up to 70 in that time period. I just haven’t taken the time to think of ideas often enough, though. Some months past I’ve sent more requests and gotten some really dazzling responses.
I think it’s a tool I’m still learning to use. That’s been my most recent experience with the service. In case you were wondering, and I know some of you have been.