"Unlimited" Virtual Assistant Services and Specialty VAs?
My validation: does anyone need this service?
I want to create a VA service that isn't limited on a per hour basis (just a flat monthly fee), depending on the type of tasks. I attached an image of the pricing below.
"Unlimited" with a no-hour cap sounds impossible, I know. The reason I structured it to be flexible is because some VA's tend to be faster at certain tasks than others and it's hard to gauge exactly how long, say, research tasks would take for one business. Combining data entry + research jobs often doesn't take more than 2-3 hours a day. It also puts less pressure on the client to delegate extra tasks if need be.
I still don't have a target market (maybe startup founders?), and I don't know if limiting the number of tasks is the way to go yet. So I need some data and validation.
Here's the rough landing page I created for it: https://amazingva.landen.co/
Would love to hear from you all!
The idea is interesting. What's the actual user benefit? Is it the vetting process? Some kind of guarantee?
I'm quite familiar with hiring VAs in South-East Asia and I've worked with fantastic people. I'm quite sure many of the VAs I've worked with would agree to work on a monthly basis with us.
Emphasize the benefits and add more details such as how the vetting process looks like. What happens after I purchase a package? What happens if something goes wrong?
As a user my concern is that I don't know who the VAs are and what kind of vetting they've gone through.
Check out Toptal as an example. It's pretty clear what they do and why people to choose them.
User benefit would be the ease of finding a reliable VA and the flexibility in what they could do. I'm still working on the vetting process, but there is definitely a quality guarantee! There wouldn't need to be any contracts signed either because they would have signed with us to protect our clients (although it is also okay if the clients prefer to have a separate NDA with their VA).
Thanks for the suggestions! It's given me some great insight on which direction I should go. I'm still at the infancy stage, testing out processes, reaching out to potential customers - 5 days in and I've already got my first paying client (although it's just the week-long trial).
I used to work for a VA service, and I can tell you there is demand for unlimited service, yet it's a nightmare to balance out internally if you don't have caps in place.
However, it's a great way to get potential customer's attention, test the waters, establish which processes you can truly support/specialize in, and so forth.
Are you thinking of this as a double-sided marketplace, or would you be interviewing/hiring/training the VAs? Do you have a sense of the going rate for talent qualified for bookkeeping?
I was worried about this. In my experience as a VA, clients have rarely been unreasonable about their tasks (although I may have just been lucky), and there are certain types of tasks that take more time/skill than others. This is what I based my pricing on.
Depending on what overwhelms the balance, I might have to put caps in place for either the hours or number of tasks at a time. I still don't know which one is the best route to go.
I will be the one interviewing/hiring/training. Basically, after a package is purchased, we will be matching the client with the VA best suited to their needs. I think it would be easier for the client not to search through directories.
What was your experience working with a VA service? I've always worked on a freelance basis so I'm not sure what kind of regulations you had to put in place and those other technicalities.
Keep in mind that, since this is a subscription service, you'll have to be upfront to early customers that the 'unlimited' part of the pricing may go away. It will be a pain to deal with legacy pricing (trust me), so maybe spin this into a limited time offer (scarcity sells), and they'd get unlimited for 30 days.
What were they being sold? Traditional VA services like data entry/email tasks, or more of this advanced bookkeeping, social media management? In my experience, there will be clients who will expect $10,000 quality of service for $999/mo.
A 1000% this, this is the biggest win that you need to remind them of - you spare them the hassle of putting out a req, sifting through resumes, setting up interviews, actual interviews, hiring, training, paperwork, etc. etc. etc. If they're looking for a VA, they're likely already done the mental math of how much of a headache this would save them - but it's worth capitalizing on that and reassuring them they've found THE perfect solution.
I worked as a Product Manager for Invisible Tech, who would hire talent from S. America, Africa, SEAsia for hourly compensation.
One clarification: one client would get one or two VAs, and only those VAs would work their requests (baring exceptional cases)?
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I agree on the task classification. This will help you manage the chaos. I think you could make good money just applying to jobs for people, collecting emails, or any one task that has a huge market.
I stumbled upon this after searching for virtual assistants. I run a similar service called Marti (https://makisu.co/pages/sme) with a different pricing model: we run both time-based tasks that go for $19/hour and output-based tasks that we quote based on a discovery call and a free trial with a VA assigned to the client's task.
We also measure the performance of our VAs in our CRM so we know which tasks to assign to VAs who are efficient in them (do them fast for clients), if the VA has worked with the client before, and if the VA has specific domain knowledge in the task (e.g. we partnered with a design studio in the Philippines to do a lot of the graphic design tasks).
This way, the customer knows that what they're paying is actually fair and consistent across their lifetime, which could potentially increase LTV -- you wouldn't want one VA performing 50% slower than another VA that historically completed the task 50% faster and get billed the same rate.
We're actually looking to white-label our platform so that other VA firms can leverage their manpower on our platform or our tech on their own platform. Would love to hop on a call with you if this seems interesting. Might be a way to boost sales to both of our services. My details are in my Indiehackers profile.
How interesting! Since the post, I've rebranded and fine-tuned some of the processes but would love to chat further :)
Where will you draw the line of what classifies as a 'task', paying hourly means if the client starts requesting changes/more you're getting paid for that extra time too, however with a fixed fee you'll have to either be very strict with what the task entails from the start, or price to allow some flexibility in the clients requirements. Saying that I have no experience with VA's so it might be me misunderstanding, but based on my time as a freelance developer, fixed pricing can sometimes mean running down your profits for demanding clients.
The pricing is based on the types of tasks you can ask from your VA. It's easy to price with the basic and standard package, but when it comes to adding skilled/creative tasks, that's when it gets difficult to gauge a limit.
For example: with simple, repetitive tasks like data entry it's generally easier to predict how long it would take versus things like creating content.
My experience with clients as a VA has never been too demanding or unreasonable, but maybe I'm just lucky. At the end of the day, the VA is there to help take time off your hands and take care of things in the back end - usually, these are processes that are already put in place so changes are rare.
Still, you do have a point and at the moment I'm just testing the waters. Thanks for your comment!