Assistable?
Skilled Assistants for Everyone!
Achieved the goal of recruiting 500 US and Canada based skilled assistants today, all of whom are remote workers and I'm very excited to start working on the next objectives.
One of the most important "big picture" reasons for launching Assistable was to create equal opportunities for as many people as possible, so it feels really good to see the diversity of people from all backgrounds across our skilled assistant workforce.
At the moment we're only recruiting US & Canada based remote workers, but next year I'll open it up to other countries. I'm being extremely careful about not growing too fast because I've seen other competitors do this and it's caused them big problems.
In the process of recruiting 500 skilled assistants I've learnt that people love our mission and that they're willing to go to great lengths to help us achieve it, this is something that's taken me by surprise and overwhelmed me a little bit but it's also a huge source of inspiration and motivation to keep going.
In the spirit of "doing things that don't scale" I created a funnel that includes a video being sent from me with an open ended question. This video has led to a lot of extremely valuable telephone conversations and relationship building, and Assistable is beginning to feel like a "movement", it feels incredible.
I've wanted to build a marketplace like this for a long time but put it off for many reasons, not least of which being I know how difficult it will be to compete in this space.
However, two things spurred me into action, the first was a Tweet by Paul Graham about how he'd like to see something to help stay at home moms.
But the thing that really got me fired up the most was watching a BBC documentary by journalist Ellie Flynn about stay at home moms being exploited by MLM companies, it sickened me and I just knew my ideas about building a marketplace differently could create a better alternative for them, and it viscerally feels like a problem worth working on.
I did a lot of research and in-depth competitive analysis on the well-established competitors and realized there are some huge weaknesses in their platforms and some massive gaps and opportunities in the remote working space and decided to go ahead with the idea of "Assistable? We can help!".
Here's a video about the BBC documentary by Ellie Flynn:
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