Item — HN Reader

Hey HN, creator here. I've been thinking about remote personal assistants for a while, but it's quite a bit to get off the ground. After publishing a book recently and realising how important the role of my editor was, mainly just in her role of checking that I was writing, and helping me set short-term deadlines, I decided on productivity assistants instead.

I hope to grow the idea into a full-blown PA service (people who can organize phonecalls and other admin tasks for you), but for now these people will be around to talk to you and help keep you productive.

Feedback on the idea, site, or anything else would be highly appreciated.

Specifically:

- Do you see the need for a service like this?

- Do you need a service like this?

- How much would you be willing to pay for a service like this?

As mentioned in the pricing page, I'm giving a trial of the service free for the first 5 members (1 month each), so feel free to be one of those five if you're working on a project at the moment and battling to find motivation to put in the hours.

3 comments

The site's design is very lovely EXCEPT for the drawer menu. I spent a couple minutes looking for more information before I finally realized I ought to click the menu drawer. It was frustrating after committing the time to read through the front page.

Design suggestion: put your 4 drawer items into the main nav so a user can immediately find more detail after reading the intro page.

Thanks for the feedback! The template comes from Pixelarity (https://pixelarity.com/) which I would recommend to anyone. CSS is not my strong point, but I've attempted to modify it to bring all the links into the header -- I'm not completely happy with the result, but I'll keep playing with it and hopefully for now it'll leave less viewers confused.

Possibly a call-to-action-like button or something similar would be nice as well.

Otherwise I certainly like the idea

I would say a call-to-action button is a necessary change if a high priority goal is to be a business.

Thanks for the feedback! As I'm running this solo and on the side for now, the priority for me is experimentation and to see if I can find even 5 people who would be keen on the idea. If it goes well I'll definitely completely change the pricing page and add a call-to-action on the main page.

Just make sure you know what you're getting into. The type of coaching you describe is something people typically get training for. It goes past simple project management skills since you're dealing 1:1 with their personalities and other life considerations as well.

Even if you don't bring those into the conversation they'll play hell with the results--that may mean it's unavoidable to bring them into the conversation as "blockers" or "risks" and that potentially opens a can of worms.

One suggestion I'd throw out is to do the market research to figure out how many people have severe enough procrastination issues to benefit from your services, but who are otherwise sufficiently well-adjusted to not be more than you could handle. How many people out there really do just need another pair of eyes and a nudge, but are sufficiently isolated that they would have to turn to this kind of service to get them?

Otherwise you might find yourself in a non-existent niche between people who just needed a todo program and people who actually need serious help. If you don't screen out that second type somehow, assuming you're not set up to handle them, they'll potentially confound your scaling calculations by being exceedingly high maintenance and they'll have a bad experience as well.

Very good point. I definitely don't want (in the extreme case) suicidal customers who expect me to fix their problems! The "market research" I've done has been extremely informal and involved me describing the idea to some academics (mainly master's/PhD candidates and a couple of freelancers). I've had mainly positive feedback on the idea -- from people who lean more towards your "just need a todo program" than "need serious help". I'll definitely put some thought into screening out the latter group, as neither I nor the PAs will be qualified to deal with them.

I think remote productivity coaching is a great idea. In particular, as an ADHD person, this sort of thing would be an excellent supplement for ADHD coaching. ADHD coaching generally includes productivity checkpointing, but it's considerably less frequent (weekly is common) than what you describe.

I'm not at all sure what I'd pay for this, but I'll throw out there that a good 1:1 ADHD coach is ~$100/hr. I wouldn't pay that for this, to be absolutely clear, since the same level of responsibility as a therapeutic service wouldn't be there and there are things an ADHD coach does that this service would not, but that gives some idea as to value.

Some random thoughts:

* There'd have to be a clear value add demonstrated over a reminder program and more typical self-check procedures like Pomodoro. Accountability is one, I'm not sure it's enough of one. People need to see a vision as to how to make their life better immediately.

* People with major procrastination issues for whatever reason do typically need a lot of handholding at the start to figure out how to organize to get past them. You mention this in your pitch on the site, but I can't emphasize enough that this is where the major value and challenge probably is.

* I'd be very interested in the qualifications of whoever was doing this. A basic outsource PA would probably not be sufficient for what you describe in the sense of adding value past what automated solutions could do. If it were, people would probably just use them for that.

* People who procrastinate also tend to wander off compliance with stuff like this. That may or may not hurt your bottom line (we also forget to cancel subscriptions :) ) but it might speak to the efficacy of your service. How would you address the core problem of keeping people engaged?

Interesting! I hadn't thought of it in the context of ADHD. For me, a person will always be more effective than an automated reminder. You can dismiss the reminder or ignore it. For a lot of people, lying to another person and saying "I'm working" when actually you're not is a pretty difficult thing to do. Doing the same to yourself or a bot is pretty easy.

In terms of qualifications, I don't think that they're that important. It's more important to find someone who, in pop psychology terminology, has a high EQ. Some people are just good at 'connecting' with a stranger and making them feel good/motivated, and customers will again want to meet deadlines set with someone like this. So yes, you could organize the equivalent yourself through outsourcing, but I reckon some people would use this as a more specialised service where they don't have to explain the role of PA to the person they outsource, and they know that the PA is competent in talking and being encouraging.

To keep people engaged, all the PAs will be really aiming to develop a solid relationship with each customer (I still keep in touch with my editor even though she no longer works at the publishing house). Thus the PAs are definitely going to be a lot more real than any automated solution (although long-term plans would be to partially automate a lot of their work!)

Thanks a lot for the random thoughts - they're really helpful in clarifying my own random thoughts, and I'll probably use some content from your comment to flesh out the FAQ if that's OK :)

No problem--use what you find useful!

Until I read this comment, I really had very little idea what the product was supposed to be, how I might actually use it, or why I might want to.

I understand drawing motivation from aesthetics and crafted prose. For better or worse, that's not the ideal goal for a product landing page for a product with more pragmatic intents. One way I might put it, what matters is that the page is directly about my goals not it's designer's or owner's goals.

If the goal is to get sign ups, I'd suggest making it free to more than the first five people because the odds that the first five people represent the right market is very very low.

Alternatively, just charge everyone. The true test of whether someone finds business value in the service is that they fork over money. Not making it free also means facing the hard work of selling, which the landing page doesn't really take on.

Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback! I don't have the resources to take on more than 5 customers at the moment, so for now it's really about getting feedback and seeing what people think (even if they're not a perfect sample of the final target market). But I'll definitely be revisiting this comment in a few months :)

If there is limited capacity, pricing can be used to discriminate customers. Free cannot. The discrimination provided by charging will provide detailed information on what people are willing to pay for and how much they are willing to pay. Free will not. Charging will surface the relevant market for a product for which the goal is to charge, free will not.

Good luck.

100% agree! However (ok, so not quite 100% then ;)), I feel like if I jump right in with such an immature product and put a price tag on it, I won't even find 5 customers. Maybe I just need some more blind confidence, but I figured it would be useful to find 5 people outside of my immediate friend group to chat about the product in more depth with and get some feedback from them about whether they found the experience worthwhile.