Ask YC: How to hire a good virtual assistant for a startup?

With oDesk the quality of VA is a lot more variable so I would make sure to check out their ratings and past reviews.

Also a quick hack I used is hire 10 VA's for 1 hours each to do a small project or piece of a larger project. Review their work and pick the one who did it the best with the least self direction.

One task I tried: find me a plain-text format wordlist of technology jargon. Specifically, I want a flat text file with each word on its own line. She billed several hours and provided me with websites I initially found on a google search.

When I started with getfriday.com, my access to their customer interface wasn't working. I tried calling their toll-free support number and received a "beep" rather than a greeting from a business. When I wrote in to cancel my account, the VA manager contacted me and I let him know about these issues. He was very attentive on the phone, but ultimately... I closed my account.

To their credit, getfriday.com let me close my account with zero hassle and they didn't charge me for the trial period.

YMMV.

They're still 'virtual' in that they work from home - but the benefit is they are on the same timezone, understand local requests ("book me a table at that fish restaurant on the embarcadero") and can easily deal with the logistics of processing receipts/paperwork etc (better delivered locally than sent abroad or have to be scanned in).

I think the VA's tend to be stay-at-home mom types, etc and are found through contact network.

It's probably more expensive than paying someone in Vietnam $2/hr but allows them to be 'customer facing' if needs be.

EDIT: After Googling around to answer my own question, I'm still not sure about start-up specific tasks. But you might find the results of this survey useful:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/12/06/the-personal...

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