One of the major time sinks when starting up a SaaS are the simple things. Following up with people who start a trial. Making sure every one is paying on time and if not, sending them a friendly reminder. Work that is perfectly suited to a virtual assistant (VA). That’s exactly what I thought when I bought Rob Walling’s course on Udemy about a year and a half ago.
[color-box]In 2014 I read, viewed and listened to a lot of stuff. To keep a record of what I learned, I’m going to organize these reviews around an important question asked and/or answered in the book. This is the second part about the Udemy course “A Startup’s Guide to Hiring a Virtual Assistant”[/color-box]
A Startup’s Guide to Hiring a Virtual Assistant by Rob Walling was released in the summer of 2013. It took me until the fall of 2014 before I actually took the time. But at that time, I really was motivated to hire a VA to help me with the menial tasks of running a SaaS.
Straight from the start, I hit a roadblock. My web application is in Dutch and is aimed at Flemish people. On a worldwide scale, that’s a small niche group. One that is not very well served by Rob’s preferred way of finding VAs: oDesk.
Yes, you can find Dutch speaking VAs there, but the price they were asking was fairly high ($35+/hour). For that price, I wanted a local VA that really knew the local culture.
I was stuck there for quite some time, procrastinating until I started noticing some options to find people:
- Local classified sites. Unlike eBay, these sites allow to advertise services. In Belgium the major options are 2dehands.be and kapaza.be.
- Classified adds in local newspapers. There are a few adds each week. Not a lot, so you may not want to bother with this.
- Google. But don’t search for VAs. The term is not known around here and I can imagine it’s also pretty unknown in other parts of the world. Search for your local version of “secretary” or “administrative help”.
Unlike a site such as oDesk or eLance, it’s more complicated to interview different people and keep an overview.
Due to this added complexity I skipped some of Rob’s advice and didn’t compare the candidates thoroughly. That was a mistake that cost me time and money. So in the future, I’ll be sure to use Rob’s ready made template.
I started with my VA experiment about a month ago, so it’s a little too early to judge the results. I can already say that the course has helped me in focusing on the right things.
There’s one major drawback with the course and that is the price. Compared to some of the other courses on Udemy, it’s a little short if you pay full price. However, there are very regular promotions, so keep an eye on the Udemy Facebook or Twitter account.