Ask Sunday
July 29, 2007 § 9 Comments
I’ve recently been dabbling with a new service called Ask Sunday (recently written up on VentureBeat) which offers outsourced/offshored personal assistant services. Apparently they have a team of 35 people in India with computers and VOIP ready to perform tasks for folks who are willing to pay their reasonable rates. They currently have two packages: 30 tasks/month for $29 and 50 tasks/month for $49. 
Apparently they’ll do anything that can be done with a computer and/or phone: book tickets, make reservations, research dry cleaners, give wake-up calls, etc.
I very well may become regular user if I can figure out how to harness them for busy work I do throughout the day. Restaurant reservations and tee times seem like a great usages – save the time of finding the number and potentially waiting on hold yourself. Unfortunately I don’t go out to eat or play golf too often. I’m not sure how comfortable I will be with giving them discretion in tasks (e.g.: choosing a flight) so I’m going stick with research and non-discretionary tasks in the beginning…
Competitors are Pullhorse, Circles, VirCierge, GetFriday (run by Your Man in India (YMII)), Brickwork, DoMyStuff, as well as CraigsList, and ThemBid to some extent, but it seems like Ask Sunday beats them all on price/flexibility right now. Their prices do seem quite low. Hopefully they aren’t planning on getting people hooked on the services and raising the rates…
Anyone know of any similar services? Anyone know which service the 4-hour work week guy used? (Edit 1: looks like he used Brickwork for work tasks and YMII for personal.)
Edit 2: Sounds like YMII/GetFriday is busy – from their website: “Due to the sudden increase in business, GetFriday is currently experiencing a shortage of resources, Until further notice, there will be a three-week waiting period between signing up and the start of service. We can’t take on clients instantly anymore without sacrificing our quality. We apologize for any inconvenience caused. Please bear with us while we ramp up.”
Edit 3: I linked to this above – hilarious and worth reading.
robwebb2k 
I was looking for a little help myself and found these guys too. I learned about them from reading the LA Times. While I like the idea of sending in my requests and having people do the work for me, I didn’t like the idea of outsourcing to India. I was with Quintessentially for a while and have now moved to Red Butler. Their extensive staff is located within the United States and they do a terrific job.
My girlfriend signed up for Quintessentially, she likes it but you have to pay the entire year in advance.
It seems like they have a good plan, most of the tasks are quite small ones that they offer as an introduction to outsourcing it might be a good starting point, for more serious outsourcing like th 4HWW, you need a more serious player to run your business for you.
Gavin Allinson
http://www.OutsourceSuccess.com
i need the service in german language – can you help me ? eric
Read my complete story about this unethical company here: http://dontasksunday.blogspot.com/
Solid article.. hope to visit once again,,
I just got an email from these people wanting to hire me. It did sound promising. After reading the blogspot, I’m going to have to pass. I’ve worked for people like this in the past. The fact I’m not in jail shows considerable restraint on my part. These guys sound like of couple of wannabe high-rollers, who could never get a real job and keep it themselves.
I know of friends who if treated like this woman would’ve paid these guys visits at night in their bedrooms.
There’s something fishy going on here. I visited “Winnie” blog about “dontasksunday” and it’s basically a copy of another site with complaints about the guys who own this company, except on the other site the complainant’s name is “Julia” and the emails this person presents are exactly the same as “Winnie” but with the names changed. The only reason I’m even researching this company is because they sent me a job offer through Career Builder and I’m looking to see if it’s a scam company. Something is definitely weird….
I’ve used Ask Sunday for a couple of years. Service has slipped considerably. It often takes upwards of a week for a simple task, and then half the time it is botched. My guess is their quality control at HR level just isn’t there at the scale they are now operating. I won’t be renewing with them and will be looking instead to hire a part time dedicated assistant.