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Justin Kan Launches Exec (YC W12) For Real-Time Mobile Jobs
- pg 15y agoThe beta users for Exec were YC alumni living in SF, and they have great things to say about it.
- leahculver 15y agoI was a beta user for Exec. I used the website to order a task ahead of time - delivering a burrito to my boyfriend on Valentine's Day! The coolest part was being able to watch the delivery happen in real-time on my iPhone (super cool). It was an adjustment for me to think of an everyday task that I could outsource. In general, I think that if people can make the mental switch, Exec will be a game changer.
- dmvaldman 15y agorandomly noticed. happy 1000th day birthday on HN!
- TruthElixirX 15y agoPlease don't do this. It does not contribute to the discussion.
- youmustbejoking 15y agoNeither does that ^^.
- tikhon 15y agoI use exec all the time -- it's amazing. We use it at parse a lot as well.
- freshfey 15y agoI have a lot of respect for Justin Kan, so this might come off a little weird, but: How the hell does he split his time between two time-intense companies and start a new startup at the same time? Am I missing something here? Edit: three companies, but I guess he isn't in Socialcam's core team (or is he?)
- kurtvarner 15y agoPlus he's a part-time partner at YC http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-sam-garry-emmett-and-justin http://ycombinator.posterous.com/welcome-sam-garry-emmett-an.... I'd love to have this question answered. Edit: Apparently, he just changed his role at Justin.TV to an advisor. So I think most of his time is spent on Exec, while on the side advising YC companies, Justin.TV/Twitch.TV, and Socialcam. But still definitely a lot for one person to manage.
- trustme 15y agoMy understanding is he only spends about one day a week at Justin.TV. I don't think he is at Socialcam.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- AznHisoka 15y agoIs Justin.TV or SocialCam profitable too?
- justin 15y agoSo, here's the skinny: I spent most of Monday at Justin.tv / TwitchTV. At TwitchTV I mostly work on strategy and management issues. My cofounder Emmett Shear runs the company as CEO along with a great management team including our COO Kevin Lin, who runs all the partnerships and operations, and CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint, who is the founder of IGN, and runs all biz dev. Operationally the team is excellent, the company is growing well (almost 60 people now between two offices) and my services aren't really required for operational issues. Monday night I work on Exec stuff as well. Tuesday is YC day. Since we're going through YC for Exec, I'm down in Mountain View anyways. I hold office hours during the afternoon most weeks, and then attend the dinner with everyone else. Wednesday -> Sunday I'm working on Exec full time, but occasionally do calls for JTV/TTV. I also stop by the JTV office a few times a week just to hang. Socialcam is being run by our other cofounder on JTV, Michael Seibel, along with two engineers formerly from JTV. It is fully spun off as a corporate entity now. We still have a great relationship and they are part of the JTV family, but I don't have an active role. They are off to the races though and on the way to be extremely successful. UPDATE: Re-read this and it makes it sound like I work an insane amount. I don't want to make it seem like I'm Jack Dorsey-ing it. I take time on weekends and nights to relax and have a social life. I think working at a sustainable pace is important. Luckily (for me), I enjoy working at so many things because they give me a chance to exercise / learn different skills (strategy and growth at JTV, programming and pitching at Exec, talking about business ideas at YC).
- abstractbill 15y agoExec is awesome. We (ZeroCater) give all our employees Exec accounts and a weekly budget they can use to outsource random tasks outside of our core competencies. Congrats Justin and Co!
- bhousel 15y agoThat sounds very interesting. May I ask, how are your employees using this in practice? What kinds of tasks they are outsourcing, and how much is that weekly budget?
- abstractbill 15y agoJust recently we had a big party [1]. We definitely outsourced a lot of the logistics and organization of that in various Exec tasks. More day-to-day, it's very random. I think we give each ZeroCater employee something like 5 hours worth of Exec time per month. It's well worth it. [1] http://blog.zerocater.com/and-there-was-food-for-all http://blog.zerocater.com/and-there-was-food-for-all
- kennystone 15y agoThis is a great idea. Certainly your employees cost more than $25/hr.
- justin 15y agoWe definitely think this is a great use case. Any companies in the SF area who want to try it out should hit me up at justin@iamexec.com.
- michael_f 15y agoWe are so going to do that.
- mikeryan 15y agoStrangely enough my biggest concern is how well this will scale. EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm getting down boated. I'm pretty serious. I have no idea the average task duration but assume its an hour then every "exec" can only do about 7-8 a day (assume some non billable time). If they get 10,000 customers and say each need one task every 2 weeks. Thats 5000 tasks and would require a staff of 125 execs. With 125 execs now you need managers and quality control and customer support. I'm assume execs are only getting paid about $15 an hour. That means A. Quality of Execs would be an issue. B. You only have about $10 of every hour left towards margin. Margin in straight services is nasty and this one is thin and in this case unless you have an extremely efficient staff your margin tends to go down as you grow - not up.
- rdl 15y agoThis is the kind of thing which scales pretty well -- there are lots of unemployed/underemployed people in most markets. I think the difference vs. taskrabbit is that it being realtime requires the task-runners/execs to be higher quality and more committed, so it might not work as well in a market with 0% unemployment where everyone has a 9-5 job. I don't think that's a major risk for the next decade or two. They can obviously raise pricing. At some point, people will pay based on the money they save, and runners might get really efficient at certain kinds of missions. If, for instance, a common mission is "pick up my car from the bar the next morning", the requestor might think it is a 2 hour task (bus or taxi, ...); maybe a task-runner has an efficient solution involving a folding bicycle, or two people. Worth $100 to me, costs 30 minutes of someone else's time who is happy with $25/hr, win/win at $50.
- alaskamiller 15y agoPeople relate this to TaskRabbit and I believe that's wrong. But not for the reason you might be thinking. So why is it wrong to relate this to TaskRabbit? Because TaskRabbit isn't competitive, yet. They're about the auction format not the on-demand format. Apples and oranges. That's fine, but take stock in their assets: national brand recognition, solid network effects, a built out rep system, resources. It is only a matter of time on _if_ they want to compete. If I were a TaskRabbit decision maker I would start a skunkworks team to clone, but not launch. Not until Exec does all the work of validating. So really Exec is more relatable to Cherry.com, an on-demand mobile car washing service started by three valley insiders. I sign up, pay $30, go shopping, and get texted when my car is done being detailed. It's amazing. And after talking to Cherry's contractors, there's also an amazing feedback system built up to ensure quality. But Cherry is just one vertical so it lacks scale. That's where Exec could shine, by being the consigliere some of us need to get through modern life. Or while in a bind on the way to Burning Man. On-demand dial-up services are the future. If you use Grindr, you know what I'm talking about.
- mhp 15y agoWhen will we see this in NYC (or other markets)?
- justin 15y agosoon, I hope! we want to make sure it is excellent in the Bay Area before expanding.
- revorad 15y agoI'm blown by how basic the site looks right now. This attitude of launching something which probably doesn't even do much yet is really hard for me to digest. Also, Justin's comment on keeping features to a minimum is interesting. Everyone always talks about it, but few manage to pull it off because you need the right features. Justin, can you comment on how you chose your feature set?
- _pius 15y ago[The site looks basic right now]. This [probably doesn't even do much yet]. The former doesn't imply the latter.
- GraffitiTim 15y agoIn the case of Exec, one simple feature (submitting a task) lets you accomplish a huge number of different things.
- justin 15y agoOne of my biggest problems using marketplaces is the cognitive overhead of figuring out the often complex process how I'm supposed to use the site. With Exec, I wanted to make something that was super simple and just works. Most of our challenge is actually figuring out how to inform users of what they can get done, because for most people outsourcing their errands is a new behavior to learn. We haven't created any features that weren't based on iterating to solve a real user problem that was being experienced during our trial. Our minimum viable product really was "minimum" -- everything including the the map / location tracking, iphone app for the Execs, etc came out of that process. The first version of Exec was literally single text area. We have done a ton of work on the backend to make sure that Execs pick up and do your jobs excellently -- a lot of that is transparent to the user. Lots of thought has gone into making that work well. If by "basic" you meant the site's design, then I fully admit that. We used Twitter Bootstrap, which is awesome. I'm not a great designer, but hopefully we can bring someone on soon that is excellent :) (Shameless plug, Exec is hiring a designer and senior engineer for our core team. Come help us build the future of work: https://iamexec.com/hiring https://iamexec.com/hiring)
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- GraffitiTim 15y agoI've tried using Exec and it worked flawlessly.
- DrewHintz 15y agoKan mentions that Exec is real-time compared to other existing services, such as TaskRabbit. I've used TaskRabbit several times and found TaskRabbit to be plenty fast enough, probably similar to the real-time described in the article.
- jamiequint 15y agoReally? I've never heard of anyone I know getting a sub-1-hour response time on TaskRabbit from request to starting a job, much less 10 minutes.
- revorad 15y agoIs there a marketplace like this for quick programming tasks?
- tuckbuck 15y agoI think there is a market for quick programming tasks. A small very welldefined task like putting up a jqueryUI stylesheet according to some specification,would fall into such a category.Of course,the problem with programming is the iteration required.
- AznHisoka 15y agorent-a-coder, elance, a ton...
- revorad 15y agoI'm talking about quick jobs. Can you hire someone to help you with some Clojure or Ruby code just for an hour? It looks like it takes an hour just to post a job on elance.
- statictype 15y agoI'm curious about what kind of programming gigs you could confidently have completed in an hour?
- AznHisoka 15y agosame here, that's why I recommended those sites.. I'm not sure who could reasonably expect a programming task to be done in 1 hour... for those so-called "emergencies" or critical tasks, you can't hire someone who has NO idea what the project entails, you need an expert who has worked on it before.
- scooter53080 15y agoI've often wished for a similar marketplace, but more for consulting, than actual programming. When starting out with a new language or new technology (particularly unpopular ones, that don't have good online resources) it would be worth paying an "expert" for an hour or two of their time to ask questions.
- twakefield 15y agoI was excited to try this out and was very impressed with the quality and speed of the service. Back when I was working at Big Co Inc., the shared admin assistants were an incredibly valuable resource to leverage your time. Unfortunately, it's not a feasible option to hire one at a startup. Exec changes that. It's a great option for times when you need something NOW but can't or don't want to stop what you are otherwise doing. Examples: taking a mac to the genius bar, getting printer ink, getting batteries. Also relevant is this cdixon blog post about how the internet is changing what a "job" is. [1] [1] http://cdixon.org/2012/02/26/the-internet-is-reshaping-our-economy-from-one-of-huge-corporations-with-lots-of-jobs-to-huge-platforms-with-lots-of-income-streams/ http://cdixon.org/2012/02/26/the-internet-is-reshaping-our-e...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deepkut 15y agoThis market sounds horizontal, but it sounds like they're managing it well. Excited to see how this pans out.
- swombat 15y agoThis sounds pretty damn cool. It's like a more humane, more generous implementation of the vision of Mechanical Turk. When is it coming to London? I'll sign up.
- justin 15y agoSoon I hope. London is on the short list of places to expand to!
- okhired 15y agoIt's not real-time but you might be interested in okhired.com - my (London based) startup. Would love some feedback if you have a minute. </shameless_plug>
- swombat 15y agoThe fact that they interview the workers is a big plus from my point of view. From your "About us" page: > Anyone can join the site but we are currently only focusing on the London and the surrounding area so this is probably where most of the jobs will be. However, you're welcome to sign up and create an alert to notify you when jobs become available near you. That doesn't sound like there's much vetting. A service like this lives or dies on being able to convince the buyer that there won't be any trouble that ends up costing even more time and money.
- joseakle 15y agoI would love to have an Exec for tasks inside my company. The money would be drawn from a company´s bank account. Sort of like internal bounties perhaps. Maybe even complementing salaries, I don´t know. Thoughts?
- justin 15y agoPlease email me at justin@iamexec.com. We can make it happen!
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI would like to know how they determined the price point. IMO, with such a name, they should be targeting higher end customers. People willing to shell out $50+ or $100+ for a specific task..... Or $15000 a la Transporteur
- Aarvay 15y agoTwitter Bootstrap + Subtlepatterns \m/
- justin 15y ago<3 both of them. Bootstrap made me 2x productive at front end stuff.
- dwynings 15y agoHaving found Exec in the AppStore, I noticed that they have 11 other apps for specific restaurants ... is Exec a pivot from another idea?
- justin 15y agoDaniel and Amir had a company that focused on restaurant apps that turned into the company that is Exec.
- siruva07 15y agoJustin, What's involved in the interview process? What are the different stages?
- justin 15y agoWe do a bunch of screens, including an in-person interview. We also background check all our Execs.
- ephermata 15y agoI'd love to see livestreaming from Exec workers. That would help "human telepresence" tasks like these: http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/attend-a-talk-at-uw-and-write-a-trip-report-28-february-2012-3-30-4-30 http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/attend-a-talk-at-uw-and-writ... http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/please-help-me-shop-for-furniture-using-qik-for-four-hours-on-monday-28-november-2011--3 http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/please-help-me-shop-for-furn... http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/help-me-attend-a-conference-via-skype-on-2-november-2011-8-30am-6-15pm http://www.taskrabbit.com/tasks/help-me-attend-a-conference-...
- ajju 15y agoRealtime access to offline services via simple interfaces is awesome. I love Exec's UI because it exemplifies this.