2 ms·

Agreed, this has obviously got some nice buzz, but never would I want to be the person having to run this business. Lots of manual work for little fees. They c

Agreed, this has obviously got some nice buzz, but never would I want to be the person having to run this business. Lots of manual work for little fees. They could hire/ outsource, but the quality will drop and prices will hike. They might be able to find a niche of people willing to pay a lot for simple things they could probably do easily themselves (like ordering food, or booking a flight), and use that extra money to outsource, but something tells me that market is pretty small. It's interesting, I'm curious to see if this can turn into a company.

sly010 12y ago
I guess beause it's SMS they can you employ machine learning and simple classification, and internal tools to automate whatever is requested the most. Requests that require manual work will probably cost a little bit more. They also seem to pass requests down to backend providers, which you can probably do very cheaply.
- practicalpants 12y ago
  I couldn't disagree with this characterization more. They will need human intelligence overseeing the majority of the cases, and those that they try to automate will be fraught with difficulty and take a long time to iron out. Even the examples I've seen posted of people using it so far would not have been able to be automated and required extended conversations. (And just in general stuff that is actually easy to automate will mean a ton of middle men already exist to make it easy, or more likely, the person could just do it themselves quickly) The founders can either outsource to someone for as cheap as they can manage and target clients who don't care about likely significant middleman fees (and who are most likely on the lazy side), or they can spend all of their attention each day doing these little tasks for people. Since it was a whimsical side project, as they described it, I imagine this will go on for a little while longer, but then they will wind it down and/or maybe try to sell it like the glitter envelope guy who didn't want to do all the work, and then have something quite nice for their resumes, plus some PR to go towards their next project.

sly010 12y ago

I guess beause it's SMS they can you employ machine learning and simple classification, and internal tools to automate whatever is requested the most. Requests that require manual work will probably cost a little bit more. They also seem to pass requests down to backend providers, which you can probably do very cheaply.

practicalpants 12y ago
I couldn't disagree with this characterization more. They will need human intelligence overseeing the majority of the cases, and those that they try to automate will be fraught with difficulty and take a long time to iron out. Even the examples I've seen posted of people using it so far would not have been able to be automated and required extended conversations. (And just in general stuff that is actually easy to automate will mean a ton of middle men already exist to make it easy, or more likely, the person could just do it themselves quickly) The founders can either outsource to someone for as cheap as they can manage and target clients who don't care about likely significant middleman fees (and who are most likely on the lazy side), or they can spend all of their attention each day doing these little tasks for people. Since it was a whimsical side project, as they described it, I imagine this will go on for a little while longer, but then they will wind it down and/or maybe try to sell it like the glitter envelope guy who didn't want to do all the work, and then have something quite nice for their resumes, plus some PR to go towards their next project.