I Ate All The Apps: What I Learned from Outsourcing My Life to the On-Demand Economy for Two Weeks

“Silicon Valley is focused on one problem: what is my mother no longer doing for me.” — Overheard via Twitter

You can outsource your life to an app these days. Laundry piling up? There’s Rinse, Washio and Cleanly. Shoulders tied in a knot? There’s Soothe, Zeel, Numi, Refresh, Massage Envy, Zennya and Priv. House is a mess? There’s Bizzby and Handy. Hate waiting in line? Get a TaskRabbit. Gas tank running low? Try Purple.

So I decided to try them all in a Timothy Ferris-style self-experiment. My goal was to live exclusively in the app world. No purchases or services through physical retail experience for two weeks.

I got some shelves installed with TaskRabbit, had groceries delivered from Instacart and Blue Apron, and had meals delivered from UberEats, Sprig, Caviar and Munchery. I talked to a psychotherapist with Talkspace and had my car parked and washed through Luxe. One night I enjoyed a bottle of wine delivered by Saucey, shortly after receiving a massage from Soothe, which began right after I had my laundry picked up from Rinse.

Here are a few things I learned:

1. I am a mediocre Timothy Ferris-style self experimenter. I caved in within 24 hours. Convenience stores are called convenience stores for a reason. Logging into an app like Instacart when all you need is some sinus meds and orange juice was too much. As much as I would have liked to receive an on-demand massage every other day, I can’t afford to try out seven different on demand massage apps for the sake of research. And as my Facebook feed can attest, there were more apps to try than I had time for. I didn’t get around to trying the other meal kits apps like Plated or Hello Fresh, or the plethora of takeout apps like KlickOrder, Icuisines, RushOrder, DoorDash.

2. It doesn’t seem expensive… until it does. The cost of these services is often rather opaque. Variable (“surge”) pricing; “beneficial” fees; free delivery, but with marked-up merchandise, delayed invoicing, and the fact that venture-backed companies can forsake profitability in the name of growth tend to disguise the actual cost of the service. Many of these services felt reasonably priced relative to the traditional way of doing things: a $13 dinner from Sprig, a $21 daily parking fee from Luxe.

At other times my new on-demand lifestyle felt extravagant, like when I paid $41.43 for a load of laundry from Washio. That’s almost 20x what I pay to do the same load in my apartment building.

More importantly, I found myself not wanting to know the true cost of these services, perhaps to avoid the cognitive dissonance of my lavish lifestyle. It’s like when Starbucks tells you the calories in those tasty little treats. Let me enjoy the coffee cake in blissful ignorance, please.

3. Restraint is good. The best experiences on mobile devices are focused. The endless scroll of dining options on Grubhub or Caviar feel overwhelming and lead to choice fatigue. Smarter apps limit your choices. Moreover the overall design and aesthetic conveys a sense of lightness and ease of use.

4. Even though these companies are designed to save time, I increasingly felt less in control of it. These companies are much better than the proverbial Cable Guy at keeping delivery windows tight, and keeping you informed on progress. But even though I technically had more free time by avoiding mundane chores, I often felt like a prisoner to their timetable, checking my phone every other minute. Kind of like the kid in the backseat who keeps asking, “are we there yet?”

5. What we want is a digital butler
It’s the wild west with these apps, and there are too many of them. Too many icons on our phones, too many passwords to maintain, too many emails to delete.

We just want a button that says “Get me _______.”

Consolidation will surely take place, likely within well-capitalized brands with logistical prowess and superior data. I also suspect the winner might go to the best conversational interface. During my experiment I came across an app called Operator, which really gave me a “wow” experience by helping me find a super cool present for my wife. This app uses a chat-type interface that feels like a natural conversation, and aggregates the results of several apps. Although it’s focused right now on e-commerce, a service like this should one day let you schedule a haircut, pick up some milk, and buy 100 shares of NFLX in one interaction.* Brands will need to find ways to integrate their apps and services into devices and platforms that get the most traffic with the best UI, as we’re already seeing with Facebook Messenger and Amazon Echo.

5. Satisfaction can be found in the mundane. At times I felt like I was becoming one of those obese people from the future from Wall-E .The promise of all these apps is, of course, the gift of time — our only truly limited resource. TaskRabbit has been running an ad campaign that shows that by using the service to do [insert boring life task X] you can instead do [insert fun activity Y]. But I wonder if all that outsourcing is good for the soul. Does washing your car, or doing the dishes, or shining your shoes, or crossing off that final box in your to-do list count as “fun”? Maybe not, but it can give one a sense of accomplishment, which counts for something.

TL;DR: Check out Sprig and Munchery. (They are now part of my weekly food rotation.) Luxe could be on to something big. Operator, Magic (or something like it) is the future.

*Since writing this I’ve learned about Magic, which basically gives you a digital personal assistant like Jarvis from Iron Man for $249 a week. Will be reporting on that soon.