Lessons learned in SaaS startups: Chapter 4. Hire a VA.
After three months of building my first SaaS app, I was lost in a sea of emails, support tickets and administration woes and couldn’t spend any time building my app.
I would wake up, get into the office, turn on my computer and ‘bing’, 30 new emails would be in the inbox with various sales questions, technical support questions, and various spam emails and other things to deal with.
I found it very stressful and tiring, but it had to be done. I spent hours every day working through these emails, and then when it came time to do some designing or coding it was 2PM in the afternoon and I was tired and hitting my ‘productivity-low-point’.
What’s worse is I was getting angry with my customers, being un-professional and fobbing them off.
“It’s by design. It’s meant to work this way.”
“It’s not expensive, it’s just you’re tight.” (I never actually said this)
“Sorry for not replying to your email that you sent 2 weeks ago.”
I wasn’t being helpful to my customers and I wasn’t giving them the love they deserved — I was stressed, tired, and hated doing customer service like this.
Something needed to change
I heard about Virtual Assistants through Rob Walling’s book — Start Small Stay Small which talks about using a VA for practically everything. I couldn’t believe there would be someone you could pay $5-$10 an hour to do things like write documents, proof-read, or do your emails for you.
But it was true. VAs exist and they are there to help you.
So I signed up to oDesk (now Upwork) and looked for my first virtual assistant.
I wanted someone who was based in the US ideally, as they would be on my wavelength. I’d also heard some horror stories about outsourcing to overseas workers and was worried about things like a communication barrier, or them just disappearing for no reason.
(I was proved wrong, as you’ll see if you keep reading).
I hired my first VA for about $20 per hour. She was very smart and she learned my whole business in about two weeks. After about six weeks she was:
- Handling the support tickets
- Reading emails, filtering them and assigning the important ones to me
- Taking phone calls
- Making phone calls
- Handling the account management for customers
- Proof-reading my blog articles and website copy
- And lots more
She was amazing. In fact, I took paternity leave after about eight weeks and she managed the whole business while I was spending time with my wife and newborn baby. I even got to play a bit of golf!
A lot of this was because I got lucky and found someone really amazing and talented. But since working with VAs for a few years, I know it’s possible to find others just like her.
Replicate the VA
After a while, I thought it would be appropriate to raise her rate as she was doing so much for us and had been with us for a while. However, we couldn’t afford to keep paying her for 25–30 hours a week at that rate so we needed to keep her on as a manager and find someone else she could train up, to basically replicate herself.
I realized how good she was when we struggled to find anyone who could learn as fast as she could, but she was fortunately a really good teacher and it wasn’t long before she was able to train people up to do what she did (maybe not as well).
She ended up writing a training document so that a) I could use it to train new VAs in case she had to leave us, and b) she could easily train new VAs without spending too much money. The document has served us really well, and it’s something I would recommend you do once your VA is working out well.
We ended up having two VAs, managed by her. The system worked very well indeed. Even when one of them went on maternity leave, and the other just disappeared off the face of the Earth, our customers were still well supported and the business ran really smoothly.
Today we actually only have one full-time VA, and another on standby, and my manager is on-hand whenever I need her. It’s keeping the business expenses very lean, and the customers very happy.
Reward, praise, reward
I like to make sure my VAs are happy. After all, we’ve invested a lot in training them up, both in time and in money. If they disappeared because they didn’t like working for us it would be a real headache. Therefore it’s good to encourage them often, sing their praises, and reward them with monetary bonuses once or twice a year.
They really appreciate this, and it makes you feel good too.
A good bonus is probably 10x their hourly rate, twice a year. This can go a long way actually, especially in countries like the Philippines.
A little side note about using VAs in far-away lands. I mentioned above I didn’t want to use anyone outside the US. I changed my mind after hiring someone here in the US, and then finding out they had terrible grammar, poor work ethos and didn’t understand our business. The workers we hired in the Philippines and Poland actually spoke amazing English, totally understood the nature of SaaS apps, and were very smart people. It totally changed my perspective on this.
In summary…
To summarize, it’s quite simple. Ask yourself this question:
“How valuable is your time?”
Is it worth $20, $50, $1000 per hour? How much time do you spend doing emails and tasks that someone else (without your level of skill and understanding of your business) could do? How much is a VA?
Go to Upwork.com, type in Virtual Assistants, start looking in somewhere like the US and then move outwards. Hand pick a few candidates, place a public job offer, then set up about 20 interviews. You’ll find someone good in no time. Also make sure you create a training document so you can repeat the process all over again.
Then you can focus on what you do best; building the business.
… or playing golf.
