Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with TimeSvr.com, a virtual assistant company whom I can outsource unlimited number of basic tasks and they get them done within 24 hours, all for a reasonable monthly fee. (For those of you who are new to this concept of personal outsourcing, see my article on Virtual Assistants).
So far, the experience has been great! Whenever I have a simple task that needs to get done, but one I don’t want to waste my time or energy on, I simply log into TimeSvr.com and describe my task in a few sentences and hit enter. Less than 24 hours later, I get a response with some very good results. From Internet research, calling people on my behalf, booking meetings, searching for addresses, to editing a document, TimeSvr.com does it.
The only catch with TimeSvr’s monthly plan is if your task requires more than 20 minutes of dedicated work, you’ll need to sign up for their “Dedicated Service” (which is also reasonably priced).
Overall, I was very impressed with TimeSvr, the timing and quality of their output was really good. I was even more impressed with the people behind it; most of the “Personal Aides” are actually Muslim brothers and sisters working hard to serve their clients professionally and masha’Allah they are doing an excellent job helping people around the world become more productive!
I decided to catch up with Osama Sehgol, one of the co-founders of TimeSvr and ask him a few questions about his company, here’s what he had to say:
Productive Muslim: What is the story behind setting up TimeSvr.com?
Osama: We started up while we were in our last semester in university. An article in the New York Times on Personal Outsourcing had caught my attention – Zaki, my co-founder had also heard about this through his friend in New York so together we sat down and brainstormed on the idea. We did a bit of research, drew up a plan, figured out how we could build a service based website and then basically just set out from there. I took care of operations which we set up in Karachi, Pakistan. Zaki took on the business development role and Zulfiqar, our Chief Technology Officer built our Customer Relations Management system.
In a little over two years we’ve been able to cater to hundreds of global clients, opened operations in three cities (Karachi, Lahore, and Singapore), incubated a virtual assistant center in rural Hunza, Northern Pakistan so that individuals over there can also earn money through VA work. The earlier part of our work (and even now, I must say) is not without its challenges. But we’re pleasantly and optimistically working through them.
Productive Muslim: What differentiates TimeSvr from other VA companies?
Osama: The biggest differentiating factor I would call out on is that we care. We make an active, concerted effort to try and help out our clients by putting them first in whatever work we do. Virtual assistance and personal outsourcing is a relatively new concept. Slowly people are adapting to the idea of being able to afford a virtual assistant for $2/day. That’s like finding skilled workforce with TimeSvr for what defines the poverty line. So we basically broke down the model and re-worked it from scratch, focused on our clients and kept our prices low.
Productive Muslim: It seems that most of the personal aides you have are Muslims, do you envisage building a niche for your company to have VAs that serve the Muslim Market only?
Osama: There are a lot of benefits TimeSvr Aides can provide to clients with whom they share an active faith. Due to cultural similarities our aides are better able to understand the personal requirements of a lot of our clients. We’re also better able to serve clients in the Middle East due to similarities in time zones.
For those of you who are interested, try their 3 day trial and see if TimeSvr is for you. Read more about TimeSvr on NicheInterview and GigaOM. And here’s another review of TimeSvr we found quite helpful.
