I 'Hired' A Virtual Personal Assistant To Do My Job For Me - Including Writing This Story

I often find myself pressed for time. Wouldn't it be great to be in two places at once, being twice as productive?

This is where a company MobileWorks comes in extremely handy. It's a crowdsourced virtual personal assistant platform that funnels your tasks to workers around the world based on who's best equipped to handle them for you.

I talked to CEO Anand Kulkarni to learn about the company, took some notes, and sent those notes in to MobileWorks to have them turn it into a finished piece of writing. (I didn't pay them for this, it was a free test-drive of the service.)

Here's what happened:

Screenshot

Screenshot

Here it is, my shorthand notes turned into a longer-form article by MobileWorks:

"We're making hiring obsolete," said Anand Kulkarni in a conversation with Business Insider. As CEO of MobileWorks, a fast-growing crowdsourcing company, he provides customized solutions for your business, guaranteeing accurate, high quality work with no stress on your part, and for a low cost. He's changing the way business owners get work done.

"We're making virtual staffers as reliable as everyday employees. We're tracking workers all over the world to figure out who's best for a given job," Kulkarni said. The MobileWorks routing system, matches your tasks to the most qualified workers, means you can rest assured that your job will be completed by someone with previous experience and expertise in your field.

The array of tasks Kulkarni's company can handle is vast, including email management, research, writing, editing, and social media marketing, just to name a few. "If it can be done by a smart person with an Internet connection, we can handle it," Kulkarni said. MobileWorks' most rapidly growing service, LeadGenius, embodies this adaptability, where workers from all over the world scour the Internet manually to identify fresh leads for clients. Recently, MobileWorks has even pushed to break into higher-skilled fields, like programming.

When using crowds, the reliability factor is increased because you're not just relying on one person, but often a small team, and at a fraction of the price you would pay to house a team in your corporate office. Plus, you can tap into great talent. Globally, there are many qualified workers who aren't always recognized for their skill, but MobileWorks is changing that, with employees in 60 different countries. "We even have a team in the Palestinian territories in the Middle East," Kulkarni said.

This isn't just lucky for you, but also for the freelancers. The MobileWorks staff is dedicated to providing living wages to all of their workers, "whether you live in central Kenya or Detroit," so outsourcing your projects contains a social justice element as well, and, over time, provides you with dedicated freelancers.

"There's a business rationale behind providing awesome wages," Kulkarni explained. "If you pay someone better and guarantee them recurring work, they get more invested than someone making bottom dollar, it becomes more like a career."

Pretty cool, eh?

The usual turnaround time is 24-48 hours, which might strike you as a bit long, but I didn't mind because it's work I didn't have to do. Pricing starts at $49 per month for 2 hours of work and tops out at 160 hours a month for $1499 - this means you could hire a full-time "employee" (which is actually a crowd of thousands of people) for about $9 per hour.

If you want to learn more, check out MobileWorks's FAQ here. Already sold? Get started here.