Trying to run a pilot program in the community

[mhofner.livejournal.com]

Hi all. My name is Marc.

For a final project for my MBA, I'm working with a team of people to try and test out an opportunity related to personal outsourcing. The concept is basically to outsource mundane tasks (cooking, cleaning, shopping, whatever you can think of) to college students to free up your time for the more important things in life.

In order to test this opportunity, I'm trying to setup a pilot program in the Tufts/Davis Square area where community members would act as the consumers who are dictating what services they need done, and the Tufts students would act as the service providers. This seems to make the most sense since college students typically have more flexible schedules than local working professionals (a ha! assumption #1) and usually are in need of money (okay, who isn't?). In the end, I guess it doesn't really matter who provides the services, and who requests them. I'd simply like to see if a system that could facilitate transactions for such short-duration tasks would be feasible.

Of course, I hit the streets and tried the basic marketing tasks of passing out postcards in the area, but that proved highly inefficient. So I'm turning my attention back to the online community to see if anyone is interested in participating.

I guess, in a nutshell, if you're interested in participating in a 1- or 2-week study that would require only a few hours of your time, and you'd be willing to help out a local neighbor, drop me a line.

mhofner@kudju.com or 617.529.7288

Comments

[mhofner.livejournal.com]

magid, you raise excellent points regarding security, privacy, etc. We've thought of each of these issues in turn, and are proposing ways of dealing with them. For one, we're looking to leverage social networking in order to exploit the social stigmas that come along with it to impose proper behavior. This is done via means of identify verification (i.e. real name), reputation mgmt, and others. The nice thing about a system like this is that you define the type of job you want done--so there is no need to go beyond what you're comfortable having someone else do. This may change over time as users grow more accustom to the system, or the service providers end up being within "n" degrees of separation of their immediate social network.

your concerns are exactly the reason why we'd like to run this pilot program, so I'm glad to see you're someone that is willing to critique the concept...this is very helpful. It would be great if you could participate in the pilot program to help refine this. Again, it wouldn't require more than a few hours of your time, and based on your concerns, I think you might find it very interesting.