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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats. With regards to the customer support thing: this is something that you can very cleanly outsource to an assistant. Write up your current procedures in a Google doc and share it with a VA. Your options include somebody overseas from you (BCC's is done from the Philippines through a company called Pepper - happy with them) or, due to the unique contours of the employment market for rural Japanese women, you may even find someone in Japan with exceptional English but very poor options careerwise.

My wife's friends who do 内職 (work-at-home jobs compatible with e.g. raising kids) work a lot harder than your CS person needs to for less than $400 a month. If you go down that path, they could also do introductory phone calls to candy manufacturers on your behalf.

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This is an interesting point, in regards to hiring someone from (rural) Japan to take care of customer service. I suspect a difficulty you would face is finding someone who speaks English well enough to serve your English speaking clientele.

Along this vein, I'm in Taiwan this summer, and it's striking how cheap labor is. An English speaking, sometimes even US educated, assistant costs $600 per month. That's very low, and competitive with higher end VA rates.

But you would have trouble finding labor of that quality on eLance/oDesk/etc. You can get a $400-600 per month VA, but English quality will be relatively low.

I wonder if there is an untapped labor market of quality English speakers in "2nd world" countries who would gladly work from home for $600 per month, but have not been exposed to the opportunities online. How do you tap into that workforce? How do you expose them to a labor sink that is a clearly a net positive value prop? And how do you filter the workers/employers such that both are happy with the arrangement?

You don't even necessarily have to have them be abroad relative to the US -- I just suggested Japan because the business and its suppliers happen to be based here. Bingo Card Creator made, hmm, $1X0,000 off of ~2.5 years of a New Mexico schoolteacher's very, very part-time labor in creating bingo cards. I'd have to look at the books from like 2008 through 2011 but I recall it totally on the order of $3,000 or so -- $100 a month with $100 extra at Christmas.

There exist many people in the United States who have talents which a) have no commercial viability at present but b) would be commercially viable if supported by the appropriate software. Many of them are in situations where ~$X00 a month pings their "Very worth my time to talk about this" radar.

Thanks, currently writing that google doc.

Combining customer support with a buyer role in the same person is interesting, hadn't considered that before.

As someone bootstrapping from Seoul, I think there's something to patio11's idea. A related untapped market for recruiting is: Japanese women who came to the US to be with their partners studying/working in the States. The Korean equivalent is something I want to tap into in the future.

Bemmu, thanks for the post. Can I ask which support ticket solution you're using now, and how you like it?

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