Many of us have spent precious hours on the Internet researching products, hotels or services when we had better things to do. If only we could hand the task to someone else. Well here's a new way to delegate. For a small fee, “Fancy Hands” offers to take the legwork out of your personal administration, leaving you to get on with more interesting things.
So you want dinner reservations? Want to know the best dentist covered by your insurance or want a list of hotels in your price range? Even want to know if your fantasy dream team is a winning line-up? Just email the team at Fancy Hands and an algorithm will assign your task to the best team member. For US$30 a month they will carry out 15 personal administration tasks for you with efficiency and discretion.
What they can't do for you (though they're working on it) is: pay for anything on your behalf; carry out any physical tasks like collecting your dry cleaning; content creation, image editing or blog writing; extensive travel planning or writing business plans.
The Fancy Hands teams in UK and USA number over 100-strong and are comprised of retired lawyers, between-job actors and former employees of a competitor. They are good, but not that good – they're not going to do your job for you for $30 a month.
Founder of Fancy Hands Ted Roden works in the Research and Development department of the New York Times, but has a number of creative side projects including Fancy Hands, which he claims is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results compared to other similar systems.
"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore,” said Roden. “If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands."
