Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

Tasks a virtual assistant can do for an online entrepreneur

Aymeric — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:25:32 +0000

Virtual assistants are all the rage these days. Since Tim Ferriss democratized the concept with his book “Four Hour Work Week”, virtual assistants have become increasingly popular. And yet, many founders still don’t outsource. The reason why people don’t outsource after the fear for poor quality is that they don’t know what to outsource. Yesterday [...]

The 7 deadly sins of outsourcing

Aymeric — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:00:22 +0000

Outsourcing is getting more and more popular and has evolved a lot but people keep associating it with poor quality or frustrating calls with a customer support guy with a thick accent from halfway around the world. Outsourcing is a skill that can be learned. Below are the deadly outsourcing sins that business owners commit [...]

Making changes based on data: fixing our registration process

Aymeric — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:44:33 +0000

UPDATE: I have added the results of my changes at the end of the article I am currently working on Goalstribe a group coaching website and this month we are trying to prove we can sell groups via online marketing channels. After bringing sufficient traffic from Google AdWords, Bing and Facebook Ads, we haven’t managed [...]

IMPROVE, new idea management software

Aymeric — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:10:00 +0000

Link: idea management software Every now and then I like to work on a side project just to keep my skills sharp and gain some perspective on my main project. Weekplan.net was born out of one of these weekends and reached over 10K users so far. IMPROVE was heavily inspired by a blog post from [...]

oDesk hurt by the Google Panda update

Aymeric — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:32:17 +0000

oDesk is an online outsourcing marketplace. SEO is one of the main marketing channels they use to drive traffic to their sites (like their competitors). The Google Panda update was targeted at reducing low quality search results on Google. It looks like oDesk has been badly hurt by this update: UPDATE: Although Elance wasn’t hurt as [...]

Free: Financial Independence spreadsheet

Aymeric — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:22:19 +0000

Very few books have changed the way I think as much as “Your Money or Your Life”. I have developed an Excel spreadsheet to help me and my friends stay on top of our personal finances following the steps outlined in the book “Your Money or Your Life”. You can download it here: Your money [...]

Prediction: Google will soon improve their task management app

Aymeric — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:38:00 +0000

Today, I got a notification telling me my Gmail got a new look. (I love it by the way). One of the changes I have noticed is how you switch from the Mail app to the Contact management app. There is a third option “Tasks”: at the moment it only shows the normal Tasks popup [...]

Features: simplicity versus completeness

Aymeric — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 05:23:30 +0000

I am tired of all the “simplest [Application Type] of the world”. I wrote about it before. A simple application is not useful if it is incomplete. Would Excel be so successful if it was limited to editing a grid? On the other hand, people like the feeling of simplicity and despise being overwhelmed by [...]

My experience at PushStart Mentor Connect

Aymeric — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 23:50:55 +0000

Yesterday I went to PushStart Mentor Connect. I had the opportunity to “speed-date” with David Jones, Brad Lindenberg, Dave Cunningham and Simon Foster. The challenge I asked them about what around how to bring more people to the website (probably a very common challenge). When people try TaskArmy, they like it but the challenge I have [...]

Outsourcing in startups: How I work with my remote developer

Aymeric — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:14:51 +0000

In the previous blog post, I explained why I outsource the development of my startup and this post I would like to explain how we work together. Task management I started with using podio.com to manage the work to do with my team. Podio is an impressive (and free) web application that has in-app applications [...]