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TaskRabbits!

By now, you know how to use your Fancy Hands assistants. They can accomplish anything for you that can be done from a computer or a phone, including: 

  • Making reservations
  • Doing research
  • Administrative support 
  • Travel research
  • Placing phone calls
  • Scheduling 

Now our assistants can help you get things done beyond the computer and phone. 

We’ve teamed up with TaskRabbit to easily connect you with people who can help you in person. 

TaskRabbit is a website and mobile app for outsourcing errands and jobs to background-checked individuals in your community.

Here at the Fancy Hands HQ, for example, we needed coat hooks to be installed. 

So we sent a Fancy Hands assistant this message: 

Please find someone who can come today during our business hours and install six coat hooks in our wall. They should have their own drill and level and other needed tools. 

The assistant replied: 

Hello, the lowest TaskRabbit bidder for this job is Frank, a handyman with all of his own tools. He will do this job for $50 and he can be there in two hours. Does this work for you? 

And voila, we got hooks! 

When you use your Fancy Hands assistants to hire a TaskRabbit, you won’t have to create your own TaskRabbit account, and you won’t need to spend time posting your ad or viewing the various bids for your job.

We’ll take care of everything for you; just send your Fancy Hands assistant your request. Once a handful of bids have been placed on your job, your assistant will let you know what the lowest bid is and ask you to confirm the charge. 

You’ll be billed to the credit card that you used to sign up for your Fancy Hands account through our secure servers – as always when you make a purchase through our system, no one will see your credit card number.

So relax! You can now say things like: 

Please have someone pick up my alterations from Barney's and my dog from daycare and deliver them to me at my house. 

Please get the oil changed in my Batmobile, fill it with gas, and return it to the garage. 

Please send a makeup artist to my home to prepare me for my news conference.

Please book a housekeeper to come clean my home. It’s no castle, just a simple two bedroom.

TaskRabbit is currently available in:

  • Boston
  • SF Bay Area
  • San Antonio
  • Austin
  • Chicago
  • Seattle
  • Portland
  • Los Angeles
  • Orange County
  • NYC

We love finding new ways to simplify your life! 

All Hands.

Integration is the name of the game lately at Fancy Hands HQ.

We want to add as many options as possible for your work delegation! 

We started with Google Calendar

Next came Basecamp

Then Do.com

Then it was Evernote's turn. 

Today: Asana

The way it works is simple: 

  • Add [email protected] to your project.
  • Pick tasks that you don't want to do.
  • Assign those task to Fancy Hands.
  • Watch as they get marked as completed.

If you haven't used Asana before and are curious about it, check out their website here, and some articles here: 

Asana Unveils Android App

Asana Unveils iPhone App

Asana Is Great & Free!

Fancy Hands is putting some magic into yours! 

Nice Assist.

Our clients are thrilled to have an entire team of assistants working for them. 

With a team working for you: 

  • you can submit several requests at once, and different people can tackle them all at the same time. 
  • you have coverage seven days a week. 
  • each assistant has a different skill sets, and they choose to work on the tasks they know the most about, so you get the most knowledgable assistant for each job. 

But sometimes, it's nice to appear as if you've got just one assistant. 

And so we are pleased to introduce a new white-glove feature called Personal Touch. 

You can now create a specialized email account and make up a name for your entire team of assistants. 

Our founder Ted Roden uses the name "Lucille Bluth", so when he is setting up a meeting, he'll cc "Lucille" on his email and say to his recipient, 

"I've cc'd my assistant Lucille on this email, she'll help us find a time and place for our lunch."

All of your Fancy Hands assistants will now email third parties from the email address that you dedicate for them, and they will all answer to the name you've given them. 


This feature has been tested in beta for a while, and people have enjoyed getting creative with naming their assistant.

Harper Reed, the former CTO of Obama for America and Threadless.com, being light years ahead of his time and techno-focused, named his assistant Robot. And we suspect that some people actually believe that he built a Robot Assistant to manage his schedule.

Luckily for you, our assistants are all very real people, working and living in the US, ready to help you today. 

What will you name your assistant? 

Once you decide on a name, create an email address (either with a service like Gmail or with your own company's email address, like [email protected]).  

Then go here to set your Personal Touch up! 

It's a feature that we're excited to now offer for free with your Fancy Hands membership! 

FAQ'S:

Q: How does this work? 

A:

  • Set up an email account for your "assistant". Use your company's email services or any free service (like Gmail). 
  • Go here and enter the email address and name that you'll be using for your assistant. 
  • You'll be given an address to set that email address to forward to. Set that up through your assistant email account. 
  • Return to this page and you'll probably see this message: "We received an email regarding this account, you may need to click a confirm link."
  • Click on that line, copy and paste the confirmation link into a new tab in your web browser, and, while logged in to the email program (like Gmail) as the assistant, you will see a confirmation pop up that you're all set. 
  • Once you're all set, you can email "[email protected]", cc "[email protected]" and say something like, "Bob, I've cc'd my assistant Betty on this email, she'll work with you to find a time for us to meet", and Bob will hear from "Betty" to set your appointment. 
  • If you have your Google calendar connected to your account, "Betty" will add the meetings that she sets to it. 
  • If you have any problems, email support at fancy hands dot com. 

Q: How will I see who my assistant is from now on? If there's a problem, I won't know which assistant was working for me. 

A: You will still be replied to by the actual assistant working on your task. Only third parties will be seeing your chosen assistant's name. 

Q: How will emails going to third parties appear?

A: When you set up your assistant's email, enter the name that you'd like to appear in the email settings. You can choose a full name or a title, that's up to you, like 

-Lucille Bluth

or

-Assistant to Ted Roden (putting "Assistant to" in the first name field and "Ted Roden" in the last name field.)

The email will go to a third party with whatever words you've put in your "from" email settings. The address will be the address that your dedicated email is set to forward to (see example image below). 

Q: How can a third party contact my assistant? 

A: You will start the conversation by cc'ing your assistant on an email to a third party. They can respond to your assistant either by replying to the dedicated email that you set up (example: [email protected]) or the forwarding address that they see in direct communication from the assistant (as may happen if the assistant reaches out to the third party directly to follow up.)

Q: What signature will appear in the body of the email? 

A: When you're setting up your account here, our website will ask you what name you'd like to use. That's the signature that will appear at the end of an email. 

Q: I tried to click the confirmation link once I set up my Gmail account to forward and received this screen from Google: "We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Apps Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."

A: You need to be logged into your "assistant's" Gmail account to confirm. If you are logged into another Gmail account, the confirmation process will not work. 

An email exchange will look something like this: 

Evernote-worthy.

Our developers continually push themselves to integrate our service with other useful platforms to make your life easier. 

We're pleased to announce that you can now link your Evernote and Fancy Hands accounts here, enabling your your requests, your assistants' responses and attachments to automatically archive directly to Evernote.


You'll be able to access them from your phone, on the desktop, and anyywhere else that you use Evernote.

By now, if you don't use Evernote yourself, you've probably heard productivity pros speak about how much they love using it. 

Lifehacker editor Whitson Gordon just wrote this article on finally seeing the light and making the connection about how useful Evernote truly is. 

The key to being an early adopter is to approach new technologies with patience and flexibility.

We are all so programmed to cling to our routines and what's comfortable, even if that way of life isn't allowing us to be our best. 

Services like Fancy Hands and Evernote are designed to simplify your life, and once you get the hang of using them, you will find yourself amazed. 

Our founder, Ted Roden, says, "The great thing about Evernote is the more that goes in, the better it is. Everything you have is in one place. I set mine up to automatically save my Tumblr likes and Foursquare check-ins. Now when I think, 'What was that awesome thing I saw on Tumblr?' I can find it in Evernote much easier than tryhing to find it on my Tumblr dashboard."

One of our clients sent this to us yesterday: "You guys have easily added 4 more hours into my days."

Statements like that are why we come to work! 

Give the Evernote integration a shot, and let us know how it works for you. 

Unfamiliar with Evernote? Check out their website as well as these articles:

Evernote shortcuts

Tips from Evernote's CEO

Going Paperless

Evernote magic

Do-licious Integration!

We're pleased to announce our newest feature - an integration with the

Do platform


Do is a social productivity tool that allows you to streamline your tasks and get things done! 

It's free to sign up, and now, as a member, you can integrate your Fancy Hands account, and they'll work magic together. 

It's our goal at Fancy Hands to help you simplify your busy life. 

We'll continue to work towards bringing you more opportunities like this one. 

Give it a try (start here) and let us know how it goes on Twitter or Facebook

We love to hear from you. 

Thumbs Up.

Have you noticed these "hand-y" icons next to your completed tasks? 


If you're happy with a task, clicking on the thumbs up is a great way to let your assistant know that you're pleased.

It's the equivalent of tipping them for their work - they're rewarded with bonus points in our internal system. 

Also, if you're unhappy with an assistant's response to one of your requests, don't be shy - let them know! 

We hope you never have a bad experience with your Fancy Hands, but if you do - boom. Let your wrath rain down with the thumbs down option! Ha - okay, just kidding about the wrath part...but do give that a click, then reply and let your assistant know what could be better.

Just as with a full-time employee, sometimes a job isn't completed to your satisfaction the first time around. Your feedback helps your assistant serve you better, and it gives them a second chance to take a crack at making you happy. 

If that doesn't work, please feel free to email a customer service manager at support at fancy hands dot com. 

We love getting emails from you. Check out these happy folks: 

"I think Mandie S. deserves some type of commendation! She was the best at helping me deal with the death of an employee. It was one of my first Fancy Hands requests, and thanks to her, I'm going to be a long time customer. Let me know if there is anything that you or I can do to put a smile on Mandie S.' face." -Patrick  

"Thank you to Audrey F., who tried to cancel a couple of things for me that I've been avoiding for a long, long time. Thank you to Michelle J. who found the perfect birthday presents for my husband. Thank you to Layne M. who has provided a soundtrack (viewtrack?) of sorts to my latest NaNoWriMo attempt. You're all awesome! Thank you so much being there to do the things that I don't have the time or patience to do myself." -Carla 

"Connie O. saved the day for me! She placed 7 different phone calls to post offices looking for a package of mine that had the wrong zip code on it and tracked it down! Without her, it would have been sent back to Singapore and I would have spent another three weeks waiting for re-delivery." -Juliet  

Yay! We love to make your life suck less!  

 

Cool Conference Calling.

Crap. It’s time to host a conference call. There’s no way around it, you’re the leader of this topic and people are looking to you for leadership. 
Lead, dammit! 
If you’ve ever used those free conference call services, you know that something usually always goes wrong. And when you’re hosting, you have to make sure you’re on time and dial in that extra host code, because yeah, another set of numbers is just what you need in your life. Like that apron Aunt Betty sent you for your birthday. WTF?
 
Stay calm. You’re in luck. 
Fancy Hands can neutralize your conference call dramas. Check it: 
1. Go here. Once you’re signed in, it looks like this: 
All you have to do is enter your date, time, the emails of people that you want to invite, and your phone number. 
And when the time comes for the call…we call you. What! Cool, right?  
Your invited friends will receive an email with a dial-in number, and they can also choose the “call me” feature if they want to be a baller, shot caller like the original – who dat? 
Oh, dat’s rite – you. 
Conference call, complete. Congratulate yourself on your genius. And, um...
Throw that apron away. 
Learn more about how Fancy Hands can handle your conference calls and more here, and let us know how it goes on our Twitter. 

Small

3

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