ziptask

[ziptask]

Looks like Amazon just killed TaskRabbit. 

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Your Website Needs Love

Ziptask is ready to help make that website shine again. Which is why we emailed you. Your website actually called us this morning and asked for an intervention. Seriously, it's time. You've been leveraging that boring old template theme or quick-and-dirty site for far too long. Time for a refresh. 

"But it takes too long", you say... "...and it costs too much"...  We get it. That's where we come in. Ziptask provides a way to instantly engage with a seasoned consultant who can put it all together for you rapidly, and save you a ton of money in the process. With Ziptask's new instant video chat outsourcing system, you can instantly engage with a project manager and start your project literally within minutes. Ziptask provides a real-time, instantly activated video chat outsourcing system, that brings you face to face with a seasoned professional in the Information Technology arena. This seasoned professional will become a project manager for you, and can oversee your website, software, or mobile app project from start to finish, so you can get back to your day-job. Ziptask provides these project managers in the cloud, as an elastic labor pool, readily available to support your business and extend your team. 

Why Websites Need Outside Help

Dan and Chip Heath write about the "Curse of Knowledge" in their book "Made to Stick", which touches on the idea that the insiders of an organization are not truly the best people to explain the product or service they provide. This is because they have insider knowledge that is far to detailed and specific to explain it to outsiders. This is the very reason many organizations will hire outside help to create a fully unique and clear expression of the product or service, without being tainted by this detailed inside information or company culture. Website content, design, and branding suffer the most because of this issue. 

Solving the Knowledge Gap

There are reasons the website you have is not up to par. It's usually because the folks who built it (while they may be great people), do not possess the skills or savvy or knowledge of the latest tools on the market. This system we built here at Ziptask is designed to fix that, and to fill in the gaps for you. The new technologies out there, the best plugins or tools, the most expeditious way to get the system built, all of this is in the hands of the elite few. These experts are not always available to your business, unless you bring in outside talent. Ziptask maintains a repository of talented consultants that bring in new knowledge and help bring you up to speed in the process. 

The area to make clear is the center dotted line labelled "Accelerated Knowledge Use". This is where your personal understanding typically increases, just by having interaction with the project manager / consultant and gaining insight into the latest trends.   Zipask is a full-service outsourcing platform, with instant-access, smart-milestones, and an advanced set of features to ensure your software, website, or mobile app project succeeds. 

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Ziptask Founder Shawn Livermore talks about what they did to grow revenue from zero to $100K per month.

Great post on a business blog about Ziptask. It's true,... so much effort is required in laser specific areas to get anything off the ground. We learned that over here at Ziptask this year. 

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On-Screen Bi-Directional Order Entry

Ziptask’s outsourcing platform uses a modern, on-screen bi-directional order entry system for capturing the specific details of your project and funneling them into systematic requirements specifications. You can click on user interface elements from both the project management side, as well as the customer side, as both look at the same exact order entry form, as a thin sheet of glass separating the 2 parties. As far as we know, this hasn’t been done before and we’re pretty excited about it. Please chime in and let us know if someone else has created anything like this.

How it Works

When the order entry process begins, a Ziptask project manager will launch the semi-translucent order entry screen, overlaid above the video chat window. Through this project entry ‘card’ separating the 2 parties, the information is captured from both sides. That is, both parties on the video chat see the same thing as it is being entered, in real-time, from either side. Both of them can edit, input, change information, type, upload, and work together on the project data entry, until all the information is included, refine, polished, and solidified. Many times it takes several set of eyes to balance the project out, making it pass all of the sanity checks and smoke tests. (This is often the critical moment where bad projects become good projects, and ideas materialize into full-fledged projects.)

Guided Selling

This is essentially just a modern guided selling tool. But there are many reasons why this is a groundbreaking for the business. If you’ve ever tried to purchase services from Amazon’s AWS environment, where they have literally 30 different products with a vast array of complicated integration capabilities, you’ll quickly realize that you’re in over your head. If only there was someone to explain all of it to you, you might have a more seamless and frictionless sales experience, and be willing to invest more into the partnership with that particular vendor. Guided selling has been around for years, and it’s about time that the outsourcing/consulting market take a little more attention to it.

Solving the Knowledge Gap

The ‘knowledge gap’ for customers has been around for a while, and isn’t going anywhere. While many customers have a deep set of knowledge and experience around development and technology, other customers have very little experience with IT or software / web platforms. Even the experienced and savvy customers have areas of misinformation, non-specialty, or simply chinks in their armor. When they walk in the front door and ask for a website, mobile app, or software development project work, they ultimately have 2 needs:

Staffing

Knowledge

The first need, staffing, can be solved in a variety of ways, with full-time labor, part-time freelance work, on-site consulting, or a hybrid combination of these.

The second need, knowledge, is not initially known to the customer, but manifests itself throughout the first conversations with Ziptask. Ziptask onboarding-specialist-certified project managers can quickly answer questions and make solid recommendations towards technological approaches that are best-of-breed, industry-standard, and highly recommended for the type of project their engaging on. Customers may “know enough to be dangerous” as they say, or, have a rope long enough to hang themselves, so Ziptask personnel work hard to bridge the gap and fill in the blanks where there may be uncertainty or technological holes in the approach. It’s a normal, systematic process that Ziptask engages in every day, scalable in the cloud, across all sorts of technologies and product/platform verticals.

Making it Seamless

A seamless user experience is hard to come by. It typically takes many iterations to really get it right, after you’ve learned all the lessons of where the friction for the customer exists, how to relieve the friction, and many times how to start over from scratch in order to make it bulletproof.

In 2002, Tom Cruise starred in Minority Report, a film based on the future, year 2054, where crime could be predicted and prevented. Forget about the movie… all anyone remembers about this film was that amazing user interface that Tom Cruise was using his hands to operate. It was ridiculous.

While we don’t claim to have any technology quite as amazing at this, we definitely have created something innovative that has made a tremendous difference for our customers. But don’t take our word for it, decide for yourself.

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Instant Outsourcing is Here

Waiting sucks. Waiting for freelancers to bid on your projects is even worse. The days of waiting for a freelancer to reply to your email are over. With Ziptask, you can instantly engage with a project manager and start your project literally within minutes. Ziptask provides a real-time, instantly activated video chat outsourcing system that brings you face to face with a seasoned professional in the Information Technology arena. This seasoned professional will handle your website, software, or mobile app project from start to finish, so you can get back to your day-job.  

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No Webcam? No Problem. Use Your Cell Phone for Audio on Ziptask.

Today Ziptask releases a new feature to its video-chat-first platform: Use Your Cell Phone for Audio.

The Use Your Cell Phone for Audio feature allows customers who don’t have a webcam and microphone on their computer to simply type in their phone number and the system will dial out to them, connecting them into the video chat session. You would use your monitor for the visual portion of the outsourcing experience, and your cell phone for the audio. If you have a headset for your cell phone handy, even better.

To check it out, simply go to www.Ziptask.com, click on the orange button in the middle to start a new video chat. Then after 10 seconds or so, the system will automatically detect that you are not able to connect via webcam and microphone, and prompt you for your cell phone number. Enter your number and click the button, and it will call you up, connecting you into the video experience using your cell phone as the audio device. That's it. You can outsource from your work cubicle just like you would from your couch on your macbook.  

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A Step-By-Step Guide to Using Ziptask

A Step-By-Step Guide to Using Ziptask

Ziptask recently released a new video-chat-first platform, allowing customers to immediately connect to a project manager with the click of a button. It eliminates the 1 to 3 day wait time that was essentially killing the experience for the customer. The immediacy of the Ziptask video chat platform and outsourcing engagement is noticeable, and we think the bar was just raised. This post provides a simple walk-through of how to use it, step-by-step.

Go to Ziptask.com, then click Start.

As soon as you click start, a seasoned project manager, with many years experience in the information technology industry, will engage with you on video chat.

If you are running chrome (which is most of you), below shows how to enable your web cam.

Firefox users have a slightly different experience:

Once you are in there, you will see a certified project manager who is ready to hear about your project, and provide a guided project submission flow.

The project manager fills out the project submission entry screens, which magically populate like a thin sheet of glass between you. You can engage and help answer some of the questions (after you login or sign up), or you can just sit back and let the PM enter it all in there. It’s up to you.

Once you they get your project submitted, it’s time to pick a project manager, below. 

The project manager would be pulled into the call, and if he accepts, can be hired on hourly contract to start putting your project together immediately.

The work that this PM performs for you depends completely on what type of project you submit, and how much materials you already have in place. Some of the work you can ask him to do includes:

Creating requirements documentation

Creating wireframes of your product/app/website

Creating Photoshop mockups

Cleaning up requirements that you may have already started on

creating visual diagrams, workflows, and flowcharts

Once your materials have been created sufficiently in order to receive estimates, the project manager works to gather numerous estimates from various freelancer groups (both individuals and companies) and culminates that information into one single fixed bid estimate for your review. Once you approve the fixed bid estimate, the project engagement begins, and your project manager will oversee the work from beginning to end, reporting back to you with status updates.

Below is a timeline from beginning to end.

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Instant Execution is the New Standard

Raise your hand if you love waiting in long lines, especially when it's for something important. Raise your hand if you look forward to going to the DMV every couple of years, appointment or not. Waiting simply is a turn-off. Let's agree to not do that. $300 billion dollars a year is spent on fast food, and 60-70% of that is at the drive-through. There is an entire science (queuing theory) built around waiting in lines. People hate waiting.  

This week we rolled out a new Ziptask front-end experience that allows for ‘Instant Execution’ (we define that later), and a very different experience for the world of IT outsourcing. Pando did a piece on the release, and it’s already off to a great start. This email article seeks to explain some background on why we did it, how it changes the game with what we call ‘Instant Execution’, and what it allows you to do.

It takes so long to do anything these days. (Try registering for health insurance on the new federally run USA health insurance system.)  And time is so precious. So very precious. In fact, the very fact that you’re reading this email is a testament to the time paradox. You’re reading this email, probably from your mobile device, and it’s a really long email. Why so long? Because we had to put the entire article in an email, instead of just a link to a blog post. Why’d we do that? Because you, (statistically), are not even willing to even take the 2-3 seconds it takes to click on the darn link to go to our blog post that contains the content. That’s why. So go ahead and keep reading this one since you’ve already gotten this far.  

“Time it takes to…”, check out what Google has in its auto-completes that caught my eye.  

Bing shows a slightly different auto-complete result…

Just kidding, we hacked those screen-shots. But still, waiting is a BIG deal for business, and is literally make or break for small businesses, where they need every sale they can get.

When it comes to customer patience, every second counts. If you don’t answer the phone, you lose money. If your website is slow, you lose money. Worse, if your servers go down, you could you’re your entire business. Servers going down means someone somewhere is in deep doo-doo. It’s true. Server hosting companies even provide 99.99999% ("5 nines") uptime guarantees in their service level agreements and often will drive bonus incentives on those poor server administrators to keep those ridiculously high standards.

For e-commerce and technology service professionals, in particular, making a customer wait means they will probably lose money, and have less fun. For freelance software developers and website designer/developer professionals, the game of finding clients and providing services has been completely redefined. There are no reward or extra bonus points for being available 12 hours from now. Customers want access immediately.

Yep, every second counts, and humanity very rarely ops for the slower approach to really anything. It's always now now now. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and many other top tier apps have redesigned their UX again and again to get eyeballs on content as quickly as humanly possible. Programmers literally create timers that capture the milliseconds that it takes for a person to load the app and look at someone’s cat pictures.

There is real science behind queuing models, as shown below from our referenced article on queuing theory:

The equation that allows a successful business model around queuing models for the image above is:

Ok - so yes, it’s a science, but we re

ally don’t need an equation to figure out that if the line is too long, your business will suffer…. Our business will suffer… The end result of the math (for startups) is simply this: build something that provides scalable and expandable service to customers who can leverage the process, yet control some aspects of the result. This leads us in the order of Instant Execution.

Yogurtland: Instant Execution Is Revealed

But it's not just speed that we crave, it's also getting your hands dirty. Exhibit A: take a look at what happened in the United States’ frozen yogurt sub-industry. In a market dominated by one or two frozen yogurt providers, a newcomer to the market was looking to shake the tree a bit. Yogurtland came on the scene in 2006, and had a different approach to product pricing and customer engagement. Instead of relying on the ‘properly-trained’ frozen yogurt professionals to carefully dispense the yogurt in perfectly symmetrical swirls, Yogurtland offered a fairly disruptive approach. It wasn't brain science… all they did was let the customers pick any sloppy combination of their own flavors and pour it all themselves in any sort of messy concoction they could imagine. That somehow made customers happy. There was some psychology involved, no doubt. Customers want to pull those levers themselves, getting their hands on the product as soon as humanly possible. They opened up the toppings bar as well, giving full access to the good stuff. Instead of charging them by the cup size, they simply weighed the product on a scale, and charged “per ounce”. These changes introduced new concepts of ‘hands-on’, ‘biased accessibility’, and ‘controllable pricing’. These factors somehow netted customers with an overall *instantly-mine-and-customized* experience, and the corporation was rewarded with explosive sales. 

Instant Gratification vs. Instant Execution

You might try to label the yogurt land experience as “Instant Gratification”. But it’s not. It's more important and more valuable than a measurement of gratification of the customer. It's actually something we would like to call “Instant Execution”, because it’s the actual fulfillment of the refined process that led to the experience being holistically different.  Instant Gratification is like walking up to McDonald’s, ordering a cheeseburger, and having one instantly appear in front of you. But what if your cheeseburger needs to have 10 different items in it, be made only after you order it, and be cooked by the manager of the restaurant and not just anybody.  This request requires something more like Instant Execution.

We define our beloved Instant Execution term as: “The immediately-accessible person, skills, and tools that fulfill a customized workflow according to the tastes and preferences of the customer.”

What it is: Getting exactly the right person in front of you, immediately, who will absorb your specific requirements, and through a carefully defined process, will engage in a transparent and predictable pattern of fulfillment to deliver custom professional services in accordance with your expectations.  

What it is not: Walking into Home Depot and going over to their design center, asking for an interior designer to work on your bedroom redesign and closet organization efforts immediately. The poor soul working at the desk will shake their head and type away at their computer in a myriad of screens, at which point they’ll raise the eyebrows and say they are booked for the next 2 ½ weeks but can set you up on a Thursday afternoon three weeks from now.

Instant Execution: Why it’s The Future

So many reasons, but here are a few:

- Because technologically, we can provide it.

- Because customers are ready for it, and as soon as they get wind that it’s possible, they will demand it.

- Because your business changes all the time, and you can’t wait till tomorrow to get started on something. It really does need to start today now.

- Because you're not always available and in the right mindset to talk about your project or needs when the service provider is available.

- Because inspiration of the entrepreneur or small business CEO is fleeting and it needs to be properly communicated to someone who can run with it before it fizzles or flutters away.

- Because somebody out there is better stronger and faster than you, and you need every second you can get to compete with them.

What it Means for You

- It means you can go to Ziptask, click one button, and be speaking with an expert. You don’t even need to sign up first. You don’t need to schedule something for 2-3 days from now. Simply go in and click and speak.

- If means you can prevent the loss of brilliant ideas that never get implemented. The ideas of many entrepreneurs are left unspoken. They manifest themselves in the moment: on their commute home from a cubicle job, or sitting at the soccer field watching little Kaitlyn or Tyler run around on a Saturday morning. But alas, the effort to implement them is too great, so now they are lost in the caverns of their mind, stuck between two brain synapses, never to fall upon the eager ears of that brilliant (yet slightly nerdy) programmer who makes it become a reality.

- It means there is no time lapse between the time you think of an item that can be outsourced, and the engagement of a resource towards that desired result.

- It allows for your team / company to move quicker, and never wait for the outsourced party offshore to wake up to get something started.

- It gives you Instant Execution, which had not been readily available or possible in the area of IT Outsourcing for the average company, until now.

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The international outsourcing market is giant-sized, hundreds of billions of dollars strong. A numerous amount of web platforms aims to monetize that marke

Nice article on the platform. 

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Ziptask Now Supports PayPal Payments!

(Cue dramatic music...) Just released today, Ziptask now allows for a 100% PayPal experience. From top to bottom, all Ziptask payments can be made with PayPal. That includes all Milestones, all Timecards, and any Product Studio packages. You never need to hassle with the credit card again. 

Oh ya, just in case you forgot... we also supported credit cards in 138 countries. :) 

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Ziptask Launches Product Studio - Fully Managed + Fixed Price

Today we launched 'Product Studio', an extension of our platform, designed to help design, document, and polish your project before you get it developed.  In Product Studio, we gather together 4 experts (an architect, designer, analyst, and project manager) to connect with you over 3 video-chat sessions, where they work with you directly on your website, mobile, app, or any other type of project. They each create specific deliverables (wire-frames, mockups, requirements, flowcharts, research, and a tech stack recommendation), that catapult you forward towards a far better outcome for your development project.

We are excited and optimistic at how this model could further solve the challenges and pain of outsourcing to freelancers online. 

you can check out product studio from the website or go directly to the link below:  https://www.ziptask.com/productstudio

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New Secure File Management Features!

Today we rolled out some file management features for use within your ziptask project management area. Instead of using shared dropbox folders to manage all your files for a project, you can simply click on the files link at the top of the project details area, and create your own custom set of files and folders for that specific project. 

Within the file management section, you will see multiple repositories, which clearly separate files for visibility purposes. Project managers can see everything, while customers and freelance teams can only see in specific selected repositories. This is quite important actually, as it protects freelancers from customers who don't want to pay the bill, and protects customers from handing out files to freelancers before they're ready. It also allows customers to only show a project manager specific files, keeping them safe from the eyes of the freelancers. The project manager sits in the middle, so he sees everything. 

Once you select your repository, you'll see a web based file management area where you can create any number of folders, drill down into your custom hierarchy, add files from dropbox or from your local folders on your computer. 

Right-click on a file to rebuild the context menu. 

You can copy/paste, rename, download, delete, or even save right into your dropbox account. This becomes incredibly helpful when the files start to get bigger. 

Enjoy!

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Ziptask was quoted/mentioned in this article by the business daily news.

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We welcome the newest member of our freelance community. Micah!

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We Welcome Our 20 New Ziptask Project Managers!

Just onboarded, they come from a variety of technically-focused backgrounds. We have handpicked these 20 from over 316 applicants over the last few months. Welcome and congratulations! 

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New Ziptask Account Verification Procedures

So here we go. In order to comply with federal regulations surrounding the Dodd Frank act, and the US Federal Government's OFAC financial procedural checks, Ziptask has incorporated strict identity verification policies, including a KYC (Know Your Customer) policy. As such, there are completely new features created for identity verification, in order to prevent money laundering and fraud. Customers, freelancers, and project managers will all have to become "verified" by uploading legitimate, government issued identification and awaiting administrative approval from the Ziptask operations team (in 24 hours or less typically, especially during the work week). You will see an alert when you login in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, asking you to 'get verified' by either adding a bank account, or going through the manual process of identity verification through another set of steps. 

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Ziptask Now Makes Direct Bank Deposits to 38 Countries!

Move over PayPal! We can do this cheaper now! That's right... Bank accounts for 38 countries (list attached) can be added for direct deposit at a cost of $5 usd per transaction. Add a bank account in the settings area, second tab, ('cogs' / 'gear' icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen once logged into your Ziptask Dashboard). 

Here is the list, in case you were interested... Most of the planet is represented below. 

India United States Bangladesh Pakistan Sri Lanka Indonesia Philippines Canada Vietnam Austria Sweden United Kingdom Belgium Bulgaria Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Ireland Italy