Fin : p/fin | Product Hunt

7yr ago

Brandon McConnell

@johan_le_bray My thoughts exactly. $120/week for the lowest tier, "occasional" usage, just seems very impractical to me. Even for semi-frequent use, I'd be hesitant to pay $120 per *month*.

7yr ago

Will Wright

Kindaba 🎈

@johan_le_bray @brandon_mcconnell "Most users spend between $500 and $5,000 per month." Yikes! 💸

7yr ago

Brandon McConnell

@johan_le_bray @williamwright news just came out that Fin is a collaboration project between Facebook and Venmo execs. No surprise there 😂

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@williamwright but not all 😄 We like to give people a sense that if you use Fin very heavily costs add up... but plenty of people just do a key task or two a month and spend far less - the price is on demand / based on use!

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@williamwright @lessin (also, cc @rrhoover re "what have you learned building Fin) A few of the biggest learnings I have had working on Fin involve time. 1. As a Fin user, I tend to really underestimate how long many tasks take. Often I'll talk to people who say things like, "it would only take me 30s to make this restaurant reservation if I did it myself" - sometimes I'll even think things like this. But at Fin we've measured all sorts of tasks like this thousands of time, and are beginning to understand all of the actual steps involved (eg, seeing if a restaurant is on opentable, finding available times when the exact time asked for was not available, perhaps calling the restaurant if they are not bookable online, adding an event to your calendar, notifying your guests, etc) and developing a much better understanding of all the real work involved and time it takes to do things like this. When you look at all of this work that goes into seemingly 'simple' requests, you can start to see how we often tend to grossly underestimate even the best case scenarios for how long they will take. 2. As someone who has worked many sessions as a Fin agent, it is remarkable to me what 'real' productivity feels like -- working an 8 hour day on the clock is really intense compared to a lot of desk jobs that I had when I was much younger. My sense is that there is a huge inefficiency with much of time spent at desks just waiting for work to arrive ( @lessin and I talk about this here https://soundcloud.com/the-fin-e... ). I expect the labor utilization at many desk jobs is probably like 20% so a '40 hour week' is more like an '8 hour week.' The upshot of this is that if you look at the cost of a single request with both of these misperceptions, it may feel high. But, if you actually measure the work that happens closely (and see that it takes longer than you might think) and consider the potential utilization loss when full time workers are sitting idle, Fin is actually quite economical. Looking at myself as an example, I use about 10 hours of work per week at Fin, and I get more work done than I used to with a full time assistant at 40 hours per week. Something I've personally been spending lots of time on is trying to illustrate this sort of time accounting on our website / through our service / to our customers. (Finally, I'll mention that this is just a straight up $ cost comparison I am talking about -- there are other massive benefits to using Fin that you can't account for in this sort of analysis, eg, (i) Fin is totally on demand, so there is no sunk cost if you use only 5 hours in a light week and then scale up to 50 hours the next week and (ii) Fin eliminates hidden costs of context switching, so while there may be instances where I theoretically could do a task myself in 5 minutes that would take Fin 7 minutes to do, outsourcing non-critical work to Fin keeps me focused on the most critical work that uniquely requires my attention and creativity -- this is invaluable)

7yr ago

Derek Shanahan

Product Hunt Regular

I've tried it three times, haven't been able to get value out of it. Last time I got a $160 bill for finding and booking an in-home dinner chef for a trip my fiance was taking with friends, for 8 emails and 20 mins on the phone - way too expensive for normal use.

7yr ago

Abadesi

Hustle Crew Academy

@dshan whoa that is pricey but I guess its about how you value your time. $160 to only spend 20 mins on phone vs an hour may be enticing for some. Who are your target audience @lessin @kortina? Are you aiming for HNWI?

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@dshan @kortina @abadesi hey all... so, we bill at $1 per minute on demand, so you only use what you pay for. This is much less expensive than having a full time assistant in most cases, but isn’t cheap for sure (good help never is!) — in the case above my sense is that if it took us 160 min to do all those things it would have taken at least as long for anyone else!

7yr ago

Susan Ho

Journy

@dshan Yikes! That's also why I think it's beneficial to use the right service that specializes in what you're looking for. My company, Journy (gojourny.com), specializes in travel experiences and because we've done stuff like hire in-home chefs for travelers in 75+ destinations around the world, it'd take us a fraction of the time to help with something like that. Because we specialize in travel and reservations, our fees start at $25 per day of your trip (we too are updating our pricing, but the max you'd pay is $50 per day of travel plus an additional $5 per person above 4 travelers).

7yr ago

tommyent

@dshan @kortina @abadesi @lessin how is this cheaper than having a full time assistant? At @40 a week fin is costing $115,200 a year. This seems to be on the high end especially considering it's virtual.

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@dshan @abadesi @lessin @40 @tommyent per my comment above, it does net out cheaper because all Fin work is on the clock / you only pay for results, not idle time. I get more done in 10 hours of work per week of Fin service than when I had a full time 40 hr / wk assistant.

7yr ago

Ryan Hoover

Product Hunt

Ever since YC-backed Magic launched 3 years ago, there's been a wave of personal assistant services hitting the market. From my experience, most were either too expensive or unreliable. I used Fin during the beta ~1 year ago but it never worked into my habits and after several price changes, I was uncertain how much I would be charged for each request. Side note: to properly evaluate the cost you need to consider how much your time is worth. Services like this are ultimately selling time, removing trivial tasks (e.g. make reservations at a restaurant for at 6pm on Friday) to free up one's calendar. What's been your biggest learning over the last few years building Fin, @lessin and @kortina?

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@rrhoover we have learned a ton Ryan... and written a bunch about it at http://blog.fin.com

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@rrhoover kortina wrote a particularly good 2017 roundup recently with a bunch of key insights at https://blog.fin.com/building-hy...

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@lessin @rrhoover See also my comment above ( https://www.producthunt.com/post... ) for a few other key insights regarding time that are not captured in this post https://blog.fin.com/building-hy...

7yr ago

Bridges to Italy

For something supposedly so revolutionary, they should let people try the service for free pr at least a couple of weeks

Pros:

It seems like an interesting concept

Cons:

they charge right away, no free trial

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

We have a highly skilled team that handles every Fin request, and we pay them well, so we can't offer a free trial. But, we are waiving the $120/mo minimum spend as a special offer for product hunt, so you can try Fin completely on demand at $1/minute with $0 monthly commitment.

7yr ago

Brandon Boynton

It's also ridiculously expensive. Even if there was a free trial, it's only meant for the exceedingly rich who can spend upwards of $5,000 a month on a gimmick they don't need.

7yr ago

Leighton Cusack

PoolTogether

why, why, why are these terrible worthless "reviews" listed ABOVE the helpful discussion?

7yr ago

James Huang

Congrats on the launch! I've tried Magic before. I saw my engagement with Magic decrease with time. I recognized that it took a lot longer for them to do something than it would take for me, which meant I only used Magic for really taxing and time consuming endeavors. Eventually, I churned out of Magic because of the infrequency with which I interacted with Magic. If it's only really large tasks, it's never top of mind and eventually I forget about it. I'm wondering how this service is different than what Magic was offering previously or other scheduling services like clara or x?

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@weiluenhuang I think there is a real frequency of use threshold to get you hooked on assistant service. I'm personally interacting with Fin 5+ times per day, which nets out to about 10 hours of work per week. Although you could use an assistant like Fin in a more occasional manner, where I think Fin really shines is in getting to know you as well as a human assistant that works with you for years -- we invest deeply in 'shared memory' tools for our team that make this possible, and I think enable a higher quality of service than you might get when you using something more infrequently: you can read a bit more about this shared memory concept here https://blog.fin.com/building-hy... Re clara + x -- these seem like great tools for scheduling. One thing I personally like about Fin is that it will do pretty much anything for me -- this often involves picking up the phone and calling someone, or emailing someone or using a website on my behalf (for more on this, you can see the same blog post under "Humans are the universal API.")

7yr ago

Alan Kane

@kortina what is the machine learning component?

7yr ago

Jeremy Peronto

I want to believe in Fin. I was turned off by the price, but was wowed by the demo video and took it for a spin. I was so excited by the potential that I even found a spot for it on my home screen.

My first request was to send flowers to someone for under $50. The ETA given was 95 minutes. Three hours later I had gotten no feedback. Concerned that I going to end up spending more on the service than the flowers, I asked for a status. I got feedback that the task would take longer but I was only being charged for the active minute. My ETA increased to 10 hours. As I watched the cost balloon up to $38, I cancelled the task.

My second request was to add a brewery I had just heard about to my "Restaurants to try" list. In my mind, this should basically be an AI task that would be used when I asked Fin to make future bookings. I assumed it would take next to zero time. Instead, it took 18 effective minutes.

$56 later, I had a single restaurant added to a list.

I believe in the utility Fin is selling. But after limited use, the vision and the execution feel very far apart. And as much as I want to be an optimist, the founder responses to user comments here on Product Hunt read as tone deaf and are in the process of converting me to a pessimist.

Pros:

Aspirational; Incredible demo.

Cons:

Expensive on a per task and overall basis; Poor definition of an "effective minute".

7yr ago

Andrew Mason

Descript

I think I've tried every personal assistant app in Fin is by far the best - it's the real deal, incredibly useful.

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@andrewmason thx man! We are working hard at it!

7yr ago

Dre Durr💡

If you are launching on Product Hunt. You have to offer a discount to the dopest community on the planet... It's an unwritten rule😉 Dope 🚬🚬

7yr ago

Thiago de Carvalho

@dredurr I totally agree, but for software. When it's a service, maybe an upgrade or exclusive features could be more feasible, especially if a company is just starting. Anything that won't hurt the company's pocket. With software is easier as the software is there no matter how many people use it. With services, the more people using it, more 'employees' needed. But I agree. Give us something exclusive o/

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@dredurr the special is that we are waving the subscription fee so you can pay 100% as you go with no minimums!

7yr ago

Jay Weiler

@lessin Is the subscription fee being waived for existing members too? Been using Fin for awhile and would love to not have a monthly minimum...

7yr ago

Nick Horsthuis

I got as far as entering my billing details and backed out because I have no idea on how much I would use/try the service and what kind of bill I would get. Why not give some typical task examples and costs involved? At the very least you should offer a free task or two for the user to understand its limitations before they incur any unnecessary costs. Get them hooked, then bill them. Using technology should bring efficiency and cost savings. Fin is suggesting that you would pay the same for an "average assistant", I don't want just an average assistant, and if Fin is saving on the human element it should pass those savings on to the consumer.

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@horsthuis we do give examples nick... and the machine learning and yield management we do does actually make Fin significantly less expensive than it would be for the same caliber of service by us based assistants. You could hire an overseas VA for less per hour at first blush, but when you consider the real cost of a VA, finding, training, managing, paying regardless of use, etc.. it actually ends up being far more expensive than it looks - and without our tools and shared knowledge generally far lower quality. We aren’t the cheapest solution out there / aren’t trying to be (though someday we would love to lower prices and include more people) but for now we are on demand quality first!

7yr ago

Nick Horsthuis

@lessin Thanks for responding Samuel. Whilst you do offer examples on the home page you don't indicate how much that task cost to complete. Try before you buy would allow the user to ascertain what Fin is able to cope with. How are you calculating that Fin is less expensive, particularly if the AI element incorrectly assumes part of a task and then has to be repeated whereas the human would have potentially been correct the first time?

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@lessin @horsthuis See section 4 on data from this blog post for some example ranges of time spent on requests from a few different categories: https://blog.fin.com/building-hy...

7yr ago

Christopher Leach

I find that the offer they give us hunters is the best way to use Fin. I used it when It had a monthly rate and loved it and love it now, but I save a lot of money because I don't request often but when I do it really helps. Don't know why so many detractors.

Pros:

Can basically get anything done for you

Cons:

Can be expensive depending on how you use it

7yr ago

Hunter Davis

How big is the market that can afford "expensive" but can't afford personal assistant?

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@rockstox actually pretty big hunter... many people have work assistance, few people have coverage for their whole life. Having a personal assistant also in many ways is less leveraged than Fin. People don’t work 24x7 and can’t scale up and down based on demand... further we get great leverage out of our shared tools and knowledge base that no individual assistant has access to.. plus no management. So, many people that have work assistants use Fin - or a combination of Fin and their work assistant to get things done!

7yr ago

Brad Rhoads

Price needs to drop to no more than $40/hr to compete with existing VA services. Presumably, using AI would allow for lower cost instead of 50% higher.

7yr ago

David Kampmann

@bdrhoa Is that the normal rate for VA? I haven't ventured into this space at all.

7yr ago

Brad Rhoads

@mrkampmann That's what I found researching it a while ago. I looked at https://belaysolutions.com/servi... and https://www.zirtual.com/. I just looked again and Zirtual is ~ $33/hr. I haven't pulled the trigger on a VA yet myself. Still hoping to launch my startup this year :)!

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@bdrhoa One thing I will note (per some of my other comments above) is that although it's tempting to compare cost in terms of straight $/hr, what you should really consider is $/results -- we invest deeply in technology to make our team productive, so 1 hr of Fin is not necessarily = to 1 hr of VA or 1 hr of a full time assistant. Personally, I get more results in terms of meetings scheduled, chores done, reservations and purchases made, random tasks done, etc, than when I had a full time 40 hr / wk assistant. So there is a hidden efficiency multiple.

7yr ago

Brad Rhoads

@kortina One thing I really like is the no min/month promo. Keeping that for everyone would set you apart. Wishing you great success!

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@mrkampmann @bdrhoa as a founder, I think investing in some sort of assistant (whether it's Fin or something else) for non-critical work is something you should strongly consider, as it will free you to spend your time on the most critical work you need to do for your company.

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

Just want to clarify here since there seems to be some confusion... the special for product hunt is no-minimum or subscription and pay as you go... our pricing page is just illustrative of what some people use- but if you sign up through product hunt you can use as little or as much as you want and just pay for the effective time at $1/min!

7yr ago

Varun Dave

Seems like a good idea, but it's expensive. Very expensive.

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@varundave someday we would love to bring the price down, but for now we are confident Fin is far more cost effective than having a full time assistant ... and completely on demand so you only pay for what you use & you get the benefit of our whole team’s shared knowledge and attention!

7yr ago

Fin

Maker

@varundave Since the time of this post, we have dramatically improved the quality of service and lowered prices 25% to 40% across all major categories. Read more here: https://www.fin.com/post/2018/6/...

6yr ago

sheynk ✈

I've been using the product very actively for about a year now. I'm a terrible edge case customer: multi-time zone, foreign language addresses, weird scheduling requirements (sun-thur for in person, mon-wed for calls, etc), and other oddities.

While no service is perfect ... and certainly no remote/virtual assistant is ... whats been awesome is seeing how much Sam and Andrew listen to customers, improve the app, and make the service work better.

Its hard to imagine not using the service now.

Pros:

Truly 24/7 help with just about anything you can reasonably ask a native english speaker with a fast internet connection to do

Cons:

Sometimes hard things are done well and little details are missed - which you would get really upset at a real assistant for :-)

7yr ago

Vignesh Warar

Keep it shot

Hey Fin, Are you Able to Speak 😁 ?. and I don't know why you cost so much for a simple use.

7yr ago

Livestack

Maker

@vignestion every request you make to Fin uses a combination of machine learning and US based top flight operations... so we have real costs to pay —. Our view is that the most expensive thing for a customer is a wrong answer or incorrectly done task ... so we cost a bit more than some other options but the quality is worth it!