(You can read more of our original ideas in our archive. You can order a business plan of this idea here.)
Problem: Hiring a personal assistant or hiring interns to work for you is difficult: you have to either find a great service (at a fee) or have an extremely robust network to find assistants/interns/chiefs of staffs.
Solution: A business that allows you to hire multiple people to do a single “chief of staff” or “personal assistant” role. The idea would be to hire people who are doing their first jobs, in aggregate, and utilize them as a decentralized army of individual assistants to eventually add up to one mega assistant or chief of staff. The value of this business is that it would enable cost-savings (since it’s people’s first jobs they are looking mostly for experience, not a salary) and would help hirers develop a broader network than a traditional one-person, one-function assistant or chief of staff.
When I was in my sophomore year of college (winter of 2017), I actually participated in a winter internship that followed this model. Me and a friend from college interned as Chief of Staff’s at Spare5 (rebranded to Mighty AI and eventually acquired by Uber in 2019). While we only received a small stipend, the experience was invaluable: by managing a tech CEOs schedule as a 19-year-old I learned some of the “unspoken rules” of management. The importance of scheduling focus time, how to cold-email (and get warm-intros from) journalists, and what to say to encourage team morale and culture. To this day, my experience at Spare5 showed me how important community and culture are to building a company.
The beauty of this model is that by hiring so many people to be your chiefs of staff, they learn (in some vertical like scheduling, time-management, emailing, network maintenance, etc.) while you get a useful service for cheaper than usual. For more on the role of the Chief of Staff, I encourage you to read Maggie Hsu’s 5-part series.
According to Tyler Parris, the author of Chief of Staff: The Strategic Partner Who Will Revolutionize Your Organization, 68,000 people held the CoS title in 2015 in nonmilitary, nongovernment organizations in the United States—mostly large companies. Given that a CoS makes an average base salary of $122,638 per year, this business’ market is worth over $8.2 billion. All the startup would have to do is attempt to capture 10% of all current chiefs of staffs with this new model (perhaps a bit more to account for price discounts) in order to be truly profitable and effective.
Monetization: Percentage of fees from hiring.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)