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The adventure of new ventures.

In an article The Times has just published, I profile four young ventures vying to help shorten to-do lists for small-business owners this holiday season. Please chime in at the bottom of this post with your own experiences offloading tasks to services that promise to lighten your load. To get things rolling, I’ve reached out to a few small businesses that use the companies featured in the article. Here are their tales:

The Gold-Plated Vacuum Cleaner

If your business wanted to sell a $1 million gold-plated vacuum cleaner – or at least get people talking about it – what would you do? Commission a two-minute rap, of course.

That, in any case, is what GoVacuum did. In June, the company began a golden-vacuum campaign devised by Justin Haver, its vice president of sales and marketing. Mr. Haver’s boss agreed to let him try the weird stunt if he could keep it cheap.

So Mr. Haver turned to Fiverr, an online market for small services. There he found a rapper-for-hire to praise his deluxe dust-buster. For $5, Haver ended up with beats and rhyming lyrics that included, “It’s 24-karat. Man, I wanna marry it! Lifetime warranty: you’ll never have to bury it.”

For the same $5 rate, other individual Fiverr members created a bouncy pop song, a press release, a blurb for the GoVacuum Web site and a computer-adjusted image of a golden vacuum. (Haver used all these elements but the last, preferring a picture created by an in-house designer.)

The fabled vacuum earned international headlines and televised coverage on the Fox Business Network’s “Money with Melissa Francis” and “Live From the Couch” on WLNY, a CBS New York affiliate. Before he could meet the cameras, however, Mr. Haver had to bring his fictitious vacuum to life. That meant paying a visit to the gold-plater.

“At that point the story became so good, we had to do it,” Mr. Haver said. “It took several thousand dollars.”

But he hasn’t forgotten that the campaign started much cheaper, with a flurry of $5 tasks that added up to less than $100. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the Fiverrs,” he said.

Updating Online Listings From a Single Dashboard

Four years ago, Ivan Mladenovic didn’t want customers randomly dropping in to visit his computer repair and consulting shop. Who can blame him? He was running it from his kitchen.

When the company, Preemo, began to grow, Mr. Mladenovic moved it to a corporate office space. This summer, he expanded into a retail storefront in South Miami, Fla., and having customers stop by became a priority. Suddenly, he needed to change his business’s address everywhere it appeared online.

“We’re listed in every directory we can be in because of the nature of our business,” Mr. Mladenovic said. “There are least 80 or 90 directory listings for our business. And it’s a huge science project to change them.”

So he turned to Yext, a company based in New York that gives users a single dashboard to update company listings across more than 50 directory sites including Yelp, CitySearch, MapQuest and Foursquare. (That list does not include Google+ Local; Yext has been a vocal critic of Google’s business listings service.)

Yext also lets business owners add promotional content, like special offers and photographs, to their listings, and it alerts owners when customers post new reviews. The full service costs $499, billed annually.

“I justify the cost because it takes me about 20 to 30 minutes to update one listing, so if I’m updating more than 40 at once it’s a significant time savings on my part,” Mr. Mladenovic said. He also uses Yext to post deals on iPhone repair and other services. He typically runs a new special every two months, hoping that fresh offers will maintain customer interest.

“Our business is obviously an as-needed service. Nobody wakes up and says, ‘I want to fix my computer today,’” he said, laughing. “I want us to be top-of-mind.”

An Intensely Manual Process

When tasks multiply, Matt Brezina calls in the rabbits.

Mr. Brezina is the co-founder of Sincerely, a start-up whose mobile apps let users create and mail photo postcards and other printed greetings. The company’s newest service, Sesame, dispatches themed gift boxes that consumers select and order through their smartphones. Sesame went live at the end of last month, just in time for prime gift-giving season.

“This is a new business for us,” Mr. Brezina said. “We had no idea how huge it would be.”

That’s where the rabbits came in. When the work became too much for the 16 full-time employees at his San Francisco office, Mr. Brezina reached out to TaskRabbit, an on-demand service for farming out quick jobs to individual freelancers, which the company calls rabbits. On some days, as many as three rabbits were dispatched to Sincerely, where they packed elaborately designed gifts sets whose contents ranged from puppy-training accessories to cocktail supplies and baby gear.

“Putting these gifts together is an intensely manual process,” Mr. Brezina said, requiring workers who bring attention and care. “We have some people we really like, and we hire them over and over.”

Have you tried any services like these? If so, what worked for you? What didn’t? Which tasks are easily delegated to others? Which ones lend credence to the old adage, “The only way to get a job done right is to do it yourself”?

You can follow Jessica Bruder on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/how-small-businesses-use-fiverr-taskrabbit-and-other-services/?partner=rss&emc=rss