Hi TCF community, I’ve been following this forum for years, but I finally decided to post now as I’m working on a service that I thought might be interesting to people on this forum, and I would love to get your candid feedback.The service, called InsightMonkey, will provide users with [b]on-demand analysts[/b] who can help them with tasks such as PowerPoint formatting, online research, data analysis etc. It will all be done through a [b]simple app[/b] (think of uber-like app experience) and will differ from services such as Fiverr or Upwork because users will a) get an instant response to their request; and b) you will be able to [b]rely on the quality of our outputs[/b] as our analysts will be trained and will follow a strict QA protocol.I believe this would be useful to many consultants who would be able to offload some of the simpler tasks to InsightMonkey analysts and focus their time on more value-adding activities.This is in early stage of development, so it would be really great to get your [b]feedback on if you would find this service useful.[/b] If you are interested, you can sign-up on our website – [url]www.insightmonkey.com[/url] or just drop me an email on matt@insightmonkey.com. [b]For people who give us constructive feedback, we can return the favour in form of free credits to try out the service.[/b]Many thanks!

Hi Matt, where will your analysts be based?

Hi Matt,I like the idea and it is one that some consultancies are, in one shape or another, trying to develop internally I think.Being completely honest and blunt (that's the point of feedback) I for one would never use it. The potential reward (save 2 / 3 days of work of an analyst which cost the project really little) are massively outweighed by the risks (who are these guys? How can I make sure they do things as I want them? How are they going to know what is our format and if the phsyco partner of the team likes column A at 2 or 3cm width? In general, who guarantees me I am not going to wait for 3 days for a deliverable which will look crap?)Main point is - I would change the target audience. Why not focusing on SMEs? Those guys really struggle to put together 2 and 2 in an excel sometimes and can't really afford a huge consulting team to do it for them. Plus they won't care if the format is in standard or not (they won't have one) and are much more likely to be amazed by what your group of guys can offer to them and way less whiny than an arrogant bunch of consultants that think they are excel Gods.I like the idea but I would go back and think about what type of companies I want to sell this to and, within them, who is the person/role who will buy it?

Just to give you a sample of what your guys would be up against, when I clicked on the link to your web-site it didn't work, it just led me back to this page.I genuinely don't mind in my free 'web-surfing' time, but an equivalent blatant mistake found in an excel or power point deliverable (eg. think of different client name in there, name of my firm misspelled...something obvious like this) would drive me nuts and would probably be enough for me to never use your service again.Trust me, I am not trying to be horrible (I really don't mind about the link, it can happen and I barely know how to navigate on explorer..) but to give you a taster of what type of attitude you would be dealing with.Also, there is an element of client confidentiality - I wouldn't be comfortable to share material of my client with a third party (I wouldn't even be able contractually) and I would not want to include a provision for it in the contract ([i]'Remind me again why are we paying you £xk a day so that you can outsource the work for 1/10 of that?'[/i])

The single biggest problem I can think of to this idea is client privacy. I can never imagine a Big4 partner or director saying: "yeah, let's send these client branded slides with for-your-eyes-only client content to a third party who will assign it to some random person to do things we might as well ask our newly recruited analysts to do".I have worked for a Big4 and they fear of leaking anything client related on slides went to lengths such as having a significant amount of people that were on the bench dedicated to anonimising material from past client work (big milestone presentations, end-of-project results presentations and suchlikes) before they could be passed on to any knowledge repository.This was done out to supposedly prevent any client brand and identity making it through the copy & paste into some new piece of work for a different client. Basically the firm wouldn't trust their own people in handling correctly material that could identify the client (and let's not mention the generic "get your laptop stolen and you are fired" policy), why would they trust an external firm? By the time any NDA and bureaucracy to cover both parties' ârse is signed, you might as well have done the job yourself...

Thanks for sharing information about on-demand analysts..It is more helpful..Thanks again..