Meet the one guy who uses every on-demand app - Jon Auerbach

Meet the one guy who uses every on-demand app

7 AM

I wake up to the piped-in sounds of a beach in the Greek isles and pick out a soap from one of the three men’s grooming box of the month clubs I subscribe to. I go with pine, which I realize was an immediate mistake. Tomorrow, I’m definitely picking the lavender body wash infused with sea salt from the Canary Islands.

I fire up GetMeThere, which sends out three different people to do my commute ahead of me using a bunch of different transportation options: bus, subway, Via, UberX, Lyft, and walking. GetMeThere’s algorithm matches my commute with people going in the same direction, so they’re getting paid to do what they were going to do anyway. It’s a win-win-win (borrowing a term from Michael Scott). Well, except for the walking guy.

himym-subwaywars1

I exit my apartment and the results are in: take the bus downtown and then walk across 14th Street to Meatpacking. Perfect.

9 AM

I arrive at my desk and my Mailytics assistant is already midway through the emails that came in from last night and is drafting responses for my review at 9:30. That leaves me time to look over the status report from my Jarvis (the Marvel-inspired on-demand manager that manages the myriad household on-demand services I am signed up for).

Last night’s Instacart run from Whole Foods delivered mushy avocados, so my Jarvis recommends using Substicart, which will allow the Instacart shopper today to request a substitute shopper at a different high-end supermarket to get some better avocados if they’re still terrible. I’m having a party on Wednesday and can’t afford to serve bad guac, you know? Hopefully that will all be sorted out by tomorrow morning, or else I’m going to have to hit up one of the food ingredient delivery apps and then hire a chef through yourChef.

Dry cleaning seems to be in order, although there were some broken buttons on a couple of my shirts. I’ll have Jarvis send those out now to Tailored-to-Me, at a cost of $5/button for same-day service. Sure, I could bring them back to my dry cleaner to fix for free (or have Jarvis put them in a cool-looking bag to leave in my lobby for Washio to pick up), but one of the broken buttons was on my favorite shirt that I want to wear for my party, so time is of the essence.

That only took 15 minutes, so I switch over to my party preparations: the alcohol lineup based on crowd-sourced recommendations alcohol was delivered on Sunday, the BarStaff bartender and waitresses were confirmed a few weeks ago, and I’ll wait until Wednesday afternoon to put in the order for the set up/clean up people on Last Minute Help.

The RSVP list looks pretty good. I’m demoing this new app that lets you find friends of friends to invite to parties and social events called Party Seed. It’s like Tinder for seat fillers. I pick a seed group of friends and then the app sends out invites from those friends to their friends, etc. Boom, instant party where everyone will know someone. [Ed.: That’s actually not a bad idea. Anyone reading this, please don’t steal it].

9:30 AM

I get a ping in my inbox, which means my draft emails are ready to review. Five minutes later, I’ve sent out 20 responses, timed to send in random intervals over the next hour. I’m the paradigm of efficiency.

Now I need to wait until 9:45 until my PrepStep assistant sends me my prep sheet for my 10 o’clock. That leaves me a bit of time to check out what’s buzzing on the Internet. Sure, Twitter and Facebook can tell you what’s trending, but I’m really liking this new app called Read It For Me, which will match you with a person who has read the top 100 articles, blogs, and listicles and narrowed down everything to three must-reads based on your interests, plus a bonus longread for the commute home.

This morning, my Read It For Me guy has queued up a collection of iPhone 8X rumors, a list of the best Vietnamese egg sandwich places in the city, and some funny dog videos. For my commute home, I’ll be enjoying the latest piece by noted technologist Carmelo Anthony, who is ruminating on the perils of the coming container unicorn bubble.

OK, got to digest this meeting prep sheet then ghost in my MeetingBuddy so they can take notes on the call and get started on the follow-up work.

11:30 AM

I ended up with a bit too much work coming out of that meeting, but that’s OK, I’ll just add another MeetingBuddy to help the first person.

It’s almost time for lunch, which means I need to check the status of my Lunch It advance team. I have three tasters out today seeing how good the food is and how long the wait is at local hot spots. The pita place is burning their falafel today, that’s too bad. The soup is good at Soup Shop, but the line is out the door, no thanks. Looks like it’s the deli for me today.

1 PM

I’ve got to turn something around for my boss before his 4 o’clock, so I ping MeetingBuddy to get a new duo. Hmm, for some reason it’s taking a bit too long to farm this out, so I click over to GetMeATeam, which provides teams of three or more people who will work in tandem to do larger projects. Because it’s my first time using the app, my first order is 15% off. Score!

A quick word about pricing.

It’s not even 2:30 and I’ve already used 14 different apps. But thanks to algorithms and global outsourcing, my total spend for the day will be about $40, so that comes out to around $10000 a year. However, when you add up all the time I save at work and in my personal life, I’m actually making money on this whole enterprise, it’s crazy.

2 PM

My GetMeATeam is hard at work on the 4 o’clock assignment, which means it’s time to turn to the remaining area of my life that I haven’t managed yet today: dating.

With the numerous dating sites out there, and dating sites that layer on top of those sites, of course you need an on-demand manager to cut through the chaff.

The best one is uncreatively called LoveManager.

Each user is assigned a manager who works with a team based around the world that will manage and communicate with your matches across all your dating sites. Thanks to the number of people using LoveManager, they’ve developed the most effective responses and communication wait times for each stage of the interaction.

The best part is that they only contact you once they’ve actually secured a date with the match for a particular day of the week. Then it’s a simple matter of selecting the person you want to see (they only give you three per day to make it easier to choose).

They also track the dates you’ve been on, so you know what you did last date and whether anything of interest was discussed, and then they email you a dossier to review on the way to the next date. This requires a little effort on my part, as I have to dictate how the date went on my cab ride home into a voice note (which will then be transcribed by TranscribeIt) and then LM takes over.

1-hTj0YMTdSk48uNz1Vo9NTA (1)

Tonight’s date candidates are Lily, a 29-year old securities litigator from Florida, Hailey, a 26-year old marketing manager that played on the LPGA tour for 14 months after college, and Amelia, a 23-year old analyst at Goldman. When in doubt, I always go with the youngest, but why the heck is a Goldman analyst available for a date on a Monday night? They don’t unchain the analysts from their desks until 1 AM as far as I know, so this must be a fake profile. I go with Lily over Hailey in the end, because as much as I would love a significant other who could play golf with me, I have a 20 handicap and would be too embarrassed to lose to her on a regular basis.

3 PM

I book the date with Lily just as my GetMeATeam sends me the 4 o’clock assignment. A solid 30 minutes of revising later and my boss is satisfied for the day, meaning it’s time to start feeding today’s emails to my Mailytics assistant for tomorrow morning.

After that, my date prep sheet lands in my inbox, which has the results of a quick Internet/Facebook search of Lily’s imprint, info on tonight’s venue (a divey-but-not-too-divey bar that’s just far enough away from my apartment that it doesn’t look like I’m trying to get her to come home with me), and finally some conversation fodder and jokes.

I print this out to read on my walk over to get my afternoon coffee. We get the same coffee delivered to our office by Joyride, but some things you just have to do yourself.

The rest of the afternoon flies by and before I know it, it’s time to check out the evening commute report, dinner options in my neighborhood, and my outfit for tonight’s date, which was put together by WhatToWear (at some point all these companies stopped coming up with clever names and just called themselves by descriptions; less confusing for me).

Ugh, Jarvis didn’t update WhatToWear to reflect that he sent shirts to Tailored-to-Me this morning, so the shirt queued up for tonight’s date is not actually available. They really need an app that keeps on top of these Jarvis managers. They’re clearly the weak link in the chain. That gives me an idea…


Re-published on Business Insider.


 

 


Leave a Reply



^