ALWYNNE GWILT
Globe and Mail Update Last updated on Friday, Apr. 03, 2009 10:07AM EDT
When Ming Ooi signed on to domystuff.com to arrange a romantic proposal evening for his soon-to-be fiancée, he left much to the imagination of the event planner.
He got candles and rose petals covering the floors of his 1,000-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., a four-foot tall flower arrangement in the living room and an eight-course menu prepared by a professional chef.
Most importantly, someone else arranged it all for him.
"The chef is a personal chef for billionaires on the Upper East Side," said Mr. Ooi, a marketing director. "He's used to cooking in places that are the size of my entire apartment."
In what is the latest in outsourcing one's life, domystuff.com allows people to post a task they want done and have assistants bid on doing it for them. Think eBay crossed with Craigslist, a virtual organizer for busybodies.
Soon after posting his request for an event planner, Mr. Ooi, 32, found nine people bidding to fulfill his needs. In the end, he paid $1,400 (U.S.).
The site was started three months ago by four twentysomethings out of California who work together at an Internet incubating company.
"It's kind of exceeded our wildest expectations," said co-founder Darren Berkovitz, 23, from the company's headquarters, adding there are more than 20,000 members from Toronto to Texas.
The site is free to join and use, but it wasn't always so. Initially, it took a small cut on the assistants' payment, but recently dropped the fee to attract more members. The company is looking for revenue ideas for the future.
The idea sprang from Mr. Berkovitz's joke to a colleague that he wished he could outsource finding a girlfriend. Then he and three friends realized, why couldn't they?
"It solves two of the biggest problems we have today: We don't have enough free time and, two, we don't make enough money," he said.
The tasks can range from the mundane - painting a house, picking up dry cleaning - to the inane: Someone wanted their ears professionally cleaned.
Mr. Ooi will marry Kathy Chan next year and has already gone back to the site to take some stress out of planning the wedding, a sign the founders take as a good one.
"If you can take back even a few hours of your life by using the site, I think it will have been a success," Mr. Berkovitz said. "That's really the most gratifying part of it."
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