My buddy Marcus is a very busy man, and being very busy he finds it difficult to meet enough quality women that he would like to date.  Not a huge issue but life is always more exciting when you have options.  So we were on the internet and ran into a great discussion with Style and Timothy Ferriss.  In this discussion Tim outlines an a bet he had with a friend that he could outsource everything, including his dating life.  So I read some of his book The 4 Hour Work Week, talked with Marcus over some of the ideas and we decided to give it a shot. It’d be a good learning experience for me, because one of my short term goals is to learn how to manage people and it’ll also be beneficial to Marcus’s dating life.  So let’s get down to brass tacks.

In Tim’s talk he spoke about using elance.com as a resource in finding some people to assist him with his little experimental bet.  I am going to do the same.  Using elance is a pretty simple so sign up, pay a small fee to be “legit” and then you can choose to post two types of jobs.  One type of job is hourly and the other is milestone based.  I’m gonna choose milestone based for this.  In Tim’s talk he said it cost him around 300$ so I’m gonna try and keep it the same.  So here’s the break down:

1.  Set up the project and describe it to the elance community. I’m gonna aim for marketeers because I think that’s the closest type of skill we would need to pull this off correctly.

2.  My hopes are to get at least a couple teams running on the various dating sites out there. As of now I’m aiming for plentyoffish.com, match.com, okcupid.com and eharmony.com.

3.  Since we are working on a small budget obviously we are gonna use milestone based, we pay the project up front in elance and that signals to the workers that they have a legit job.  That they can start work on.

4.  The first milestone for payment would be setting up a profile for Marcus, accessing their email and setting up a date on the calendar.  That would pay 20$.  The next milestone would be a lump sum of 50$ if they put 5 dates on the calendar.  After that the team with the most dates gets a bonus of 50$ this would be the incentive to work harder at finding dates.

5.  To setup Marcus’s dating profile each team will be given a basic information sheet.  We might make one team do this for the other teams by just calling Marcus and asking the appropriate questions.

6.  Date locations would be chosen so that it would be easy for Marcus to take them out.  In the instance that dates are on the same day then we would prefer the teams to find locations that are very close to each other to make the most efficient use of time.

7.  Setup a project specific calendar using google apps.  This way when the teams line up dates they can make sure they aren’t stepping on anybody else’s plans.  Also Marcus can put in times when he doesn’t want to take a girls out, greatly reducing the amount of time needed to schedule.

8.  Of course we would have to explain to the teams what type of girl Marcus is interested in and for that we would look at a couple of profiles before hand probably turn them into PDFs and figure out general traits that Marcus is interested in.

9.  When they set a date on the calendar we would require them to also post a link to profile of the girl so that we can see what we are getting ourselves into.  Marcus has final say in whether he wants the date so they have to be “ok’d” by him.  Only when he has ok’d the right amount of dates will they be official and we will pay out the teams.

10.  The time frame for this would be over the course of two months to be flexible.

So that’s my general plan.  I guess the next step is to actually get some of this stuff setup and working.  Once we have this running I’ll write a post about how it is actually operating.  So stick around for part 2.