Anon // Athena — Design Partnership

Intro

• 🎉 First off, we’re incredibly excited to be working with Athena as a design partner!
• 📓 We had two main agenda items for today:
• (1) Give you a high-level update of where we stand and what we’ve been focused on.
• (2) Get some alignment around the project plan and goals for the future.

Clerical Tasks

• Legal Documents:
📝 Design Partner Agreement: Who is the right co-signer from Athena?
📝 MNDA: Should be helpful for information sharing! Can you share your standard one?

• Athena has a standard MNDA we can use.
• Anon to send the Design Partner Agreement to Athena for signature.
• Scheduling:
🗓️ For kickoff in August: Should we set a date to start?

• We can schedule a kickoff meeting anytime after the 24th of August.
🗓️ What meeting cadence should we set once we get started? Weekly or bi-weekly catch-ups where we report the latest and demo the product to you for feedback?

• After the kickoff, we can schedule weekly checkins.

What We’ve Been Up to at Anon

• Product development / engineering:
• ⚒️ First internal demo scheduled for tomorrow (full delegation of access to a service from one machine to another using secure credential storage, IP proxying, etc.)
• ⚒️ PRD for Athena’s (VA) product completed and under development by the Anon engineering team.
• ⚒️ Product mockups nearly-finished (80-90%) and should be fully completed by EOW.
• Business development:
• 🤝 4 design partners in onboarding process including 2 primarily VA-focused partners and 2 primarily AI-focused partners (obviously some overlap, like Athena that does both).
• Team and growth:
• 👪 Hired 2 additional engineers and 1 UX/UI designer since we spoke last, so team is now 5 full-time employees and 2 part-time employees.

Goal Setting

Primary

• 🏆 Improve Athena’s ability to sell to security-conscious or compliant orgs.
• Measurable by conversion rate of HIPAA, PCI, or SOC 2-compliant companies.
• 🏆 Improve client UX via simpler onboarding, off-boarding, and “transitions”
• Measurable by reduced churn, higher NPS, or fewer required client “actions” during these critical phases of engagement with Athena.
• ‼️ Any needs for API support to integrate existing automation for on/off-boarding.

• Overall, these primary goals align well with how Athena is thinking about the engagement.
• Athena gets a lot of questions about security during the sales process. Anon could give Athena a way to prove to clients that they are security-first and do more than just offer a password manager.
• Onboarding, rematching, off-boarding is also really important. Anything that can make this easier and more re-assuring to clients is good. The first 3 months of working with a client are very critical for success.
• Clients have a portal account and VAs are managed in Google Workspace. They’re looking at a new tool to manage identity that could integrate with us. We will keep tabs on this project so we can support necessary integrations in the future.

Secondary

• 🏆 Improvement in AI adoption rate for automated task handling.
• We don’t know Athena’s roadmap so hard to quantify, but would love to discuss.
• 🏆 Reinforcement of reputation as the most tech-forward and security-minded VA firm.
• Again, hard to quantify but maybe measurable by PR mentions or sales pipeline increase.

• Athena has a number of AI initiatives underway.
• One is taking the 90-minute client discovery call and using AI to transcribe the call to turn into a “User Manual”.
• Another is leveraging human-in-the-loop AI tools like ChatGPT, or building micro-apps. Currently, EAs are just leveraging client credentials for AI use cases but as the micro-apps become more sophisticated, Anon’s AI credential management tooling could be useful.
• Nathan is the director of AI — Ben is going to introduce us so we can chat with him soon.

Requirements Gathering Questions

Athena’s business, growth, and client base

• 📊 How many VA clients does Athena have today? So we can think about future product rollout.
• 📊 What is the breakdown of VAs:clients? Are most matches 1:1? Do some VAs have multiple clients? Do some clients have multiple VAs?

• Almost all matches are 1:1; however, a few Athena clients have multiple EAs.
• Athena has ~900 clients total.
• 📊 How many Athena execs have VAs? And what is the breakdown (☝️)? This is so we can start thinking about the Athena-only internal rollout.

• Any director-level or above person at Athena has an EA. This is 20-30 people total.

Onboarding, off-boarding, and VA transitions

• 📊 Is Athena’s current onboarding flow documented anywhere? We would love to walk through it, or could just go through any documents that are provided today.
• Current onboarding flow
• 📊 At what rate do re-assignments happen for Athena clients? This could be due to a VA quitting, being fired, or just being a poor match for their client.
• 4.7% YTD (as of June 2023)

• 📊 What are the most common reasons that clients churn? Has Athena conducted any kind of “exit survey” or documented clients that are leaving the business?

1. XP Performance - 53.6%
2. XP resignation prompted to churn - 21.4%
3. Client budget / business issue - 21.4%
4. Ended due to XP long-term leave - 3.6%

• 📊 What are the most common reasons that VAs churn? Same for VAs. Are most VAs fired? Do they quit? Are they bad fits and just get reassigned to a new client?

1. Personal / EA resignation - 55.6%
2. Career shift - 22.2%
3. Poor performance - 11.1%
4. Migration - 11.1%

• 📊 What is Athena’s breakdown of clients by industry? Or compliance type? How many clients are founders vs. execs vs. work in healthcare or government. What % have to meet a certain compliance standard?
• Here’s the current breakdown by industry of our clients.

1. Unknown - 24.5%
2. Technology - 18.5%
3. Finance - 16.15%
4. B2B Goods & Services - 11.7%
5. Others (Government, Real estate, Education, etc.) - 10%
6. Healthcare - 8.6%
7. Consumer Goods & Services - 6.6%
8. Philanthropy (Non-profit) - 1.25%

Technology

• 📊 Does Athena purchase any technology on behalf of clients today? Obviously something like AWS is indirectly on behalf of clients, but I mean tech for communication, security, etc.
• Athena has a “Tools and Tech” portion of their onboarding process where clients disclose the tools they use. The tools covered in this include calendars, email clients, project management tools (Asana, Monday, Notion), communication tools (Slack, etc.), and more. Athena can provide us with this data.
• The purpose of the “Tools and Tech” onboarding is so that Athena EAs can get trained-up on the tools that clients will use.
• Athena doesn’t provide a lot of technology to EAs, but they do provide a VPN account, an OpenPhone account, and an Asana account to each EA. They also provide a 1Password subscription for internal use, but clients must pay if they want to use 1Password themselves.
• Athena is willing to recommend technology like apps and Chrome Extensions to clients.
• We also provide a Macbook Air for the XP that is equipped with an MDM software to help with security.
• 📊 What % of Athena clients use a password manager? And if you know which password manager, that would be helpful.
• Many clients use 1Password (or another password manager) but Athena recommends using 1Password.

Support for apps and services

• 📊 What are the most common tasks that VAs handle on behalf of clients? Does Athena track which clients are working with VAs for meeting scheduling, business services like building lead lists? Or personal services like ordering groceries, booking trips, etc.?
• We’ve divided these into different pillars that we saw had made the most impact.

1. Foundations (Inbox, Calendar, Travel)

2. Essentials (Home, Image, Finance)

3. Career (Networking, Hiring & Team, Project & Ops)

4. Lifestyle (Food & Drinks, Sports & Games, Arts & Leisures)

5. Health (Wellness, Nutrition, Exercise)

6. Fulfillment (Learning, Creativity, Productivity)

7. Relationships (Partners, Family, Friends)

This is still dependent on the client’s needs / preference.  We do have our Playbooks where you can see the breakdown of common tasks that support the pillars.

• 📊 Does Athena guide or match VAs differently based on client needs? Are some VAs more suited to personal tasks? Or business tasks? Or more or less complex tasks? Or those that require a strong knowledge of English?
• Yes, our matching team would; 1.) Base it on the client’s preferences, and 2.) The EA should be match-ready (a matching readiness process happens weekly).
• 📊 What are the most common websites or apps that VAs use on behalf of clients? This is highly correlated with the “tasks”, but the answers here would be Gmail, United Airlines, Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Notion, LinkedIn, etc.
1. Google / Bing
2. Gmail / Outlook / or other email platforms that a client will use
3. Google Calendar or other calendar management tool
4. Slack for internal communication
5. Zoom / Microsoft teams
6. Asana / Trello
7. Office 365 / Google Workspace
8. Google Maps and Yelp for location / restaurant reviews

• Athena has a “Tools and Tech” portion of their onboarding process where clients disclose the tools they use. The tools covered in this include calendars, email clients, project management tools (Asana, Monday, Notion), communication tools (Slack, etc.), and more. Athena can provide us with this data.
• The purpose of the “Tools and Tech” onboarding is so that Athena EAs can get trained-up on the tools that clients will use.
• Athena doesn’t provide a lot of technology to EAs, but they do provide a VPN account, an OpenPhone account, and an Asana account to each EA. They also provide a 1Password subscription for internal use, but clients must pay if they want to use 1Password themselves.
• Athena wants to get to a point where there is “recommended tech stack” of tools for productivity, communication, and security purposes. Anon could be one of those tools.
• Many clients use 1Password (or another password manager) but Athena doesn’t provide an account and doesn’t recommend how a password manager should be used or how credentials should be shared.
• Athena clients have a mobile app that mostly transcribes voice notes to EAs today. They haven’t pushed this app a lot and utilization is likely <20%; however, there are plans to improve this app in the future.
• Athena is willing to recommend technology like apps and Chrome Extensions to clients.

Support for apps and services

• 📊 What are the most common tasks that VAs handle on behalf of clients? Does Athena track which clients are working with VAs for meeting scheduling, business services like building lead lists? Or personal services like ordering groceries, booking trips, etc.?
• 📊 Does Athena guide or match VAs differently based on client needs? Are some VAs more suited to personal tasks? Or business tasks? Or more or less complex tasks? Or those that require a strong knowledge of English?
• 📊 What are the most common websites or apps that VAs use on behalf of clients? This is highly correlated with the “tasks”, but the answers here would be Gmail, United Airlines, Uber, Doordash, Instacart, Notion, LinkedIn, etc.
• ❗ Important because it will dictate the set of services we will support on day 1.

• Athena has collected some use case data, especially from the “Tools and Tech” portion of the onboarding process, but this is mostly productivity and communication tools versus individual applications like airlines or banks.
• Athena also has a “client preferences” Google Sheet that we can access that has preferences for each client. This might include more specific use case or application data that has been collected by EAs.
• Athena also gathered demographic data from EAs, including location, children, etc. It was easy to collect this information because the EAs were able to complete the survey.
• For any places where data is limited or missing, Athena and Anon can work together to gather data about clients through EAs — this is a very simple way to get information that most companies cannot do without creating added client work.

Proposed Phases of Design Partnership

Phase 1: Information Gathering and Specs

• ⏳ Starting now until mid-to-late August
• 🏆 Success is Anon getting all the required inputs to build a beta version of our product to Athena’s specs.
• 💲 No cost to Athena as the design partnership is very valuable for us.
• ☑️ Get answers to all the information gathering questions from Anon such that we can be building while Ben is finishing up other projects and has vacation in early August.

Phase 2: Demo and Internal Rollout

• ⏳ Mid-to-late August for 1-2 months
• 🏆 Success is Anon delivering a demo and internal-use version of our product so the Athena team can test the product in a low-risk setting before rolling out to clients.
• 💲 No immediate to Athena but we would want to have decided on future financial terms, contingent on meeting product and rollout SLAs during this phase.
• ☑️ Anon to deliver a demo to Athena to showcase our product
• ☑️ Anon to onboard Athena execs to a live version of Anon’s product, built to Athena’s specs, that can be tested with execs and internal VAs.

Phase 3: Initial Client Rollout

• ⏳ End of Q3 / early Q4
• 🏆 Success is Athena rolling out Anon’s product to a subset of it’s VAs “in the wild” based on a successful rollout and utilization for its internal execs and VAs.
• 💲 Athena and Anon can discuss pricing before this stage but Athena will receive a significant “Design Partner Discount” regardless.
• ☑️ Anon to deliver an external-ready beta of our product to Athena such that Athena can confidently roll the product out to clients with all bugs worked out.
• ☑️ Anon and Athena to constantly measure success metrics such as utilization increases, reduced churn, or improvements in client NPS that could be attributable to the product.

• The discrete phases (1, 2, and 3) align with Ben’s expectations.
• We clarified the starting date (after August 24th) at the start of the call.