“Today I woke up two hours before my shift and I had an email … saying it was done.”
Via blog.zirtual.com
Four years after debuting its virtual assistant service, Zirtual appears to be shutting it down. Early Monday morning, the company broadcast a message to its clients informing them it is suspending operations due to "a combination of market circumstances and financial constraints." Zirtual's Twitter account has since disappeared and the company has shuttered the email accounts it provided to its assistants. Meanwhile, CEO Maren Donovan's voicemail inbox has filled to the point where it can no longer accept new messages, and frustrated complaints and allegations — including a fairly vicious "parody" account — are popping up on Facebook and Twitter. Zirtual has not responded to requests for comment.
Before Instacart, Shyp, Luxe, and Sprig made it trendy, Zirtual was one of the first digital labor platforms to shift its contract workers to employee status, making the change over a year ago, BuzzFeed News reported in April. At the time, Donovan said the decision was made to give employees what they wanted, despite increased labor costs.
Randi Judge, a former Zirtual assistant, said the decent pay and benefits Zirtual promised employees is what drew her to the company six months ago. After a drawn-out application process that took over a month, Judge was excited by the potential for growth inside the company, which allowed assistants to rise through the ranks of team leadership. So when she got word this morning that the company was shutting down, it came as a real blow.
"Just a couple weeks ago [...] they were trying something new. They were looking to increase our pay rate in the next 18 months," Judge told BuzzFeed News. "Then today I woke up two hours before my shift and I had an email from Maren saying it was done."
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