Tim Ferriss Interview Transcript
A while back, I did an audio interview with Tim Ferriss (Listen), author of the bestselling The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Compare Prices). I don't normally do transcripts of the audio interviews I do, but I've had so many requests for a transcript of this one that I decided to go ahead and get it done:
It's five pages, covering a wide variety of topics, including Tim's personal entrepreneurial story, Richard Branson, creating a turnkey business, passive income, outsourcing, remembering to put a value on your time and what to do with all that extra time once you've created it.
By the way, if you're interested in getting transcriptions of podcasts done, let me tell you a little about my experience. Following the advice in his book, I had the transcript done very inexpensively by someone in India I hired off Guru.com. I still had to review it and correct it, but I've always had to do that with U.S.-based transcriptionists as well. I might have had to make a few more corrections, but those actually don't take that long -- the time-consuming part is just listening to the whole thing and reading it as you listen.
I probably spent an extra 10-15 minutes vs. using an American resource, and spent $8 instead of $25-$30. Let's call that $20 savings for, say, 12 minutes of my time. Multiply that by 5 and you get $100 per hour. Using the rough estimate technique Tim talks about in the interview, that works out to a rate of about $200K per year.
Is your time worth that? If so, then you'll probably save money by using a native speaker with a lower error rate, even if they're a bit more expensive. If not, then you'll more likely save money by using the cheaper offshore resource. If you're doing it on an ongoing basis, if you can get a resource that you can trust to produce error-free transcripts that you don't have to check yourself, then it's simple: do you make more or less per hour than they do? If you make more, then you definitely want a resource who can give it to you publication-ready.
Comments
I am the secretary/office manager of a medical practice. We tried using a highly recommended transcription service who offered Indian transcriptionists OR American transcriptionists at a higher price. Using the “lower cost” Indian transcriptionists actually resulted in higher costs. The amount of time spent correcting reports more than would have been spent typing in-house. Although they had three people reading the transcripts for errors before sending, there were many errors AND each would correct with a different font so we would have to reformat the entire report!