The Inspiration Project: Lilit Marcus on savetheassistants.com

What inspired you to create savetheassistants.com?

Lilit Marcus: After seeing way too many treacly movies about young, idealistic sorts who move to New York City to follow their dreams, I decided to move to New York City to follow my dream. In this case, the dream was making a living as a writer. The reality was that I had no idea how exactly I was going to accomplish that. So I ended up working as an assistant to an executive at a media company. I answered his phone, arranged his schedule, and got yelled at constantly. One day he’d demand that I make changes to our official company stationery, which I obviously couldn’t do. Another day he’d tell a visiting client how utterly incompetent I was–while I was standing there pouring them cups of coffee. The only reason I didn’t have a nervous breakdown was that the other assistants helped each other out. I started wondering why there wasn’t a website where assistants could meet each other, trade stories, get advice, and generally commiserate. It seemed like all of the workplace-related sites out there were designed to help people further along in their careers. There were other sites for disgruntled workers, like Bitter Waitress or Customers Suck, but they both dealt with very specific industries.

In November 2006, after both of us were safely removed from our former place of employment, a fellow underling, Ashley Seashore, and I founded Save the Assistants. We had no money, no business plan. Ashley’s new job required her to move to California not long after we launched. But no matter what happened, we knew we had a good idea. Work is a huge part of everyone’s life. If I met someone at a party and told them about the site, the person immediately ended up telling me stories about every bad job they’d ever had. The site grew mostly by word of mouth. Our friends sent it to their friends. We got linked on popular blogs like Gawker. Reporters started to contact us to give quotes in their stories. Somehow we were considered “experts” about bad bosses and workplace hostility. (I should put that on my business card.)

In the year since Save the Assistants launched, I’ve been able to actually make my living as a writer. But no matter what happens, I can never forget what it was like to have a boring, soulless, depressing job. I will never be able to totally let go of the feeling of emptiness I had when I worked there. To me, the best thing in the world is opening my email and having a note from an assistant who says Save the Assistants inspired her to quit her job. My former job may have inspired me to start the site, but the people who write in every day are what inspire me to keep it going.