August 22, 2025
TEL AVIV, IL – The mission at VAA Philippines is to help e-commerce sellers grow their business with the aid of vetted and trained virtual assistants (VAs) from the Philippines. The team at Israel-based VAA recruits and trains VAs from the Philippines specifically to work with Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, and TikTok Shop sellers.
CEO Gilad Freimann started the company eight years ago after his own stint as an Amazon seller who successfully worked with VAs—eventually recruiting and training them. His experience led to the creation of VAA, a company that makes the entire process easier for sellers who need extra help.
Prosper Show sat down with Freimann (shown here at Prosper Show 2025) to learn more about VAA Philippines and how they can help sellers expand their company.
Prosper Show: Why do sellers hesitate to try VAs?
Gilad Freimann: People are generally hesitant to delegate to other people, and that’s the biggest problem among e-commerce sellers—and it’s different than other professions. For example, when you start a restaurant, it’s obvious that you must hire staff to run the restaurant. e-commerce sellers tend to do it all by themselves. We can definitely see the difference between a solopreneur who is trying to do everything and those who find excellent help.
Prosper Show: Why is it so important to change the solo mindset?
Freimann: When you know how to delegate, you can break the ceiling and continue to grow. It’s more about overcoming your fear of delegating and releasing tasks to other people. We help sellers make that a reality because we invest the time to find the good people, vetting them, training them, and supporting them—and we keep training them.
Prosper Show: What’s the biggest misconception about VAs?
Freimann: The misconception is that you can’t trust them because they disappear after a month and will not stay with you.
Prosper Show: Why is that a common belief?
Freimann: People do not really know how to recruit good VAs. Too often there will be excuses such as iPhones and Internet problems and you name it—and sellers mistakenly think they can never find reliable VAs.
Prosper Show: How does your company keep that from happening?
Freimann: We have a very established way of recruiting people. It’s not just one interview and reading resumes that were probably written by AI anyway. We have a method of recruiting good people—helpful and skilled assistants who are motivated. They will become an asset to your company for years to come.
Prosper Show: What’s an example of longevity among your VAs?
Freimann: We have VAs who have been with us from the very beginning—for eight years now and they’re still a part of our company. We have VAs working with sellers for eight years so these clients have gone from one VA working part-time to a team of VAs working full-time. They have successfully scaled their business using our VAs.
Prosper Show: Is language ever a barrier?
Freimann: English is the second language in the Philippines and they speak very well. We only recruit VAs who have very good English.
Prosper Show: What’s the first step with individual sellers?
Freimann: The first thing we do is we jump on a call and try to understand where and how they need help. We tell them they can hire someone for three hours a day and start small. We make sure that they are supported every step of the way—connecting them with the right VA and then making sure that we build a schedule, giving them ideas for assignments and tasks that they can give to the VA.
Prosper Show: Who are the majority of your customers?
Freimann: About 60% of our customers are agencies, and they are going to Prosper Show. They manage Amazon accounts for other people. They know the importance of hiring assistants. We help these agencies grow much faster because they could use their internal team more efficiently, instead of doing all the task of managing accounts. They become managers and they hire VAs from us to do all the work of accounts management and PPC [pay per click] social media. It helps them to actually acquire more customers and more accounts—and grow their agency.
Prosper Show: What’s your level of optimism these days?
Freimann: I’m very optimistic. We definitely saw a panic attack in the beginning of 2025 with the announcement of tariffs, but we cannot stop e-commerce. It will continue to grow and we see this with Amazon. We see this as Walmart is increasing their online platform—and TikTok Shop which didn’t exist two years ago and is becoming huge—and we’ll see this happening with Instagram. e-commerce is the right place to be.
Prosper Show: How important is AI in VA training?
Freimann: AI is becoming a task in itself that is taking time and energy. You must understand AI. Our focus in the last year has been to develop our AI knowledge so our VAs can support sellers with all the new AI innovation. You need somebody to manage the prompts and you need somebody to work on the tools, learn them, and then go the extra mile to make them relevant. VAs must know how to use AI tools to do their jobs even more efficiently. AI will only help to realize the benefits of a virtual assistant.
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