TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise | Hacker News Reader

TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise

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49 pointsJimWillTri24 comments

Taskrabbit is a great idea and very useful. Here are a few things they could improve:

1) Take a page from Exec and do flat-rate pricing in different verticals (e.g. $25/hour for Exec Errands). Doing a price auction every time is too time consuming, but that's the UI default at the moment.

2) The refocus on mobile/realtime (like Exec) is also good.

3) Figure out a way to incentivize people to do more transactions through the site. Once you meet a good service provider, right now there's an incentive to do all future interactions outside the site.

4) Re: enterprise refocus: do some sales calls with all the admin assistants of VC funds and funded startups in the Valley. Set up a bulk enterprise account for $Xk per month and have them go crazy assembling Ikea furniture.

Taskrabbit is a great concept and really should succeed with some tweaking.

I think collaborative consumption companies changing their business to focus on a specific niche or vertical is quite common. Getable (fka Rentcycle) did it. Zaarly did it.

I'm head of sales at balancedpayments.com, a payments company that works with online marketplaces, so I interact with dozens of marketplace founders in a given week, and in my opinion the true P2P/collaborative consumption movement is a few years away.

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The problem of Taskrabbit is that they could not be associated with one clear repeatable need that people had, which lead to a sub par experience for almost all use cases.

Most marketplaces in this space are pretty "directed" by the Company (Postmates: deliver food, Instacart: delivery grocery, Lyft: deliver people with car, HomeJoy: deliver cleaning ladies).

Lyft is a good example of a P2P system that worked when everybody before them failed because Zimride "directed" the marketplace when all previous tentative where about "grab people on your way to work".

Great point. As co-founder of Scripted, I whole-heartedly agree.

I think Leah is great -- I've never met her but have heard and read good things. However it's hard to be one size fits all anymore. Craigslist and oDesk may be the last two marketplace leaders without single focus.

Indeed, especially in the era of mobile which tend to focus on remote control solutions to problems. I like Scripted a lot - funny that you work with Paul B. also ;-)

Is there a service like HomeJoy but has cleaning gentlemen available?

iirc the vast majority of exec use is house cleaning as well so it does seem that the generic -> specific refocus is quite common in this space.

Maybe the new people can make an iPhone app that doesn't crash every time I try to use it, and lets me message people who bid on tasks?

The web version works fine, but the mobile version has serious issues.

I'm almost certain that whatever they're doing, this is an example of where a v2.0 rewrite makes sense.

I think it is pretty tough to see how this works on a such a low-margin service - in order to reach scale, they need to do a massive education of the ordinary consumer. Huge costs. Looks to me like they raised their money on that vision, but have found that $30m actually doesn't get you that far.

So it looks to me like they're shifting to the B2B side - which is smart but also difficult given the competition in that space. oDesk has been shifting their model away from the 10% commission on small account model to a more enterprise sale - I expect TaskRabbit to move that way as well.

As an oDesk intern… is it really a shift so much as an expansion? It seems like we still do plenty of work on "small" accounts.

Good point - it is likely an expansion - I would ask this: what is management saying is the focus for this year? Enterprise or small accounts? My guess would they would say "Small accounts are still important and our core, but the enterprise is where our next stage of growth will come from." The reality is that small accounts don't provide the same kind of reoccurring revenue that VCs and Wall Street likes to see. And to grow beyond a certain point, you have to have a massive number of small accounts and acquisition to make up for the churn. Large enterprises, by contrast, are a longer sales cycle but more predictable revenue and generally, in my experience, lower churn.

Hope they are able to grow their consumer service. I've found it tremendously useful. I used it when I proposed to my girlfriend, to hire talent. I also used it to pick up something very important from Jfk airport that I had left on my flight. If you use if for the right reasons, it's a magnificent tool.

I think their move to business is really smart. The times I've used it was to get data for small MVP projects (eg to get happy hour menus from several SF restaurants) and it was awesome for that.

I never like their consumer model—but if they could become the "LinkedIn for temp workers", I think it could be a hit.

The problem with taskrabbit is there is no global liquidity in the marketplace, so you need to boil the ocean building local micromarkets. Too much can go wrong with local jobs so you need deep touch in checking IDs, background checks and so forth. It's the opposite of Freelancer.com (my company).

Remember when TaskRabbit launched followed by a hundred clones?

I actually have a hard time thinking of clones in this space (not counting general freelance sites like odesk and fiverr)...who was TaskRabbit's biggest competitor (not counting Zaarly, which also pivoted)

www.taskisland.com http://taskpandas.com/ https://sortedlocal.com/ etc... there are lots

Those 3 wouldn't even be considered competitors. All have an Alexa higher than 1 million, so they are barely known. Depending on how long they've been around, one might say they've failed.

Hi, I'm one of the Founders of Sorted (https://sortedlocal.com)

Firstly, Alexa data isn't fresh, I'm pretty sure it's up to 3 months old...3 months ago we weren't live.

The UK isn't as receptive to task marketplaces as the US, hence why nobody is really killing it over here, but times are changing and traction is starting to come through.

We started out as a clone to the original Zaarly, but realised that the data was screaming at us to do something different.

Sorted is now a profile driven marketplace, our Sorters (task do-ers) create profiles and Customers simply search what they want, so a cleaner near postcode x. They browse profiles and request the Sorter, payments still run through the platform.

It opens up a lot more marketing opportunities by leveraging the Sorter base, and the model is being pretty well received in the UK.

We launched and MVP about 2 months ago learnt from the data, iterated and launched another version about 2 weeks ago, we've gone from 800 users on the Zaarly model to 15,000 on the search model, and we're optimising the funnel as we speak.

I assure you, we have not failed, we're a very young business and it's a steep learning curve, but the UK is a tough nut to crack.

iamexec.com

I make good money on TaskRabbit. I hope it doesn;t move too far away for a "Regular guy" like me to make use of it...

what kind of stuff do you normally do? what is "good money" in terms of USD?

I do mostly engineering, and by that I mean I may do anything from backing up someones data to assembling Ikea furniture at an office in Midtown. I bring in sometimes $600 extra a month for meeting cool people and doing shit I generally like doing anyway.

EDIT: I'm learning Rails right now and doing Tasks to bring money in while I learn... It would be so rad to work for them as a Rails dev one day. Circle of life, man.

> engineering, and by that I mean I may do anything from backing up someones data to assembling Ikea furniture

I thought I'd heard pretty much every creative interpretation of the word "engineering" possible but have to admit - you got me with the IKEA furniture assembly.

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