Leah Busque was tired. She worked as a software engineer for IBM’s Lotus group did not really enjoy it. Leah’s favorite part of her job was when she attended an annual conference at Disney World which was the only time she had the opportunity to meet her customers. For this reason, she quit her job at IBM in 2008 right before the financial crisis began. The end of her time at IBM marked the beginning of a new endeavor: TaskRabbit
Leah’s vision for TaskRabbit was that people would be able to go online and easily hire others to ran errands for them and do other mundane jobs. Initially, she thought that this online job creator would mainly attract college students strapped for cash. She was wrong. Today there are roughly 13,000 TaskRabbits bid for jobs in 14 United States cities. The focus group of this business consists of what Busque calls “micro-entrepreneurs.” These are people like mothers, the underpaid and underemployed. Some of the tasks done by these “micro-entrepreneurs” can be anything from fixing toilets to dressing up as a hot dog for a birthday party.
The pay for jobs from TaskRabbit runs from as low as $10 for small jobs, to hundreds for more skilled work. The employer for each individual task pays 20% commission to TaskRabbit.
Busque believes that TaskRabbit has enormous potential. Recently, it has expanded to help small businesses and even planers find temp workers without paying expensive fees to placement agencies.
“Our vision is huge: to revolutionize the way people work,” says Jessica Leber, a partner of Busque. “It is about offering people more choice on how they work, what their schedules are like how much they get paid, [and the choice of] being their own bosses.”
This seems like a service that has not fully realized its potential yet. The potential for commercializing and standardizing sundry tasks to be fulfilled by a “task rabbit” could be huge on the scale that Ebay is for sales. I wonder how she came about inspiration for a service like this?
This sounds to me that someone took the small business/neighborhood chores idea and turned it into a huge enterprise. I’m very curious as to how TaskRabbit is able to hire so many people with different skills. I feel like that would be a very difficult “task” to do. However, it seems as if they are prospering as a company and show signs of success. I think this will open many opportunities for jobs and hopefully lower the unemployment rate.
I would absolutely work for a company like this. I agree that it probably has not reached its full potential though. In an environment where it is difficult to find steady jobs, TaskRabbit could give a huge number of people the chance to find interim work while they are searching for a job, or just some extra cash here and there. Companies would do well to look into this company and find a way to utilize all of their services.
This is a perfect example of how someone had an idea to initially attract college students who might be strapped for cash, and pivoted it to appeal to not only college students, but really anyone who is looking for work. I think that this is a great idea and identifies a major problem that many Americans can relate to – unemployment.
I would definitely use this on my slow days during the summer. The idea that with the click of a mouse I could be connected to the small/ odd jobs market means that I could hold a full time job and then some. As a motor-head this is especially appealing because of the potential it has for connecting me with people who need engine work but don’t want to pay for a professional. Is there a scoring system for the micro-entrepreneurs? That could be quite helpful if you are trying to pick out the people who know what they are doing from those who don’t.