TaskRabbit - Wikipedia

TaskRabbit - Wikipedia

URL http://www.taskrabbit.com/

Slogan Do More, Live More. Be More.

Commercial? Yes

Type of site Marketplace

Available language(s) English

Owner Leah Busque

Launched 2008

Current status Active

TaskRabbit is an online and mobile marketplace that allows users to outsource small jobs and tasks to others in their neighborhood.[1] Users name the task they need done, name the price they are willing to pay, and a network of pre-approved TaskRabbits bid to complete the job.[2] It was founded by Leah Busque in 2008 and has received $37.5 million in funding.[3]

RunMyErrand and beginnings

According to Busque, in February 2008, she and her husband realized that their dog was out of dog food.[1][4][5] Not wanting to go to the store, she discussed founding a website to run tasks with her husband, Kevin.[6] According to her account, Kevin thought "Wouldn't it be nice if there was a place online where we could go, say, 'We need dog food,' name a price we'd be willing to pay, and find someone in our neighborhood, maybe at the store that very moment, who could help us out?"[7] Later that night, Busque bought the domain name RunMyErrand.com, the precursor to TaskRabbit.[1][8]

Four months later, Busque quit her job as a software engineer at IBM and began working on RunMyErrand.[2] By September 2008, Busque launched the site in Boston, with the first 100 "runners."[2][9] In 2009, Tim Ferriss became an advisor to the firm after meeting Busque at Facebook’s startup incubator, fbFund.[10][11] The firm accumulated $1.8 million in seed funding from venture capital firms, .[4][11] and hired the company’s first full-time employee, Brian Leonard, a software engineer with whom she had worked at IBM.[6][9][12]

TaskRabbit and growth

In April 2010, Busque changed the name of the company from RunMyErrand, which she found was limited by the word "errand," to TaskRabbit, which she described as "fun, spunky, and more memorable."[13] By June 2010, Busque and team moved across the country to San Francisco and opened operations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

One year later, in May 2011, TaskRabbit closed a $5 million Series A financing round from Shasta ventures,

First Round Capital, Baseline

Ventures, Floodgate Fund, Collaborative Fund, 500 Startups and The Mesh author Lisa Gansky.[14][15] At that time the firm had 13 employees and 2,000 participating "TaskRabbits".[1] Within the next year, the firm expanded from Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Orange County.[7][16]

In July 2011, TaskRabbit launched an app, which allows users to post a task with an iPhone.[17][18][19][20][21] In October 2011, she hired Eric Grosse, the co-founder and former president of Hotwire.com, as the firm's new CEO so she could focus on product development.[22][23][24]

In December 2011, TaskRabbit received an additional $17.8 Million in a Series B round of funding;[15] At the time the firm had 35 employees and generated $4 million in business each month.[1][18][25]

Site structure

The TaskRabbit team

TaskRabbit has been described as eBay for real-world labor.[2] Users post tasks on the site and declare the maximum amount they would pay for it.[2][20][26][27][28] Pre-certified, background-checked TaskRabbits, the people who complete the jobs, then bid on completing the task.[29] The user then selects the TaskRabbit who is the best match for the task.[2][30]

People wishing to become a TaskRabbit must apply online, submit a video interview, go through background checks, and pass an online quiz based on the company's manual.[21][31] The firm says that its workforce is composed of students, unemployed workers, retirees, and stay-at-home moms, with ages ranging from 21 to 72; it claims that some people earn over $5000 per month.[12][29] The firm generates revenue by taking on average a 15% cut of each task.[15][32]

TaskRabbit employs gamification techniques.[15] A leaderboard ranks the top workers, displaying their levels and average customer reviews.[2] The workers also see a progress bar showing the number of additional points they need to jump to the next level. Points are awarded for everything from bidding quickly and accurately on tasks to referring friends to the firm.[2] The level system is exponential: moving from level 0 to level 1 takes only 60 points, while going from level 20 to 21 requires adding roughly 1,700 points to your tally.[2] Points earned also correspond to some real life benefits.[2] At level 5, runners get a TaskRabbit T-shirt and at level 10, in a nod to the professional dimension of the game, they get their own business cards.[2]

Reception

In 2011, TaskRabbit was nominated for a TechCrunch Crunchie Award for Best Mobile App and Busque was nominated for Founder of the Year.[33] TaskRabbit has been profiled in world publications, including The New York Times, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Inc. magazine, Fox News, and The Guardian [5][26][31][34][35][36]

Competitors

Taskrabbit's competitors include

Thumbtack

Zaarly

Zaask




Startups such as Coursera, 2tor and Udacity have used the web to bring college professors' lectures to a wider audience.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3000182/skillshare-rethinks-education-putting-projects-not-lectures-online

Skillshare, meanwhile, is eliminating the lectures--and the professors.

A new class format the startup is launching on Tuesday aims to create a learning environment where teachers become facilitators and students, at times, become each other’s teachers. To do so, it straddles the gap between online and offline learning.

The new “hybrid classes” have both an online component where teachers orchestrate projects, resources, videos and feedback as well as an option for students who live near each other to meet periodically.

Skillshare’s website, which launched last April, has until now been focused on helping anyone organize an offline class to teach anything (it charges a 15% fee on class tuition for the favor). By removing the brick-and-mortar restriction, it has made those classes available to a global teacher and student population.

But it also hopes to change how they're taught.

“The basic idea is students learn by doing, and learn by doing with other people,” Skillshare founder Michael Karnjanaprakorn says.

In a trial class Karnjanaprakorn taught earlier this year, for instance, he gave his 200 students mini-projects (starting with “define your goals”) for each week. They culminated in one large project: launching a minimum viable project for their startups.

Though he thought fielding questions from a class of that size would be cumbersome, more often than not students answered each other before he got a chance. Bi-weekly live-video office hours, which were recorded for anyone who missed out, filled in the rest.

Jason Culbertson, one of his students, says it was the first class about entrepreneurship that he translated to action. In addition to participating online, he met weekly with about four classmates in New York to work on his projects. He completed the classes' rather daunting ultimate goal, launching a startup called Hashpix.

“These tasks were being shared with a group of people who, after a while at least, knew what I was working on,” he says. “I felt like I had the moment of a group of people to get things done.”

It’s not a teaching method unique to Skillshare. The Tinkering School and a K-12 alternative school called Brightworks are just two organizations based on similar project-based, collaborative learning structures. Karnjanaprakorn says he picked up the theory during grad school at Brandcenter VCU, which prides itself on not having many textbooks, lectures or tests.

But is this what the future of education looks like? Some subjects lend themselves more naturally to the class structure than others. It’s easier, for instance, to imagine a knitting class based a series of projects than it is, say, a class on Russian literature.

Skillshare may never replace traditional college education. In fact, that seems to be part of its point.

“Your statement of accomplishment no longer needs to be a degree, certificate or stamp of approval,” read the startup's education guidelines. “Instead, frame the pictures you’ve taken, bake a cake, and wireframe your future website.”

.END