from Hacker News

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

by JimWillTri on 7/8/13, 9:55 PM with 24 comments

• by temphn on 7/9/13, 4:55 AM

  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.

• by jareau on 7/8/13, 11:27 PM

  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.

  [1]

• by everettForth on 7/9/13, 12:00 AM

  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.

• by inthewoods on 7/9/13, 1:51 AM

  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.

• by dr_ on 7/9/13, 3:09 AM

  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.

• by callmeed on 7/9/13, 4:15 AM

  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.

• by mattbarrie on 7/9/13, 8:15 AM

  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).

• by nedwin on 7/8/13, 11:07 PM

  Remember when TaskRabbit launched followed by a hundred clones?

• by piratebroadcast on 7/9/13, 12:07 AM

  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...