Leah Busque launched TaskRabbit in Charlestown, Boston by partnering with a local mothers' organization of 600 moms and recruiting service providers to meet their needs. Word-of-mouth spread to nearby neighborhoods like Cambridge and Brooklyn. She credits staying focused on working mothers as central to the product and growth strategy.
Chapters
That's a great question. The question was early on, how did I build the user base? What were the challenges? How did I scale up? Great question. Because when I first launched the service in Boston, I launched it in one neighborhood, and it was the neighborhood I was living in at the time, Charlestown. Not only did I only launch it in one neighborhood, in that neighborhood, I went to the Charlestown Mothers organization, which were 600 moms in one square mile. And I thought, moms are really busy now. I know, because I'm a mom myself. But then I didn't just figured they were busy. And I said, I've got these 600 moms. If I could find like 30 taskrabbits to fulfill the needs of these moms on this site, that will be a good start. So I started there, did a closed beta with that mom's group, and then it just really started to amplify from there, so started to open it up. Moms started telling other moms in Cambridge and Brookly Line and Beacon Hill and Back Bay, and I started having to recruit taskrabbits in those areas too. And so I would say one of the big challenges we even see today is you have to go. For us, it was helpful to go really narrow with our focus. In the early days, it was this moms group. Now we even still see actually a big working mother's demographic that we market to, that we build product around, that we build messaging around as well. And I would say making sure that you're tracking those customer demographics, customer analytics all the way through will really help you decide where to focus.
