Leah Busque: The Early Metrics

So the question was, what sort of metrics or traction did I have when we did our first seed round? So I'll say a couple things about that one. It was a very different time than it is now. So I quit my job at IBM June of 2008, launched the site in September of 2008. The stock market was crashing, People were getting laid off left and right. I was like, oh, my God, what did I just do? Leaving this cushy job at IBM, started trying to raise money, and it was really, really hard. People were not writing checks at that time, did Facebook fund. And so by that point, I was launched in a bunch of neighborhoods in the Boston area. We were looking at metrics like match rate, close rate, the unit economics per task. So on average, we take 20% cut of every transaction that flows through the site. So we were making sure that those unit economics worked to. The numbers were still very small at the time. And we knew that we needed to get to more cities to learn faster, too, about what sort of product needed to be built. So I would say early on, it was really focusing on what are the key metrics, not necessarily how good do they look, but then what's the path forward and how fast can we prove those things? Yeah.