Scaling Taskrabbit As A Local Services Marketplace With Ania Smith | EM Group Chat #171

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk with founders and leaders from some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 171, which is a really great group chat that we just had with Anya Smith, who's the CEO of TaskRabbit. TaskRabbit is a leading marketplace for hiring help with home tasks. Prior to joining TaskRabbit as the CEO in 2020, Anya was at Uber and also Airbnb, so she has some real incredible marketplace experience. So this is a great chat with Anya where we got to learn more about her previous experience at Airbnb and then Uber. Some of her key learnings, what led her to joining TaskRabbit as the CEO. We did a deep dive into it as a marketplace for hiring help with home tasks, got to learn more about how it's evolved, the recent growth. Anya shared tips for early-stage founders, and we also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. You're going to find it a great watch to the end. So Anya, you've been a highly requested group chat guest and of course have some really incredible marketplace experience. So it's great to have you join us here today. I want to start off by saying a huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. We have a lot that we're going to chat about with all of your previous marketplace experience and now as the CEO of TaskRabbit. But before we do, I think it might be great if you can briefly start off by sharing your background for those that might not know you.

Thanks. I'm very happy to be here. So I will be very brief. I've been at TaskRabbit for about 4 years. And prior to that, I spent a little under a year at Uber. And before then, I was at Airbnb for a little over 3 years. I took a brief hiatus. I took a gap year in between Airbnb and Uber. I moved my family to Argentina. And prior to that, I spent some time in retail and management consulting and a long, long time ago investment banking. So, you know, have had the opportunity to live on 4 continents, have had the opportunity to travel a lot. I love to travel. It's still sort of my deep, deep passion. And I love working at marketplaces for many many reasons, um, one of which is that, um, they are super analytical and they're kind of a bit, um, uh, counterintuitive sometimes. And I didn't really know that this is what I would enjoy. It's not like one day I woke up and said, oh my gosh, I want to work at a marketplace. Um, in fact, you know, I kind of started my corporate career at Expedia, which is sort of the OG of marketplaces, I would say. And I barely really actually understood that it was a marketplace. And this is 20 years ago. I'm so old. So anyway, but at some point, I went into Airbnb thinking, OK, of course, I love to travel. So it's going to be fun. Finally, I can be back and travel after Expedia. But that was when I really, really started to understand what a sort of gig economy marketplace is. And while I love to travel, I found that actually solving the problems that we are trying to solve and understanding how to optimize the match between supply and demand was really, truly fascinating. And it was really hard to do. Coming from retail, it wasn't nearly as hard to think about, here are the SKUs that we need to merchandise, and so on. This was much more challenging because we were dealing with humans on both sides. And so both at Airbnb and Uber, I worked on the supply side. So I definitely have a very soft spot for taskers now at—

TaskRabbit. Yeah, that's such an incredible background and thanks for sharing with us. You know, so I wanted to go back to your previous experience at Airbnb and Uber since those are of course 2 notable marketplaces. And, you know, start with Airbnb. Can you briefly walk us through your experience and, you know, maybe what some of the biggest challenges and key learnings were from your time there?

Yeah. So one of the biggest things, well, one of the coolest things is the sort of gig economy marketplace has not been around for that long. I mean, you know, 15, 16, 17 years, it's not that long. And really it was between, I would say, 2010 and 2015, where there was just a lot of thinking going on in this space and a lot of innovation and really trying to understand how liquidity is really important, how density is really important, how in a marketplace looking at totals or averages can really skew what you're trying to get to, and you, you won't be able to really diagnose the problem. So at Airbnb, we learned a lot of those things. It was just a very special time. I joined when I was like employee 1,100 or something, and by the time I left, it was like 5,000. And we had just seen incredible growth. And I was on the operations side. I'm definitely a deep operator at heart. And sometimes we felt like, oh my gosh, it literally would require like the CS team and part of the engineering team, and the rest of us can just go home because it was just such a rocket ship. But of course, we felt like we really needed to have a big impact on growth, particularly on the supply side. It became very clear to us that supply was dragging our growth rates. And so supply-driven growth is something I've talked a lot about, particularly once I got to TaskRabbit. Um, and we spent a lot of time thinking about how to grow supply. The thing that I loved about Airbnb, which is so many things, Is that we had the time and the space to learn and experiment. So we just would do a lot of things. Sometimes it felt like we were throwing noodles at the wall and just seeing what sticks, but it was just about doing it quickly and as quickly as possible understanding, you know, does it make sense to do sort of local activations? Does it make sense to have more influencers? Does it make sense to provide more services to hosts? What will really get hosts to come and stick and be on our platform for a long time. And so, there was just a lot of learning and opportunities and a lot of experience— experiments. And I felt very thankful that I was working at a company where we had the space to do that.

And then you mentioned as far as, you know, joining Uber, and so kind of going from a sharing economy marketplace to more of like an on-demand kind of marketplace, you know, were there any kind of specific learnings maybe from your experience at Uber?

So Uber is very different than Airbnb from so many— obviously the business model, but then also the culture and the people and everything else about it. You know, in 2017, when Uber was going through a lot of turmoil internally, at Airbnb, we were almost just thankful that we're not going through that. By the time I got there, Dara was in charge, and Dara's fantastic. Of course, I knew Dara from Expedia, so it had been sort of, you know, a story. But when I got there, we were deep, very quickly deep into the AB5 debate. And I don't know if many of you remember, this is before Prop 22. And this was just like the sort of all hands on deck. What are we going to do to deal with these new changing regulations? And how are we going to respond? How is Lyft going to respond? And what's going to happen? And there was a little bit of game theory and was changing product really quickly at the expense of potentially losing growth and revenue. And should we be doing that if our competitors are not doing that? And those types of discussions and moving very, very fast. As soon as we kind of felt like we got a handle on it, pandemic happens. And I was at Uber Eats. And so I can't explain that very first weekend when that sort of shutdown happened on Friday. I mean, I, I, I don't believe that I barely like got up from the couch. I worked for like 24 hours straight and had a little bit of sleep and we kept working and working. It was insanity how quickly the demand just spiked. And then trying to figure out how we can help restaurants, trying to figure out how we can get enough drivers, trying to figure out how we can get drivers into couriers. I mean, there was just so much going on and the teams were full on. So the experience was all about speed.

No, that's definitely a great example as far as, you know, speed and, uh, yeah, never a dull day with, uh, with marketplaces. So yeah, that's a good kind of transition into, uh, to TaskRabbit, you know. So, uh, so what led you to, uh, joining TaskRabbit? And, uh, could you give us maybe a sense of kind of scale that the business was at when you joined?

Yeah.

So, um, Look for me, and I talked about this a little bit why I love marketplaces, but I particularly love gig economy space because I often think back to my own upbringing and my own background. I immigrated to the U.S. from Poland when I was twelve, so it was many, many years ago, and we lived in a small town in South Dakota. Well, it's not, I guess, so small, but it's twelve two hundred thousand people now, but it was maybe eighty thousand people then, and it was really. Really hard to make ends meet. And so my parents had to work 2 jobs, usually at a meatpacking plant and at some factory making plastic bags. My mom was cleaning rooms. There was just a lot of work, and it was all about schedules and trying to manage schedules while we were still quite young and figuring out how to take care of us while working double shifts. And I, I feel that if these types of platforms were around then, our lives would have been just much easier. Just the flexibility of being able to set your own schedule and being able to figure out when is the best time for you to work. I mean, just generally immigrants, at least I found this, they want to work hard and they hustle. And my parents just hustled a lot. and worked really hard to try to make ends meet. And had these platforms been around, I believe that our lives would have been much, much easier. And so I feel this sort of sense of gratitude that we're able to, at TaskRabbit, provide a meaningful income to all the taskers who are on our platform. We have thousands and thousands of taskers who are doing really good work every single day, and they get to set their own rates. So they get to tell people how much they want to charge, and I feel very proud of that. And so I, I love marketplaces for many reasons, as I've talked about, but I particularly love the concept of TaskRabbit of just being able to provide a way to give an opportunity for meaningful income to many, many people.

So I definitely want to talk about the supply side with Taskers, but I realized it'd probably be helpful. Could you give us, for a little bit of context, a brief overview of TaskRabbit as a marketplace today?

TaskRabbit today operates in 8 different countries. We do millions of tasks per year. We focus on a large group of categories, but have been actually becoming more and more curated marketplace and more managed as you see sort of the recent trends, mostly because we believe that we can at that rate are able to provide more jobs and more tasks to our taskers. We— our biggest category is furniture assembly, as one would expect. We are owned by IKEA. IKEA purchased TaskRabbit in 2018. We have sort of been tripling our revenue every 2 to 3 years over the last few years. So we've seen a lot of growth, particularly obviously with the pandemic and so many people wanting to stay at home. So 2022 was just a stellar year for us as sort of things got settled, but people wanted to do major upgrades to their homes, and that was very helpful for us.

Yeah, so going to the supply side with Taskers, you know, what are some of the ways that you're helping Taskers you know, be more successful and increase their earnings through your platform?

Oh, this is such a great question. So it is our job every day to ensure that more taskers come onto our platform and that they stay with our platform. So there's a lot of things that we can do to make their lives easier on our platform. At the end of the day, what they want to do is earn. And so some of them want to work full-time, and so we should be able to provide enough jobs that are available for them full-time. And some of them maybe just want to work in the evenings, or perhaps they just want to work on a Saturday, and perhaps they're a full-time student. So first and foremost, our goal is to provide the jobs that they want at the rate that they want. You know, our average rate today for taskers, an average hourly rate of what they earn, is $48 per hour. In markets like New York City, it's $57 an hour. And so we want to make sure that they have all of the all of the jobs that they need at those rates. So what else can we do for them? We can provide all sorts of benefits, which we try to do. So we just recently signed a deal with Robinhood so that taskers can have an IRA with a 2% match in the first year and 1% match the following years. Those types of benefits really help them to come onto our platform and stay on our platform. But there's so much more we can do. So we're thinking a lot about payments and making sure that they're able to get paid as quickly as possible after a job is done, making sure that scheduling is really easy to do so that they can easily manage their calendar, ensuring that they have protections when things don't go well. So there's a lot of things that we can do to ensure that taskers are happy on our platform, and majority of them really are. You know, a lot of times people worry about disintermediation or they worry about what we call gray market, where we have just a lot of people that could go off platform. I strongly believe that both on the supply and demand side, we can do things that allow people to really want to come back to the platform because they feel the protection and the benefits of the platform that outweigh any sort of savings that they may get by working. working off the platform. And so we spend a lot of our time focusing on these things.

Glad you mentioned it, disintermediation, because, you know, we couldn't go a conversation talking about marketplaces without that. And you mentioned some of the ways that you're, you know, kind of preventing that through adding value through the platform. So, you know, so what are some of those ways?

Yeah, so I believe it's both on a tasker side and on a client side. So on a tasker side, as I mentioned, our goal is to provide them with all the jobs that they want at the rate that they want in a location that they want with a schedule that they want. And so all the tools that are needed in order to make their lives easier. And, you know, if, if you're trying to sort of work on 2 or 3 platforms, now you're trying to manage 2 or 3 calendars. Now you have to try to copy things into a single calendar, and It's just hard to do. You know, oftentimes— not often, but sometimes— if you've had a Tasker in your home, at the end of the task they may say, hey, next time you need something, just give me a call directly. And part of that is because if you have a person that you sort of know from somewhere come to your house and do a small painting job, they will expect payment immediately after the job is done. Um, If it's a small job, they're not going to sort of write out an invoice and then wait for 30 days for you to pay the invoice. And we have to do the same thing at TaskRabbit, right? So today we pay them quite soon, but we don't pay them immediately. If we were to pay taskers immediately, does that make things easier for them? On the client side, it's making sure that people understand that there's protections, right? If things go wrong, if things don't work out the way that they need them to work out, we're here to help them. If If a tasker cancels, we're here to make sure that we can get another tasker. If, you know, it's very few, you know, sub-1% of jobs perhaps don't go as well as we had hoped, but we're here to make sure to make it right. And so we believe that adding those types of protections to both sides of our marketplace really helps us in declining the gray market.

Certainly. And you mentioned this, or I think it's, I guess, worth mentioning as well, you know, that, you know, taskers set their own price and I believe they keep all their earnings, correct?

That's correct. So in that way, it's much more unique than perhaps an Uber where part of my role at Uber was to set the price for every courier and what they would get paid. Here, the taskers get to set their own price. It's a little bit more akin to Airbnb where, of course, Or of course hosts get to set their own price. But you know, pricing is a huge component of a marketplace, and I think sometimes people think that, like in this instance, well, Tasker sets its own rate or host sets its own rate, so there's not much we can do on pricing other than maybe play with our rake or with the amount of fees that we charge. But that's not true. There's a lot of guidance that we can give to hosts in terms of the types of price that they want to pay. There's a lot of encouragement that we can give them. We can give them information that we have that they don't have that says, hey, in this, um, on Friday night, we're always short on taskers. You can, you can actually charge more, um, because it's, it's really hard. But if you have just one bathroom and your toilet's plugged and you need someone to come fix it right now, someone will come fix it, but perhaps they don't— they can charge a bit more. And so there's just a lot that we can do to help taskers be smart about their pricing.

Pricing is always a fun topic to chat through. We'll probably get to it during the group Q&A. So, and you mentioned as far as, you know, the sense of scale that you're at today, and we could probably have an entire kind of conversation, you know, talking about, you know, how TaskRabbit has evolved and scaled. But, you know, could you maybe, you know, share a little bit more about, you know, how it's evolved more recently? And I would say some of the key points in growth.

Yeah, so the last 4 years, again, as I said, we've grown sort of exponentially, particularly in 2022. So, you know, our growth rates were at 60-70% in the first couple of years when I got here. Of course, things have slowed down, as everyone understands, with the rate of inflation, obviously with interest rates. With our housing markets and obviously people moving a lot less because of all the factors I just mentioned, the growth rate has slowed down, but we're still growing a lot, double digits, and still just signing up thousands more taskers every day onto our platform. We have waitlists in some of our markets because there's just more people that want to do the work than the demand that we have coming in. So we're working very hard to continue to build our demand.

Yeah, and then what are some of the ways that you're, you know, building demand?

So there's obviously many different ways and tactics that we're thinking about. It's about our current customers coming back more frequently. So just increasing that lifetime value of a customer. And so again, making the product right, making the fit right the first time they come, ensuring that they have the of first-time-right experience. And so there's a lot that we're doing on that, making sure that we're providing more personalized and specialized experience to every client. So just leveraging a lot of the data that we have, and then also external data to just build much, much more robust understanding of our customer. And then, of course, looking at sort of other ways or benefits that we can drive people who have already been at TaskRabbit at least once to come back, whether that's that's via some sort of subscription loyalty programs. So there's a lot that we can still do and build to ensure that returning customers come back more often. And then of course, new customers, um, staying really relevant. And, you know, our brand really truly punches above its weight, which is fantastic. It's a huge asset. We've had some really exciting brand campaigns recently. So we're spending a lot of time really top of the funnel, continuing to grow our awareness, particularly with Gen Z and millennials, because the brand is well known on the— on both of the coasts, but perhaps less so in cities like Denver or, um, Dallas and so on. So we're spending a lot of our efforts in those markets to make sure that people recognize how we are there to help them make their lives easier every day. And that's been really fun.

I can imagine. So, and one thing I wanted to ask about is, you know, the relationship with IKEA. And I'm sure a lot of us have gone to, you know, the IKEA site and seen the, you know, Assembly by TaskRabbit there on the checkout. So, you know, could you share a little bit more about that? Maybe the, I would say, like the distribution advantage that that might provide?

Yeah. So look, IKEA has been a parent for now 5, 6, 7 years. It's been quite some time. I think It really puts us in an advantageous position for many things. First of all, we have access to all of the customers from IKEA. Are we leveraging that opportunity as best as we can? Not yet, but we're making a lot of progress. And there's millions of people who walk into an IKEA store every day and who visit the IKEA site every day and the IKEA app. So we're excited for that opportunity. IKEA is also a great parent. You know, when Silk invested Valley Bank goes bust and all of a sudden we're short on cash like that day, that day IKEA is there to help us out. And so I feel very, very fortunate to be part of the overall broader IKEA team. And they have struck a really good balance of ensuring that we still can operate very independently. I report to a board. It's not like we're a division of IKEA. Um, while also being able to work closely on, on projects that make sense, which includes things like merchandising in stores, includes obviously tech integration and so on. So, um, and then finally, they've been able to help us really grow internationally, right? So we have expanded to 6 markets in Europe, and that's been a lot of fun. And we could only do that because of the IKEA presence and brand name that that they have in Europe. In Germany, I think they hold something like over 50% of market share in furniture sales. It is just a really much bigger player in Europe than it is in the US. So that's been, that's been a great learning for us as well.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that as far as like when it comes to, you know, geo expansion into new markets, you know, I can imagine, you know, as marketplaces, we all kind of face the cold start problem, but that might be advantage kind of, you know, expanding into some of those markets. Absolutely.

It definitely starts with just some sort of flywheel, right? We have one or two categories in the IKEA stores. We have instant exposure. And so the question is, how can we get those IKEA customers to then come back and book other categories and really understand TaskRabbit as a service provider for their home, um, not just a partner to IKEA? So there's a lot more work that we can do there, but, um, certainly it gives us a really great start in any market.

And, you know, you mentioned as far as like the sense of scale you're at, right? And then all the different markets and all the different categories. So, you know, how do you think about, I guess, like starting from a high level, you know, balancing liquidity in markets or supply and demand?

So we call them these, these little small pockets of which there are hundreds because it's really about the category market combinations, right? So in any given market, we have a met cap. Sort of a concentric circle of really understanding in this category, in this specific market, what is our supply position? What is our density? What is our demand position? How do the two match? Are we short? Are we light? Where do we spend more time? On which side of the marketplace? And there's sort of infinite numbers of these, so you can't do all of them, but obviously using data and And really using algorithms and machine learning AI to try to really optimize these things, it's what helps us do it. I talked about, you know, early on how you can't look at totals or averages across because they can really hide what's going on in any given market, in any given category. So we spend a lot of time looking specifically at these combinations.

Are there specific, maybe some of those kind of KPIs or metrics that you look for that you could share with us?

Yeah, so we look at— I mean, there's, there's so many, right? But like, we look at, for example, a KPI called faces, which we look at in every single market for every single category. What are the number of, of taskers that show up when you do a search? And we understand that, um, do you need a certain number for a client to even feel like this that there's a level of trust there, which at the end of the day, this is what we're really bargaining on, right? We're trying to build trust on both sides. And so for a client to have trust that we know what we're doing in that category, so in Houston and TV mounting, they need to see some number of people in order to understand that this is something that we do well. And so we can then use math and data to make sure that we have the right number of people in every single market, in every single category. So that's just an example of a KPI that we would look at.

One of the other questions that I actually wanted to ask about, you know, is the TaskRabbit team. And, you know, so what's the team like today? And I guess like from a high-level org structure as well.

So we have a little bit over 400 people. So we're still not that big, but we're big enough. And many of those people are helpful to our customers and do our customer service calls. We obviously have people in Europe and people here. We've grown, we've doubled in size in terms of people over the last 4 years. And the overall team is structured in a sort of, in a functional way, which is quite normal, right? So we obviously have product and engineering, data and design, and then we've got operations, marketing, and then we have all the supporting functions as well.

And now what's a day in life as the CEO of TaskRabbit like for you?

It's actually quite— the days are so different. Obviously, I spend a lot of time with my team one-on-one and as a team. I spend a lot of time listening to customers. At the end of the day, Really trying to understand the customer's problem versus trying to find a solution. We tend to often dive deeper into solutions, and I'm still trying to learn the problems that they're facing. And I've spoken with so many clients and taskers, and I continue speaking with them, and I learn something new every day. Obviously, I'm also, you know, an avid user of the product. But I think it's just really important to spend as much time as possible with the customer to really understand the problems that they're facing. Even though we've been around for quite some time, there are many, many use cases that we can still improve on.

No, I'm glad you mentioned that. Something we always need to reiterate here. So we're going to get into questions here in a little bit because I promise founders that we save time for that. But, you know, right before we do, so you of course have some pretty incredible marketplace experience. So do you have maybe a few tips for early-stage marketplace founders that you'd like to share?

I think, as I kind of started saying, the biggest thing I would say is really focusing on listening to the customer. I think spending a lot more time in a field, spending a lot more time talking to the clients and talking to both sides of the marketplace is really what kind of helps to understand, helps me understand how to best figure out the next solution. It's really hard to prioritize. There are so many things and ideas that at least I have and my team has, and I'm sure many of you have as well. So learning how to prioritize and knowing which ones are the ones that are going to hopefully not only create value for your customers but also create value for your company too, right? So Sometimes we get a little bit sort of wanting to help the customer so much, so we create products that are really helpful, but they don't create necessarily any incremental value to TaskRabbit. And you have to do that because it comes back to the retention and so on, but there has to be a really strong balance. The other thing is just really quickly making decisions. Decisions that are wrong are better than decisions that are I fundamentally believe that most decisions are not one-way door decisions, meaning you can reverse them. And so you will learn on a process and do it better the next time. And that's better than trying to figure out the perfect answer, and it'll never be perfect anyway. So just going faster, I think, is better.

Those are going to be super helpful tips. So actually had a question that a founder wanted me to ask that they posted in advance, which was around the AI. So, are you seeing any, you know, specific opportunities to leverage AI and maybe ways that you're already doing so?

First and foremost, which is sort of what most companies are doing, is within the CS org, right? So, there's just a lot more that we can do in terms of really outfitting our agents and providing tools to our agents that make their jobs more meaningful and actually allow us to be much more efficient in terms of of answering the questions that our clients have and really reducing the error size or the error count and really providing better experience both for the agent and the customer. So we're already deploying several tools and we'll continue to experiment and get better and better at that. The second part is just driving efficiencies across the business. And so, you know, that means within engineering, that means copy and marketing, that means, you know, every single executive and everybody else knowing how to use tools properly that just really help us to be more efficient in our everyday day-to-day jobs, I think is really important. Excuse me. And so providing the right environment so that people can learn and experiment and get better and better at using tools, I think is really important. And then finally, and this is the hardest part, but this is where we're spending most of our time, is really thinking through how we can leverage AI. to optimize the match between supply and demand. So getting the right amount of data and then being more predictive about what's going to happen next or what is the right match, given all the information that we have, is really, really critical. And so obviously, we've been doing that all the time, even before sort of the AI revolution. But with the new tools, we have a better way to accelerate that.

You mentioned matching. Of course, matching is super important for marketplaces. So I'd love to learn a bit more about that. You know, like, what goes into a I would say like making a good match and maybe even improving.

It's knowing the price, the location, the time, the category type. It's understanding now the next level of data. So before you would say on our platform, hey, I'd like to, I'd like to have something mounted, and then you would just get a box and now you'd have to describe, okay, I'm mounting a TV. And then the tasker would ping you and say, okay, well, how big is the TV? Do I have to carry the TV? Are there cables? Do I have to put the cables behind the wall? All the questions and so on and so forth. What kind of wall? Now we can actually get that data ahead of time so that then we can use that data to find the right taskers with that exact skill set at that price at that time to match it in a much smarter way than we did before. We can very quickly say, okay, is it TV or are you mounting posters or artwork? Or are you mounting curtains? And those are slightly different skills and not leaving all of that to the tasker. And like halfway through the conversation, the tasker is like, oh wait, I actually don't do that. We want to limit those types of experiences as much as possible.

Hey, Olivia, do you want to come on?

Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Mike. And thanks so much, Anya, for sharing your insights and your journey with us in the community today. You spoke a little bit earlier about pricing, so I had a question around pricing, and if you could kind of share how that's evolved over the years, given that taskers can set their own pricing. So do you have minimums or maximums in place, and like, what does that guidance process look like?

Yeah, so there's a lot of work that goes into it. I don't believe we have either mins or maxes. I think perhaps in some categories we're starting to experiment with that. I think we're most likely What we have found most effective is to say, hey, in your category in this market, this is the range. You have a lot more room to go up. Or hey, are you finding that you're not getting as many jobs? Here's the range. You're pricing too high. We can also say that a couple of times, and if the tasker doesn't sort of change their pricing, we can do some other things right on the back end to say, hey, if you're not changing your pricing, you're not getting booked. And as you're not getting booked, the algorithm works in such a way that you may— that you're continually going to be less likely to be booked. So we want you to get more jobs on the platform, but perhaps that tasker only wants to work in that category in a single sort of for a single price because otherwise they don't like that category. They will do it at a single price, but then we have to be careful not to take that as data point to then build into the algorithm to say that the actual price is between X and Y when some taskers are using the price to actually indicate that they'd rather not work in that category or only at a certain price. price. So there's a lot of work that we can do to try to manage that so we can be much smarter, so it doesn't become sort of a circular argument.

Awesome. That's a great, uh, great question. Thanks, Olivia. And thanks, Anya. So hey, uh, Michael, Joe, want to come on? I saw you raise your hand.

I've got a couple questions. I'm gonna try to keep it to just 2. Um, how do you encourage users to keep using TaskRabbit and not go back to the status quo of just asking their friends or family or, you know, doing the kind of asking friends for recommendations on service providers?

So, I mean, our biggest competitor, as we say, is the sort of do-it-yourself, right? And there's always going to be the people who choose to do things themselves, but there is a large proportion of the market that honestly either cannot do it themselves because they don't know how to— like, I will not be able to put up a TV. I can clean my house, but I cannot put up a TV. Um, there are always people who will just simply be too busy, and so they use service providers in order to help them manage their time. So it's our job to find those people and to indicate the value that we're providing to them by sort of take— giving them more time back. Time that they can spend with their family or on their hobbies or working or whatever else it is that they prefer to do with their time. And so we have to ensure that we're building a message and a value proposition that resonates with them. So it's, it'll, it's always hard to do, but, you know, there's always a balance of people who come back and new customers. And so for the new customer, It is just stating a lot and in a fun sort of creative way about the value that we can provide.

Okay, awesome. Appreciate that. And then real quick, this one's a little bit easier to answer, I think. What I noticed, you guys offer tipping on the platform and just curious, have you seen a lot of success with that? Like, do you know what percentage of users actually use the tipping feature? Um, because we're thinking about doing something similar on our platform.

So I do not know off the top of my head what percentage of people use tipping, but I remember from Uber it was like in the 60s, 70s. It is a huge benefit to the supply, um, population on a platform. If anything, we're going to continue enhancing that feature so that it's easier for people to figure out when to tip, how much to tip, to do it as soon as possible after the job, and so on. And so it is a huge part of earnings, which is why we want to make sure that we continue to provide that type of a feature.

Those are good questions. Hey, Blake, do you want to come on? I saw you raise your hand.

Yeah, thanks, Mike. Hey, Anya. I'm ex-Uber as well, so always good to reconnect with those folks. Would love to just piggyback on that question. How do you think about retention and how do you measure retention? Because this could be a once-a-year task, this could be once every couple of years task. This is clearly not a weekly or monthly thing. So curious what cadence you look at retention and how you measure that, or how you've maybe changed your mind about how you've looked at retention over time as you've learned more about the business.

Great question. So for retention, we do a ton of cohort analysis because I think that that's sort of the best way to understand what is happening. But we also look at frequency of how often within a 6-month period and within a 12-month period or whatever the cadence is, people come back. We've also started measuring a lot about How often do people come back to new categories versus the same category? What we have found in the past is people find us in the first category and they get that category done. They've had a good experience and then they'll come back again for the same category. This is different for TV mounting because, you know, hopefully you're not mounting your TV more than once a year. But for many categories, people do come back more than once in a year. And we know that we can actually cross-sell them on new categories. They will find more ways to come back. So one of our biggest sort of plays right now has been to drive cross-sell into new categories— new not for us, but new for the person who's booked a category. And then we are looking at combinations saying, okay, Okay, if you started with moving, what are the most likely categories that you're going to book again? We have data that can help us do that, so then we can incentivize people to cross into that new category. So we have been quite successful with this. Um, I, I think retention's really hard. I have found that there's no silver bullet. It is small incremental changes that over time build into something bigger. Of course, if you sort of launch a loyalty program, maybe that helps. But again, it's a one-time thing. You've got to keep growing the number of times that people come back. And so I find that it's just a lot of trial and error again.

Awesome.

Thanks. Well, that was a good question, a way to wrap things up. But, you know, Anya, thanks for the awesome group chat today. This is fun to, you know, learn more about all of your awesome experience, you know, more about TaskRabbit and also dive deeper in a few marketplace-specific topics here with us today. So, you know, we really appreciate taking the time to join us. And I actually had one last question for you before we wrap things up. And that's if you could go right back to before you joined TaskRabbit, you know, what would you tell yourself about maybe about it as a marketplace in the journey?

Oh, I would probably tell myself to just give myself a bit more grace. It's just, it's a fabulous place to be, and there are so many great challenges. I love solving problems. I think the key is building the right team and helping to give the space to the team that they need and the autonomy that they need to do their best work. I'm very fortunate. I've been able to bring in several people from Uber. with whom I partnered before. I have some people from Airbnb. It's great to have folks with some previous marketplace experience. It doesn't have to be that everyone has to have marketplace experience, but having some balance or some mix of folks who've done some of this work before, I think, has been really, really helpful.

It's going to be good parting advice for us here. And last but not least, time for a quick plug. Where can we keep up with you?

I'm quite active on LinkedIn, and so is TaskRabbit. That's sort of my main platform that I use to communicate and talk about some of the things that we're working on at TaskRabbit and some of the things that keep us going every day.