Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, explains how taskers set their own hourly rates while the company takes a 20% cut. TaskRabbit uses real-time heat maps to balance supply and demand by zip code, category, and time of day. Marketing focuses on storytelling, PR, and word-of-mouth, with about 85% of business coming from repeat customers.
So do you allow the users to set their own price? And how do you get your money?
So the way the model works is that all of our taskers on the supply side, the service providers, they're able to set hourly rates for up to 40 different categories. They also set their own schedules and their own work area. They can accept and decline work. And then basically our business model is to take a 20% fee for every transaction that flows through the site. Mm-hmm.
Yep.
I like it. Yes?
How hard was it to kind of fit the supply of workers and the demand of the people who want the product?
Yes. It's really complex. Any marketplace business where there are 2 sides to manage has its own challenges and complexities. And so we at TaskRabbit, as an example, we manage supply and demand ratios. down to the zip code, down to the category, down to the time of day level. So there's 3 dimensions, and we have these real-time heat maps that we're looking at. And we know if we see a demand spike in 94107 for handymen, we need to go into our database and start onboarding more handymen. And there's this particular ratio that we have figured out, and it's different for every category and every zip code actually. If we can hit that right balance, then the taskers are making the money that they want. The clients are finding people that they want to work with. If that comes out of balance, if we flood the marketplace with too many taskers, then it becomes too competitive. And they're not all making the money that they want. So they tend to churn out or disengage. And so that's not good. If we don't have enough taskers on the platform for demand and for clients, then the clients are having bad experiences because they can't find anyone to get matched with. It's one I think of the biggest challenges in any marketplace business is managing that supply and demand ratio. Sharon?
Thank you so much for coming in. My question is, what are the best marketing techniques you've used to date, and what kind of spike do you see from those?
As I mentioned, 85% of our customers today are repeat customers. day still come in through free channels, so word of mouth, through PR. And so for us, every single task posted on TaskRabbit is its own story. It has its own background, its own context. It might just look like a simple cupcake delivery. And then you start talking to both sides, the client and the tasker, and you find out that the cupcakes are for my daughter's, like, first birthday party, and, you know, this— Mom has been working 80 hours a week full-time and trying to plan this party and then has all these taskers helping her get this done. And on the tasker side, it looks like they're doing a simple delivery, but they could be in between 2 other TaskRabbit jobs and picked it up on the side and was happy to help this mom out with the party. So every single task is a story. And we try as best as we can to get those stories out there into the world because they're really interesting. They're stories, and we've been, you know, really cognizant that if we can share these via press, via broadcast, via PR, and just get them out, then it really resonates with people. And that's what drives people to try the service. If they see someone like themselves, you know, trying to pull off that first kid's birthday party, right? There's lots of moms out there doing that. And then they'll come and utilize TaskRabbit as well. So for us, it's really been about sort of the evangelism of the underlying stories that we see on the platform, and then having the right channels to get those stories out there. Thank you.
