Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, explains how the platform rewards top taskers (top 10% earning $7k-$14k monthly) with elite status and direct-hire links. In 2014, TaskRabbit switched from a bidding model to instant booking with automatic matching, which streamlined the experience and doubled U.S. business.
My question revolves around— so we're talking about evangelism, right? Is there a way in the system that you identify and track top-performing taskers? And then how do you incentivize or reward them for being your evangelists for TaskRabbit? Do you equip them with nice TaskRabbit swag and all-star gear? And how does that process work?
Yeah, great question. So we do. We have this sort of top 10% or so that earn what we call elite status. On TaskRabbit. And these taskers are typically picking up 2 to 3 jobs a day. They're probably filling most days with work. They're cashing out anywhere from $7,000 to like $14,000 every month. So they're earning a lot of money on the platform. And so we definitely want to reward and celebrate them. And so we do simple things like— Give them a raise. TaskRabbit swag, and we give them business cards where it also has their own direct hire link, so they can pass those out and get rehired by people as they want to. But I think one of the most interesting things we've done is for all taskers, right in their Tasker app, which is on iOS or Android devices— all of our taskers have smartphones— they're able to see their performance metrics, and there's all kinds of different metrics, like acceptance rate, response time, completion rate, money earned, how many hours worked, ratings and reviews, like all sorts of things. And so they can open their app at any time and kind of understand how they're falling in line with the rest of the community and how they're performing. That's been a great way to just give taskers, I think, insight into performance. In areas, you know, if they improve, they could maybe increase their hourly rates, they could maybe do better. If they see that, you know, their response time is higher than 80% of the other taskers on the platform, that might be a reason why they're not getting as many jobs. So it just helps give them some insight and tools into how they can perform better, and just the transparency around that has been a big value add to them.
Hi, thank you for coming. So I have a question. In July 2014, you reversed the model where task placers would place the tasks and taskers would choose that task to fulfill, and then you decided to employ the other strategy. What was the driver of that change, and how did it impact the company?
Yeah, so the big shift in the model in July of 2014 was we got rid of auction. We got rid of bidding. That was the massive change. Prior to that, you would put a task out that you needed done, and then taskers would bid on your job. And then you'd choose who you wanted to work with based on price and availability and ratings and reviews and reputation. What we found in the old model is that it wasn't as fast-paced as people wanted, both on the client and on the tasker side, actually. We heard from taskers that they were spending up to 2 hours a week just bidding. on jobs, just bidding for work, not even actually doing work. So that was a staggering metric that once we learned that, we're like, oh my God, we have to make this more efficient. On the client side, there could be tasks that would get like 25 different bids, and then it's like, oh my God, how do you choose? It's just so overwhelming. And so what we decided to do is streamline the experience on both sides of the marketplace. And this is where we really focused on a mobile experience as well. both sides of the community, where now all of our taskers have already put in their schedules, their hourly rates, the work area that they want to get hired in. And so basically a client comes on, describes their work, picks a category, and then is immediately shown taskers in their area that are available. They already have hourly rates set. They can read ratings and reviews. But then they can actually book them immediately against the schedule that they've provided. So before a client closes the app now, they know who they're going to work with, how much they're going to pay, and when it's going to get done. And those were 3 things that kind of took a long time to get to in the old platform. So it's been awesome. We actually tested this model and this experience in London before we rolled it back here to the US market, which was a pretty bold move. It was a pretty big risk to open a new city in another country with a product that no one has ever seen before. But we had a lot of confidence that this was the direction we wanted to go with the model. And when we saw that London has been our fastest growing market, it's grown 30% faster than any other city in the US, we decided we had to roll the model back here to the US market as well. And so we hit a pretty big inflection point in the US business as well in July. And we've been growing double digits month over month. We've doubled the size of the business already. since then. So it's been a really good focus for us.
