In this interview, Leah Busque recounts the founding story of TaskRabbit, beginning with a personal need for dog food in February 2008 that sparked the idea of an on‑demand errand service. She purchased the domain RunMyErrand.com for $6.99, built the first version of the site herself over ten weeks, and launched a closed beta with the Charlestown Mothers Organization in Boston. Early branding involved a neighbor‑designed logo and later iterations via 99designs, culminating in a community‑voted rebrand to TaskRabbit after a failed attempt to acquire the name RedRover. Busque describes the scrappy, bootstrapped nature of the early team—her full‑time effort, her husband’s hosting work, and a handful of friends—plus the recruitment of the first 30 taskers through Craigslist ads and in‑person interviews. The conversation highlights the challenges of early mobile adoption, the importance of clear, descriptive naming, and the iterative process of product, brand, and marketplace development that set the foundation for TaskRabbit’s later growth.
Chapters
So I have to start off and ask, where did this name come from? Why TaskRabbit? Was it originally called this?
Did it morph into this?
Tell me a little bit about this.
Yeah, it's actually an interesting story I haven't shared too many times. But originally, the company was named RunMyErrand.com. And I have to tell sort of the founding story so that there's context there. I was living in Boston at the time. It was February of 2008, so it was cold and snowing outside. And my husband and I were getting ready to go out to dinner. When we realized we were out of dog food. And at the time we had this 100-pound yellow lab named Kobe who we kept very well fed. And we had called a cab to come pick us up and take us across town. And we're like, oh, how are we going to get this dog food? Are we really going to stop on the way home? What if all the stores are closed? This is such a simple problem. Why isn't there a simple solution? And my husband Kevin is also in technology. So we always have very geeky conversations in the house, probably like you two over here. And that night it turned into, wouldn't it be nice if there was just a place online we could go, say we needed dog food, name the price we were willing to pay, we were certain that there would be someone in our neighborhood willing to help us out, maybe even someone at the store at that very second. It was just a matter of connecting with them. And the iPhone had literally just come out a few months earlier. This is February of '08. I mean, can you imagine, like, not everyone had iPhones back then. It had just come out. No one was really leveraging location-based or awareness technologies Foursquare didn't really hit mainstream. Facebook was just coming out of the college scene and becoming more mainstream as well. But I grabbed my iPhone that night and I said, OK, if such a site existed, what would it be called? And the first thing that came to mind was runmyerin.com. And it was available on GoDaddy. And domain names are never available. I'm sure you guys know. And so I bought it on the spot for $6.99. And we went off to dinner. And I hated the name like 20 minutes later. I hated it. But I felt like, well, you know what? Let's just see how far this name can take us. Let's see how far it can go. And what I became really passionate about is how do we leverage social technologies that are emerging, the iPhone and the smartphone and these new mobile platforms that are emerging, and then location awareness and location-based systems? And how do we take those 3 things and Utilize them to connect real people in the real world to get real things done in real time. So it was kind of this 4-dimensional thought I had. So I bought RunMyErrand.com on the spot, hated it 20 minutes later. But we operated under that name for the first, I would say, 18 months, like year and a half that we existed. And then we always knew we wanted to change the name to TaskRabbit. Actually, I have to show— I think I have some of the early, early—
Yes.
OK. You guys, this was the very first logo of RunMyErrand.com. And it was done by my neighbor in Charlestown. I had zero design sense. I was an engineer at IBM for 7 years. And he was like, oh yeah, I'll make you a logo that you can use. And so we used this. We even, which is kind of funny, service marked it. Very official. Little SM at the top there. Just to make sure no one stole the logo. So that was an early, early logo. This, it morphed sort of over the course of those 18 months into this. This one I believe we did on 99designs.com. And so, you know, early days, you're just like bootstrapped, you're scrappy, you're doing whatever it takes to get stuff done. And so we utilized 99designs. And then finally— That's a good one.
TaskRabbit.
Yes. Early days of TaskRabbit here. Finally, we morphed into TaskRabbit. And the story behind this is kind of funny because we always knew we wanted to change the name. We were only open in Boston under runmyiron.com, but we wanted to open San Francisco, and we had just raised a little bit of seed money. And we were moving the whole company and team out here to the Bay Area. And so we came up with hundreds of different names. And we knew that before we opened San Francisco, we had to change the name. We couldn't get another market open underrun my urn. And so we actually picked our top 5, and then we let our community vote on what they wanted. And TaskRabbit was not my first choice, actually. It was— I liked it, but it wasn't my first choice. My first choice was Red Rover, because you know the childhood game Red Rover, Red Rover, we'll send someone right over? I felt like that was a nice tie-in. And then the tie-in with the dog, of course, was also appealing to me. But this woman in New York City owned redrover.com. She made dog collars out of her home and refused to sell it to us. So we went with TaskRabbit. And overwhelmingly, the community loved TaskRabbit on both sides of the marketplace and just felt like it embodied the spirit of the brand we were building. fun and quirky and fast-paced and trustworthy. And so those were all things that we were trying to build up from the early days. And so when we opened San Francisco, that's when we launched under the new name of TaskRabbit.
Gotcha. Wow, that's a cool story.
Yeah.
I really like that logo.
Yes.
Especially the 99designs one.
I think that that probably— I know. This one I think was 99designs too. The first TaskRabbit logo was And then we started cleaning it up in-house until— this is the latest, and this was all done in-house. I mean, it's really a testament to just a company's stage and size and lifecycle and what you can do in-house and what you have to outsource sometimes. And you come from that scrappy mindset and mentality, and you're constantly prioritizing what to focus on and what to do.
But now, when you were back in Boston and you really started out, How did you get people to kind of identify with this brand? I mean, no one had ever heard of it. Obviously there was a pain point. You had experienced it yourself. How did you get people to say, okay, well, yeah, let me try this out? And also, not everybody had iPhones back then.
It's true. I mean, in the early days, I actually think even though I didn't like the name runmyerrand.com, it was very descriptive. And so it was easy for someone to see the website or see the logo and immediately understand what it was for. When I launched the company, the product in Boston, basically I'd quit my job at IBM. I locked myself in my house for 10 weeks straight, coded the first version of the site, and got it launched in one neighborhood where I was living at the time called Charlestown. I spent a lot of time at this coffee shop in Charlestown coding and just talking with folks in the community. And they were literally my beta, early beta testers. And it just so happened that there were a lot of moms that would hang out in this coffee shop. And so I got to know some of the moms in the community. And it turns out there was this organization called the Charlestown Mothers Organization, which was about 600 moms in 1 square mile of Boston. So like really concentrated. And the more that I talked to these moms about what I was building, the more I could just the interest and how compelling the value proposition was to them. And that they immediately knew what Run My Errand could do. And they're like, oh, Run Errand. Wow, could someone go grocery shopping for me? Could they go to Target? Could they pick up this birthday gift? I mean, there was like a million things that these moms came up with as use cases. And so I originally launched the site just for them.
Gotcha.
It was a closed beta. It was just the Charlestown Mothers Organization. And once I got them onboarded and really got some learnings under my belt about how people wanted to utilize the platform, then we started expanding and opening it up across Boston.
And how big was the team at this point? So you had closed yourself off 10 weeks, built the site.
I mean, it was me full-time.
It was you full-time?
Yeah, it was me full-time. And then, of course, you have friends that are helping nights and weekends. And my husband Kevin was building the hosting environment for us to run all the servers in. And my other friend Brian, who I worked with at IBM, is now our chief architect at TaskRabbit. He was helping me do some of the coding on the side as well. It was a lot of scrappy people digging in.
That's what a startup is. Were the moms both the ones running around doing the errands and the ones asking for the errands to be done? Was this a very closed environment, or were you bringing people in to basically supply the labor?
I originally started the supply side of the marketplace with 3 moms. 30 taskers. And I in-person interviewed every single one of them at this coffee shop in Charlestown, 30-minute meetings with each of them, because I just didn't know who I was going to get, who was going to be interested in doing these types of jobs. And I had put an ad out on Craigslist, and then I met people in person. And so I picked 30 people to start with, and then I opened it up to the Charlestown Mothers Organization for posting. But what happened actually was there were some moms that were stay-at-home moms that were out running their own errands anyway every day, didn't mind picking things up for people, and those moms started to sign up as taskers on the service as well. So it did very organically become a pretty diverse set of people.
