Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, built her brand around four core values: neighborly help, trust, reliability, and innovation. She tested logos, colors, and taglines with hundreds of surveys, and 85% of TaskRabbit's customers still come through word-of-mouth referrals rather than paid channels.
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And now, so, I mean, you just showed us a little bit of the evolution of the brand. So everybody here earlier this week, they started to build a logo for themselves. They'll start to really go into later tonight what message they want to put out into the world about their brand. What advice can you give them in core elements when you're starting a brand? What is strong messaging that you think needs to be there, or some direction?
Yeah, I mean, OK. I mean, it's hard because it's so nuanced and it's so subjective. The thing that really, I think, helped us from the very beginning was our openness and willingness just to get as much feedback as possible from as many users as possible. So even as we settled on these different logos over the lifetime of the company, we sent out hundreds of surveys through SurveyMonkey, through 99designs. We had people voting on— colors and fonts and, you know, at one point there was a tagline that we had incorporated into it. I think what I've learned over the evolution of TaskRabbit and its brand is that the core elements haven't really changed that much from the beginning. The idea that we are neighbors helping neighbors, that we're helping people live more efficiently together in a neighborhood, This concept of trust and reliability, of innovation, those were all sort of core values and elements that were part of the original thinking for TaskRabbit. They got incorporated into the original brand for Run My Errand. And even though, as you can see, the logo changed so dramatically over the years, we were able to, I think, keep those core values sort of and held them sacred. So I guess my advice would be figure out what are the 2, 3, 4 things that are really important as core values to what you're building, to your company, and then spend a lot of time getting feedback and testing it and ensuring that those values are gonna resonate through the brand that you're creating.
Do you think that speaking with your customers this much and being able to send out those surveys and really get on the ground and talk to them, is that what helped you get past the 600 mothers that you were targeting and then allowed you to scale?
Yeah, absolutely. The 600 moms started talking to other moms across the neighborhoods in Boston. It really did start to grow via very strong word of mouth. Because the value proposition was so clear, Because the brand was so well trusted from the beginning, these moms felt like they wanted to share it with other people across the community. That was a big help. Even today, 85% of our customers at TaskRabbit come in through word of mouth and PR, just free channels. It still is a very organic word of mouth type business.
I actually have a question around branding. Initially, you had this different brand. Midway through, you switched over. So how was that experience? Was anybody confused? How did you kind of integrate the change? Yeah.
And I'll show you this. I mean, this last page has all the different brands on it. So we knew that we had to change— if we were going to change the name of the company, we had to do it before we opened San Francisco. We felt like we couldn't have 2 different markets in 2 different parts of the country running under 2 separate brands. That would be really confusing. So we kind of had set ourselves up with a timeline and milestones that we wanted to hit. As far as the communication around it, because it was just one city, it was just Boston, and we did it so early in the company's life cycle. I mean, we literally did it just a few months after we got our seed funding. So I'd been bootstrapping this in Boston for a long time, but it was really just me, and it was still very small. So the communication consisted of, We sent out some emails. We flipped the switch at midnight one night. People visit runmyair.com, they get redirected to TaskRabbit, and it was like, hey, now we're TaskRabbit. And because we had included the community in the naming exercise, that actually was really helpful. So there wasn't a lot of surprise or like, oh, I didn't know you guys were thinking about this. open about it, and they knew it could be one of 5 names that we had floated by them. So we did it— as far as the actual execution was concerned, we did it fast. We did it overnight. We lined the communication up ahead of time and just ripped the Band-Aid off, so to speak.
