

TaskRabbit is blowing up its business model and becoming the Uber for everything - peterkchen
http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/17/5816254/taskrabbit-blows-up-its-auction-house-to-offer-services-on-demand

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vincentbarr
'Blowing up its business model'? I enjoy hyperbole in prose. Headlines? Not so
much.

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jjoonathan
Have you ever seen a headline you enjoyed?

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vincentbarr
"An Open Letter to the Phrase 'Having Said That.'"
[http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-
phr...](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-phrase-
having-said-that)

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czbond
Serve some - do well. Serve many, die hard.

~~~
dueprocess
It's the law of the startup though. Scale as big as you can, as fast as
possible.

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rohans
Hey guys, Rohan here Founder and CEO of BIZZBY, we run a mobile-first on-
demand services model.

We don't give users choices simply allocate the best (algorithmically based on
factors we are tweaking regularly like, hours online, job acceptance rates,
reputation score, jobs completed and proximity to job etc.) within seconds
where the professional also accepts in real-time.

End result is that within 10 seconds you're done and 60 mins later that
professional turns up. No thinking.

Our supply base is vetted and curated not a random neighbour.

This model is very different to the open aggregation type marketplaces. The
secret source is heavy on the supply logistics / operations and on boarding as
well as scaling with quality at a reasonable rate side.

The more mobile the world goes, anything that takes longer than a phone call
or more than a few seconds is a waste of time.

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damian2000
Jack of all trades master of none.

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jypepin
Yep that's the problem we faced at Exec, before pivoting to cleaning.

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_up
Is the process of matching cleaners so different from lets say matching
handymen? Or is this more about markteting to the right audience or maybe not
overwhelm the user?

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fiatjaf
Why shouldn't something like this become the hiring platform of the future?
Hire for missions, not for job positions. Get a presentation of what the
person can do, not the job positions he has had. It's done.

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rwhitman
Kind of surprising it took so long to figure out and optimize. As an outsider
it always kind of smelled to me like their marketplace was flawed, even back
several years ago when I first saw it.

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interg12
What did you always suspect was the core flaw?

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aaronblohowiak
Auction takes too long / is too heavy. The whole point of a convenience app is
that it is supposed to be "just take care of this for me", not "let's spend
time figuring out the bid/accept process".

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romaster
Zaarly... Taskrabbit... can anyone get this notion of "bid for the right TO
service" done properly? or are we all just reduced to having to FIND our
contractor, on our own.....

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sotu
There's also some players providing "kayak of local services" \-
[http://locality.com/](http://locality.com/) is one I know of

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notastartup
I wonder how much work is actually involved with running such businesses that
cater to peer economies. Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft, their site is a simple web
app. I see more and more startups with simple web apps that is catered around
a business model that involves being a marketplace or automating some process.

What's happening behind the scenes to such startups? Is it a group of
marketers?

Say I create an Airbnb clone, what now? Or say I create Uber app, what's the
next step? Does the chicken or the egg come first?

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jeremyt
Cofounder of thumbtack here - left in 2010, which basically directly competes
with taskrabbit now.

I can understand how you would be skeptical that there's much going on behind
the scenes, but you have to understand that this is mostly on purpose. It
SHOULD look simple from the outside.

But underneath, we're vetting, categorizing, and matching. How do you fill a
request for house painting with a database of perhaps 100 house painters that
are qualified? You don't want too many bids, but you want enough to give the
customer a decent choice. How many leads to you send out to get, say, three
bids?

It's all algorithms, and we've been working heads down on it for years and are
getting pretty good at it. Not easy, though.

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rwhitman
I've always thought it sounds extremely complicated. I've worked in vision /
product / design on peer-to-peer social ecommerce marketplaces and getting the
supply / demand right for an organicly viable marketplace like etsy or ebay is
mind bendingly difficult.

Every which way we cut it, we had to control the supply side more and more and
that means having staff to find them, qualify them, pair them etc

