For $X, we will come and do Y chores, quickly and professionally, relatively flat rate. Y job is a typical household chore.
Particular pain point: cleaning the litterbox. I don't really like it, so it gets delayed a bit more than it should. Garbage can be a pain when the apartment building is poorly laid out.
I don't mean a maid or cleaning service. If I lived in a house, I'd want someone for random house maintenance tasks.
I'm half-tempted to do this where I live - I live near both a university and a fairly well-off suburb. Pretty sure a freshman would appreciate odd-job work not far from campus.
The catch is that I don't really have time to deal with bonding, insurance, payroll, workman's comp, etc, etc. Someone with 10-20K, familiarity with the process, lots of flex time over the next 4-6 months (when your help gets sick, YOU get to do it. =) ), and a yen for business could probably make a tidy income from it.
Think of this from the viewpoint of changing demographic:
People get older and need to taken care of, which is shockingly expensive.
There are several attempts, with prototyped like housing/neighborhood scenarios, where the younger generations (students) live together with the elderly.
Older people might live in the ground-level apartments, while the young students wouldn't worry about walking up 2-3 flights of stairs. They could do some shopping, basic housekeeping, watch them take the right medication in the morning.
In return the elderly could return the favor by exchanging non-monetary things, like home-made food. Or they could just pay for the students to lower their rent.
All those solutions are great, but they require serious building of infrastructure, which can't be done immediately.
So services like the one described above seem to be an intermediate solution.
The problem is that all those "micro-tasks" (take the cleaning the litterbox example) are too easy/short to be paid a sufficient amount of money to be done. It's an entirely different league if you pay a gardener to come to your house twice a week for 3-4 hours.
And even gardeners/poolboys etc. have issues if they have to drive from client to client for 30min. or more.
It would be great if there would be a platform that allows people living geographically close together share a qualified person doing specific services.
Take someone walking their dogs every morning as an example. The cost can be shared amongst 6-10 dog owners. While the time spent for walking 6-10 dogs might only double (you need time to collect and return them) instead of increasing 6-10 fold.
So the service should bundle and curate requests from a neighborhood or house.
If a couple requests are similar, like "I would love someone to clean my windows every X weeks." They get bundled into a service package for which local contractors provide a quote.
And other people living in the neighborhood can then pledge for the service. With every new customer joining the average price is lowered for everyone.
Kind of like a curated form of a cross between taskrabbit and kickstarter.
I completely agree. I think that the effective way to start this would be to get a high-rise to buy into the idea. If you have 10 floors of apartments all in the same building, you have some good time efficiency and can start sharing resources - i.e., a big bin to throw bags of cat crap in that can be trundled down the hall from apartment to apartment.
I like your angle on how it'd help the elderly. It might be an interesting way to put together a 'senior living' neighborhood in conjunction with a developer. You could contract with the developer that your labor force would handle the big lifting duties; on the buy side, the rent would be marginally higher (and spread out over the development). Perhaps that already exists though.
Yes, that's similar. I don't think it's the same. Definiately in the same space though.
Task Rabbit presents a very "sanitized", very "Apple", "Industrialized Clean" overall. It's also "tasks" (vs. someone regularly showing).
I want to hire for "Detroit", "dirty", "Dirty Jobs". Services: My "labor" shows up 3x a week and cleans cat crap up & takes garbage out.
Task Rabbit is also one-off hires, it seems like. My "labor" would be the same couple people every time.
I think this could be really efficient for the labor in, say, the same condo or skyscraper. Also, this would be a relatively traditional employment situation, not a sharing economy/one-off model like TaskRabbit. Could even make it unionized if the thing works. That'd be a fun twist. :)
For $X, we will come and do Y chores, quickly and professionally, relatively flat rate. Y job is a typical household chore.
Particular pain point: cleaning the litterbox. I don't really like it, so it gets delayed a bit more than it should. Garbage can be a pain when the apartment building is poorly laid out.
I don't mean a maid or cleaning service. If I lived in a house, I'd want someone for random house maintenance tasks.
I'm half-tempted to do this where I live - I live near both a university and a fairly well-off suburb. Pretty sure a freshman would appreciate odd-job work not far from campus.
The catch is that I don't really have time to deal with bonding, insurance, payroll, workman's comp, etc, etc. Someone with 10-20K, familiarity with the process, lots of flex time over the next 4-6 months (when your help gets sick, YOU get to do it. =) ), and a yen for business could probably make a tidy income from it.