TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise • Hacker News Board

Re: TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise

#21

Post by krilnon » Tue, Jul 09, 2013, 5:37 AM UTC

inthewoods wrote: post #12

I think it is pretty tough to see how this works on a such a low-margin service - in order to reach scale, they need to do a massive education of the ordinary consumer. Huge costs. Looks to me like they raised their money on that vision, but have found that $30m actually doesn't get you that far. So it looks to me like they're shifting to the B2B side - which is smart but also difficult given the competition in that…

As an oDesk intern… is it really a shift so much as an expansion? It seems like we still do plenty of work on "small" accounts.

Re: TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise

#22

Post by gohrt » Tue, Jul 09, 2013, 6:28 AM UTC

2pasc wrote: post #5

jareau wrote: post #3

I think collaborative consumption companies changing their business to focus on a specific niche or vertical is quite common. Getable (fka Rentcycle) did it. Zaarly did it. I'm head of sales at balancedpayments.com, a payments company that works with online marketplaces, so I interact with dozens of marketplace founders in a given week, and in my opinion the true P2P/collaborative consumption movement is a few years…

The problem of Taskrabbit is that they could not be associated with one clear repeatable need that people had, which lead to a sub par experience for almost all use cases. Most marketplaces in this space are pretty "directed" by the Company (Postmates: deliver food, Instacart: delivery grocery, Lyft: deliver people with car, HomeJoy: deliver cleaning ladies). Lyft is a good example of a P2P system that worked when ev…

Is there a service like HomeJoy but has cleaning gentlemen available?

Re: TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise

#23

Post by mattbarrie » Tue, Jul 09, 2013, 8:15 AM UTC

The problem with taskrabbit is there is no global liquidity in the marketplace, so you need to boil the ocean building local micromarkets. Too much can go wrong with local jobs so you need deep touch in checking IDs, background checks and so forth. It's the opposite of Freelancer.com (my company).

Re: TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise

#24

Post by jpursey » Tue, Jul 09, 2013, 7:53 PM UTC

smartwater wrote: post #13

sdhull wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

www.taskisland.com http://taskpandas.com/ https://sortedlocal.com/ etc... there are lots

Those 3 wouldn't even be considered competitors. All have an Alexa higher than 1 million, so they are barely known. Depending on how long they've been around, one might say they've failed.

Hi, I'm one of the Founders of Sorted (https://sortedlocal.com)

Firstly, Alexa data isn't fresh, I'm pretty sure it's up to 3 months old...3 months ago we weren't live.

The UK isn't as receptive to task marketplaces as the US, hence why nobody is really killing it over here, but times are changing and traction is starting to come through.

We started out as a clone to the original Zaarly, but realised that the data was screaming at us to do something different.

Sorted is now a profile driven marketplace, our Sorters (task do-ers) create profiles and Customers simply search what they want, so a cleaner near postcode x. They browse profiles and request the Sorter, payments still run through the platform.

It opens up a lot more marketing opportunities by leveraging the Sorter base, and the model is being pretty well received in the UK.

We launched and MVP about 2 months ago learnt from the data, iterated and launched another version about 2 weeks ago, we've gone from 800 users on the Zaarly model to 15,000 on the search model, and we're optimising the funnel as we speak.

I assure you, we have not failed, we're a very young business and it's a steep learning curve, but the UK is a tough nut to crack.

Re: TaskRabbit Confirms Layoffs As It Realigns To Focus On Mobile And Enterprise

#25

Post by inthewoods » Wed, Jul 10, 2013, 3:10 AM UTC

krilnon wrote: post #21

inthewoods wrote: post #12

I think it is pretty tough to see how this works on a such a low-margin service - in order to reach scale, they need to do a massive education of the ordinary consumer. Huge costs. Looks to me like they raised their money on that vision, but have found that $30m actually doesn't get you that far. So it looks to me like they're shifting to the B2B side - which is smart but also difficult given the competition in that…

As an oDesk intern… is it really a shift so much as an expansion? It seems like we still do plenty of work on "small" accounts.

Good point - it is likely an expansion - I would ask this: what is management saying is the focus for this year? Enterprise or small accounts? My guess would they would say "Small accounts are still important and our core, but the enterprise is where our next stage of growth will come from." The reality is that small accounts don't provide the same kind of reoccurring revenue that VCs and Wall Street likes to see. And to grow beyond a certain point, you have to have a massive number of small accounts and acquisition to make up for the churn. Large enterprises, by contrast, are a longer sales cycle but more predictable revenue and generally, in my experience, lower churn.