TaskRabbit: Leah Solivan

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2022

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One snowy night in Boston, Leah Solivan ran out of dog food for her 100-pound yellow lab. She wondered: shouldn’t I be able to resupply Kobe without going to the store? That was the origin of TaskRabbit, an online errand service that matches users with “taskers” to do deliveries and other chores. When Leah left her IBM job to start coding the service, the peer-to-peer economy was still in its infancy. But she saw that three important developments—mobile, location services, and social media—were about to converge. She recruited errand-runners from Craigslist, and took an expensive gamble on a 15-minute meeting with Tim Ferriss to get advice and investors. After some management hiccups and a difficult rebranding, TaskRabbit sold to IKEA in 2017.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:11.4	So we're scaling up, and we're also realizing that the product now in 2011 is just not working.
0:20.7	It's just not working.
0:23.0	And at this point, there are competitors coming out that are launching mobile first, mobile only.
0:30.7	And we've been on the web.
0:33.0	I mean, honestly, it's like the entire consumer market and expectation just changed underneath
0:39.4	us and we missed it.
0:48.2	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories
0:54.2	behind the movements they built.
0:59.8	I'm Guy Ross, and on the show today, how a hungry, hundred-pound dog on a snowy night inspired
1:05.8	Leah Sullivan to launch TaskRabbit, a service that will take care of your errands.
1:15.4	Leah Sullivan's idea for a business grew out of a very specific problem she wanted to
1:20.7	solve on one snowy evening in Boston.
1:24.9	The problem of getting a big bag of dog food for her yellow lap to her apartment.
1:31.4	And did she really want to go out in the middle of a snowstorm?
1:35.4	Not really, but was there someone else who might be willing to do it for the right price?
1:41.6	Now that was an interesting question.
1:44.0	But the thing Leah found most compelling about this problem was not that the solution might
1:49.6	one day turn into a business.
1:52.2	Instead, Leah, who at the time was an engineer at IBM, saw the problem as more of an engineering
1:59.2	challenge.
	...

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