124. Make $1,000 - $10,000 per month with TaskRabbit
Be a Task Master!
Whether you live in a city or a small town, there is always someone in need of an extra hand—an older person who can't drive, a busy mom, or someone with lots of work travel—to pick up dry cleaning, stock the fridge, or organize a closet. (Simple tasks, but hard for some people to do.) TaskRabbit is a service that will set up reliable people looking to make extra money on the side (the "rabbits") with different tasks they can bid on. The site can be awesome, but it does have a pretty rigorous screening process—so if you're looking for something more low-key, try a posting on Craigslist and putting the word out with friends and family that you're available for assembling Ikea furniture, cleaning out their grandma's attic, or, really, anything!
Lots of things get rebooted these days: movies, TV shows, restaurants, video games. Tech startups don’t usually make that list. TaskRabbit, however, reworked itself seven years after launching and has grown quite a bit as a result.
Founded in 2008 by Leah Busque, TaskRabbit connects people who need a job done — e.g. help moving, building their IKEA furniture — and people willing to do that job (called “Taskers”). The Taskers set their hourly fee for performing a service, and TaskRabbit gets a 20 percent cut of that — 15 percent if the customer and Tasker have been paired together five or more times. Last year, TaskRabbit applied the knowledge it had gained from several years of business to create a new app with a new user interface that works faster.
Rebuilt to better accommodate mobile devices, TaskRabbit has seen a 100 percent increase in revenue per task and now averages $100 per task. Work opportunities for Taskers have quadrupled, and TaskRabbit expects its revenue to double by the end of June. Consequently, the amount of money the most active Taskers make has also increased, from around $5,000 per month to $6,000 to $7,000.
Brian Schrier ran his own seasonal business for 13 years before a friend bragging to him about making $1,000 per week for TaskRabbit convinced Schrier to shut down his business and start working through TaskRabbit. Now one of the most active Taskers, Schrier uses his background in construction to do minor home improvement tasks like hanging lamps, TVs, or assembling furniture. This nets him $8,000 to $10,000 per month, he said.
“When I first started, my hourly rate was lower, so I had almost too many jobs. It was too much and now I’ve adjusted my rates and it’s much more comfortable.” Schrier said he now charges $150 per hour. Schrier, who is based in the North Bay, is certainly an outlier in terms of rates. TaskRabbit said that rates for a handyman average $40 an hour.
“I’ve managed to find my balance,” Schrier said of his work.
TaskRabbit’s founder said it has achieved what it set out to accomplish.
“It comes back to our core mission and values,” Busque said. “It’s all about connecting people.”
