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Strangely enough my biggest concern is how well this will scale. EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm getting down boated. I'm pretty serious. I have no idea the average

Strangely enough my biggest concern is how well this will scale. EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm getting down boated. I'm pretty serious. I have no idea the average task duration but assume its an hour then every "exec" can only do about 7-8 a day (assume some non billable time). If they get 10,000 customers and say each need one task every 2 weeks. Thats 5000 tasks and would require a staff of 125 execs. With 125 execs now you need managers and quality control and customer support. I'm assume execs are only getting paid about $15 an hour. That means A. Quality of Execs would be an issue. B. You only have about $10 of every hour left towards margin. Margin in straight services is nasty and this one is thin and in this case unless you have an extremely efficient staff your margin tends to go down as you grow - not up.

rdl 15y ago
This is the kind of thing which scales pretty well -- there are lots of unemployed/underemployed people in most markets. I think the difference vs. taskrabbit is that it being realtime requires the task-runners/execs to be higher quality and more committed, so it might not work as well in a market with 0% unemployment where everyone has a 9-5 job. I don't think that's a major risk for the next decade or two. They can obviously raise pricing. At some point, people will pay based on the money they save, and runners might get really efficient at certain kinds of missions. If, for instance, a common mission is "pick up my car from the bar the next morning", the requestor might think it is a 2 hour task (bus or taxi, ...); maybe a task-runner has an efficient solution involving a folding bicycle, or two people. Worth $100 to me, costs 30 minutes of someone else's time who is happy with $25/hr, win/win at $50.
- alaskamiller 15y ago
  People relate this to TaskRabbit and I believe that's wrong. But not for the reason you might be thinking. So why is it wrong to relate this to TaskRabbit? Because TaskRabbit isn't competitive, yet. They're about the auction format not the on-demand format. Apples and oranges. That's fine, but take stock in their assets: national brand recognition, solid network effects, a built out rep system, resources. It is only a matter of time on _if_ they want to compete. If I were a TaskRabbit decision maker I would start a skunkworks team to clone, but not launch. Not until Exec does all the work of validating. So really Exec is more relatable to Cherry.com, an on-demand mobile car washing service started by three valley insiders. I sign up, pay $30, go shopping, and get texted when my car is done being detailed. It's amazing. And after talking to Cherry's contractors, there's also an amazing feedback system built up to ensure quality. But Cherry is just one vertical so it lacks scale. That's where Exec could shine, by being the consigliere some of us need to get through modern life. Or while in a bind on the way to Burning Man. On-demand dial-up services are the future. If you use Grindr, you know what I'm talking about.
  - michael_f 15y ago
    It's closer to Uber than Taskrabbit, conceptually.
patio11 15y ago
Your managers are algorithms. Your onboarding costs you $20 for each Exec you sign up - in this economy, your acquisition cost for them is likely near zero because WOM and free PR will give you more opportunities than you can handle. You bootstrap CS with either the founders or one of your close friends, building systems to support the common cases (e.g. "Exec flaked on me") and using T1 support as a system-level T2. Your margins are asymptotically the same as selling iPhone apps at $15 each ($10 minus pocket change either way), but you'll have many customer LTVs in the hundreds. Eventually, you'll have a proper CS team in place like e.g. Airbnb and the'll involve themselves in < 5% of orders at a fully-loaded cost of $12 per incident. We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work. The major gamble is that there exists sufficient market demand among the upper middle class for semi-interchangeable gophers. It doesn't strike me as obviously a billion dollar business but then again I thought "Young ladies will happily pay money to stay the night at private residences" sounded categorically insane the first time I heard it and we already know how that story turns out. P.S. Numbers here come from "Big dumb megacorp with a traditional CS department assumes an American FTE talking on he phone costs $12." There's all sort of ways you can cheat that assumption, beginning with not being a big dumb megacorp.
- mikeryan 15y ago
  Your managers are algorithms. - We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work I'm sorry I don't buy this, I may be misreading how Exec works but it looks like Exec's are employees - not freelancers. I don't know how this would work any other way you couldn't guarantee staffing levels and "real time service" for your customers if they were independents like Task Rabbit. Not to mention Rentacoder, Odesk and 99designs all usually have some aspect of geographic arbitrage which brings down their prices. The major difference in this model is that Exec becomes entirely responsible for QC - unlike each of the other's you mention where if a person (or place) is crap that "vendor" gets downvoted out of the game. Here the only people who lose karma is Exec itself. This brings a whole world of pain and management which none of the crowdsourced models address - payroll taxes, labor codes HR - scheduling. You're definitely not managing with algorithms. I have a good friend who runs a Doggy Day Care in SF who hires a lot of folks in this price range. He has a hard time getting 15 people who can walk dogs with a decent level of service.
deleted 15y ago
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rdl 15y ago

This is the kind of thing which scales pretty well -- there are lots of unemployed/underemployed people in most markets. I think the difference vs. taskrabbit is that it being realtime requires the task-runners/execs to be higher quality and more committed, so it might not work as well in a market with 0% unemployment where everyone has a 9-5 job. I don't think that's a major risk for the next decade or two. They can obviously raise pricing. At some point, people will pay based on the money they save, and runners might get really efficient at certain kinds of missions. If, for instance, a common mission is "pick up my car from the bar the next morning", the requestor might think it is a 2 hour task (bus or taxi, ...); maybe a task-runner has an efficient solution involving a folding bicycle, or two people. Worth $100 to me, costs 30 minutes of someone else's time who is happy with $25/hr, win/win at $50.

alaskamiller 15y ago
People relate this to TaskRabbit and I believe that's wrong. But not for the reason you might be thinking. So why is it wrong to relate this to TaskRabbit? Because TaskRabbit isn't competitive, yet. They're about the auction format not the on-demand format. Apples and oranges. That's fine, but take stock in their assets: national brand recognition, solid network effects, a built out rep system, resources. It is only a matter of time on _if_ they want to compete. If I were a TaskRabbit decision maker I would start a skunkworks team to clone, but not launch. Not until Exec does all the work of validating. So really Exec is more relatable to Cherry.com, an on-demand mobile car washing service started by three valley insiders. I sign up, pay $30, go shopping, and get texted when my car is done being detailed. It's amazing. And after talking to Cherry's contractors, there's also an amazing feedback system built up to ensure quality. But Cherry is just one vertical so it lacks scale. That's where Exec could shine, by being the consigliere some of us need to get through modern life. Or while in a bind on the way to Burning Man. On-demand dial-up services are the future. If you use Grindr, you know what I'm talking about.
- michael_f 15y ago
  It's closer to Uber than Taskrabbit, conceptually.

patio11 15y ago

Your managers are algorithms. Your onboarding costs you $20 for each Exec you sign up - in this economy, your acquisition cost for them is likely near zero because WOM and free PR will give you more opportunities than you can handle. You bootstrap CS with either the founders or one of your close friends, building systems to support the common cases (e.g. "Exec flaked on me") and using T1 support as a system-level T2. Your margins are asymptotically the same as selling iPhone apps at $15 each ($10 minus pocket change either way), but you'll have many customer LTVs in the hundreds. Eventually, you'll have a proper CS team in place like e.g. Airbnb and the'll involve themselves in < 5% of orders at a fully-loaded cost of $12 per incident. We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work. The major gamble is that there exists sufficient market demand among the upper middle class for semi-interchangeable gophers. It doesn't strike me as obviously a billion dollar business but then again I thought "Young ladies will happily pay money to stay the night at private residences" sounded categorically insane the first time I heard it and we already know how that story turns out. P.S. Numbers here come from "Big dumb megacorp with a traditional CS department assumes an American FTE talking on he phone costs $12." There's all sort of ways you can cheat that assumption, beginning with not being a big dumb megacorp.

mikeryan 15y ago
Your managers are algorithms. - We know that this model in broad strokes works because Rentacoder, ODesk, 99Designs, Airbnb, etc etc all work I'm sorry I don't buy this, I may be misreading how Exec works but it looks like Exec's are employees - not freelancers. I don't know how this would work any other way you couldn't guarantee staffing levels and "real time service" for your customers if they were independents like Task Rabbit. Not to mention Rentacoder, Odesk and 99designs all usually have some aspect of geographic arbitrage which brings down their prices. The major difference in this model is that Exec becomes entirely responsible for QC - unlike each of the other's you mention where if a person (or place) is crap that "vendor" gets downvoted out of the game. Here the only people who lose karma is Exec itself. This brings a whole world of pain and management which none of the crowdsourced models address - payroll taxes, labor codes HR - scheduling. You're definitely not managing with algorithms. I have a good friend who runs a Doggy Day Care in SF who hires a lot of folks in this price range. He has a hard time getting 15 people who can walk dogs with a decent level of service.

deleted 15y ago

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