Leah Solivan was an IBM engineer, engaged on enterprise collaboration instruments like Lotus Notes, when she discovered her million-dollar startup concept: an internet market connecting clients with “taskers” who might run errands or do family chores for them at a value.
The thought arose from Solivan working out of pet food one evening and asking why she could not join with somebody at that second who might decide it up for her. It was 2008 and the first iPhone had come out a yr prior. Solivan noticed the potential in her iPhone for a location-based enterprise.
Leah Solivan. Photograph: Likelihood Yeh/WireImage
In an interview with entrepreneur Jeff Berman final week, Solivan mentioned when wanting on the drawback as an engineer, she noticed these three applied sciences: social, location, and cellular.
“I believed, there’s so much right here,” she mentioned.
Solivan determined to depart her engineering job and cashed out the $27,000 she had earned in her IBM pension plan to get her concept off the bottom. Ten years later, Ikea purchased TaskRabbit for an undisclosed sum after the startup carved out a valuation of about $50 million from a number of fundraising rounds.
TaskRabbit was Ikea’s first acquisition within the U.S.
It wasn’t straightforward to get to an acquisition although. Proper after quitting IBM, Solivan began coding. For six to eight weeks, she labored on her concept and constructed the primary model of it, working from a espresso store at instances and asking random folks on the store for suggestions on what she had created.
When the location was prepared, Solivan put out an advert on Craigslist for taskers — the individuals who would run errands via the location. She gave every one who responded to the advert a 30-minute interview on the espresso store and ended up with 30 taskers for the primary launch in Boston.
The launch taught Solivan that she wanted to “be the primary tasker.” She ran errands too, throughout Boston. The expertise nonetheless prompts her to ask founders: “Are you able to be part of the method?” Solivan says being a part of the corporate’s day-to-day is vital to studying what clients actually need.
Ikea, in the meantime, identified for its must-put-together furnishings, acquired TaskRabbit in 2017 after an in-store partnership in London proved profitable. Prospects might choose to have TaskRabbit ship and assemble Ikea furnishings for them as a substitute of doing it themselves, which elevated the common order worth for Ikea and introduced in new clients for TaskRabbit.
Ikea determined then that they wished to personal TaskRabbit.
“It was bittersweet,” Solivan mentioned. “It had been 10 years… It feels so good to me to know that even with out me, it lives on.”
For entrepreneurs with jobs at Meta, Microsoft, or different corporations who come to her to ask if they need to give up their jobs to work on their concepts, Solivan says that it is tough to be all-in on a startup with a day job, however she is aware of that not everybody has the privilege to have the ability to pursue their concept with no security web.
“My recommendation is, when you actually have conviction round one thing, you will discover a approach to go for it,” Solivan mentioned.
