Leah Solivan was IBM Engineerworking on business collaboration tools equivalent to Lotus Noteswhen she got here up with a million-dollar startup idea: an online marketplace that connected consumers with “task-getters” who could do errands or chores for them for a fee.
The idea got here about when Solivan ran out of pet food one night and asked why she couldn’t contact someone who could pick it up for her right then. It was 2008 and The first iPhone released a yr earlier. Solivan saw the potential of her iPhone for location-based business.
Leah Solivan. Photo: Chance Yeh/WireImage
In an interview for entrepreneur Jeff Berman Last week, Solivan said that when she looks at the problem from an engineer’s perspective, she sees three technologies: social, location-based and mobile.
“I thought there was a lot of it here,” she said.
Solivan decided to quit her engineering job and money out the $27,000 she had earned in her IBM retirement plan to make her idea a reality. Ten years later, Ikea I purchased TaskRabbit for an undisclosed amount after the startup valued the company at around $50 million across multiple funding rounds.
TaskRabbit was Ikea first purchase in the United States
But the acquisition wasn’t easy. Right after leaving IBM, Solivan began coding. She spent six to eight weeks working on her idea and creating a first version of it, sometimes working from a coffee shop and asking random people in the store for feedback on what she had created.
Once the site was ready, Solivan put an ad on Craigslist for taskers—individuals who would run errands for the site. She gave each one who responded a 30-minute interview at a coffee shop, and ended up with 30 taskers for the initial launch in Boston.
The launch taught Solivan that she had to “be the first one to ask.” She also took on assignments throughout Boston. That experience still prompts her to ask the founders, “Can you be a part of the process?” Solivan says that being a a part of the day-to-day operations of the company is key to understanding what customers really need.
Meanwhile, Ikea, known for furniture that has to be assembled, acquired TaskRabbit in 2017 after a partnership at a London store proved lucrative. Customers could opt to have Ikea furniture delivered and assembled by TaskRabbit fairly than do it themselves, increasing the average order value for Ikea and driving recent customers to TaskRabbit.
Then Ikea decided to acquire TaskRabbit.
“It was bittersweet,” Solivan said. “It’s been 10 years… It makes me feel so good to know that even without me, it’s still going on.”
Solivan says that entrepreneurs at Meta, Microsoft and other firms who come to her asking if they need to quit their jobs to pursue their ideas have a hard time fully committing to a startup while also working full-time, but she knows that not everyone has the privilege of pursuing an idea without a safety net.
“My advice is that if you really believe in something, you will find a way to do it,” Solivan said.