TaskRabbit, the online marketplace for outsourcing errands and short-term work, is announcing this morning the launch of its service in five new United States cities: Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
This is a major step in the company’s growth, bringing its regional reach up by 50 percent in one fell swoop, from 10 cities to a total of 15. TaskRabbit CEO Leah Busque, who founded the company in Boston in 2008, has always said that she has methodical about adding new cities to ensure that supply matches demand and the quality of the service stays uniform across all regions.
Also today, TaskRabbit is lifting the lid on its latest growth figures. A total of 15,000 “rabbits”, or background-checked and trained workers, are signed up on the platform; on the demand side, TaskRabbit says it expects to add 1.25 million new users in 2013 alone.
It’s encouraging news, especially in light of TaskRabbit’s recent layoffs to focus on restructuring the business to focus more on its mobile and enterprise use cases — this shows that TaskRabbit as a company is still very much focused on growth, even as its headcount has downsized. Peer-to-peer errand outsourcing startups may be going through some changes, but it’s clear that there is still a lot of life left in the space.