Recent Press

Today Show: Work-at-homers: Treated like doormats?

Wall Street Journal: Yes, I'm Home. No, I Can't Pick Up Your Child

Many say they’re fed up with being personal assistants for friends or neighbors who work outside the home. Jeffrey Zaslow of The Wall Street Journal and lifestyle expert Harriette Cole weigh in. Our Runner Elke is featured.

Taskrabbit at the forefront of the telework movement

I've got to admit, Taskrabbit.com is a massively cool, good idea that could revolutionize work as we know it. By providing website-easy access to small jobs, the site may make those jobs more desirable, and cause growth in a whole new segment of worker: people who specialize in doing odd jobs.

TaskRabbit: new part-time work for people without jobs

The new website offers quick jobs and fast cash to its more than 300 runners – people with time on their hands who sign up on taskrabbit.com to run errands for those who don’t. They’re paid a mutually agreed upon fee for each task, which can range from picking up groceries or laundry, to transporting a pup across the country and finding someone the perfect roommate.

TaskRabbit Kicks Off Errand-Running Service in San Francisco, Boston ‘Burbs

Now the company is formally kicking off its service in San Francisco, which is also its new corporate home. That means overworked professionals, in a city that’s full of them, can go online and hire TaskRabbit “runners” to do whatever needs to be done—walking the dog, going grocery shopping, picking up the dry cleaning. It’s an idea Busque (pronounced “buss-key”) calls “service networking”: using the power of online social networking to get things done in the real world. And the startup’s expansion to the City by the Bay after more than a year of operations in Boston is a sign that TaskRabbit’s investors think it could be the next big thing for busy urbanites.

Cancer Patient Hiring A Runner For Marathon

Two items below "clean the pet cage" on Runmyerrand.com's list for that day is Margaret Isham's offer to pay someone $75 to run the Boston Marathon. She's hiring legs to raise money for breast cancer patients. "When you get a diagnosis of breast cancer, it affects everyone around you," said Isham. Isham, the mother of two grown daughters, knows first hand. Five days a week, she has radiation treatment at Mt. Auburn Hospital. The arrangement between Zunkiewicz works like this: he'll cover the miles on the course and she handles the fundraising legwork.

RunMyErrand Changes Name to TaskRabbit

Finish tasks on the quick with the help of web-based personal assistance service RunMyErrand. Simply post what you need done and interested runners (who’ve been fully vetted and are rated by other users) respond — usually within ten minutes.

RunMyErrand is now TaskRabbit

RunMyErrand, a Boston-based Internet startup that helps users outsource errands and odd jobs, has changed its name to TaskRabbit to reflect the wide spectrum of tasks the site is used for, the company announced today.

Outsourcing the Boston Marathon

Runmyerrand.com is a New England based web site that allows you to get just about any task done. You can hire someone to run small errands, like going to the post office, picking up laundry and now, running the Boston Marathon.

Women 2.0’s Female Founder Successes of 2009

This list of Female Founders is limited to founders of technology companies (defined as a company with an engineer on the founding team). A “success” for this list is a company launch, significant product launch, significant milestone reached, funding received or similar success.

Lifetips Radio: Craigslist meets Ebay with RunMyErrand

Tune in to LifeTips Radio - Its Craigslist meets Ebay as we talk with Leah Busque, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of RunMyErrand.com, an online community of Errand Senders and Errand Runners joining together to get things done.

RunMyErrand Picks Up $1 Million from West Coast Venture Firms

RunMyErrand, the Boston-based online clearinghouse where busy people can recruit temporary helpers to complete tasks around town, doesn’t have a branch in the San Francisco Bay Area (yet). But if it did, founder and CEO Leah Busque might be using it to pick up checks from Baseline Ventures and Maples Investments this week.

Advancing service networking as the industry standard

Many famous discoveries, inventions and businesses begin with an aha moment. Consider Sir Isaac Newton and his head-banging apple, said to have helped him discover gravity. Karl Bühler, the German psychologist credited with coining the term aha experience almost a century ago, described it as “a peculiar, pleasure-oriented experience within the course of thought that pops up with sudden insight into a previously intransparent context.” The lightbulb only turns on however, when the person experiencing that moment acts on it. Seeing a flash of genius through to execution is rare - we remember Newton, not the scores of others hit by falling objects before or after him.

RUN MY ERRAND - SO I CAN DO SOMETHING BETTER WITH MY TIME!

Many famous discoveries, inventions and businesses begin with an aha moment. Consider Sir Isaac Newton and his head-banging apple, said to have helped him discover gravity. Karl Bühler, the German psychologist credited with coining the term aha experience almost a century ago, described it as “a peculiar, pleasure-oriented experience within the course of thought that pops up with sudden insight into a previously intransparent context.” The lightbulb only turns on however, when the person experiencing that moment acts on it. Seeing a flash of genius through to execution is rare - we remember Newton, not the scores of others hit by falling objects before or after him.

Too Many Chores? Use the Web to Get Someone Else to Do Them

You’re busy. You need to get the groceries, return the camera you borrowed, and pick up the kids. Oh, and you have work. You can’t do it all, nor do you want to. So what do you do? RunMyErrand, a Boston-based startup funded in part by Facebook’s (Facebook) FbFund, aims to solve this problem with a simple premise: get someone else to do your chores for you. It lets you post an errand for someone else to complete, usually for under $10.

RunMyErrand Outsources Your Chores

Looking for someone to pick up your dry cleaning, make a grocery or IKEA run, or tackle other errands for you and don't mind paying a few bucks extra for the convenience? Web service RunMyErrand might be worth a look. This isn't the first service of its kind—previously mentioned DoMyStuff is a similar offering—but where DoMyStuff lets anyone offer to run your errands (and could be a nice way to make some extra cash for yourself if you want to run a quick one), RunMyErrand only puts your errands in the hands of background-checked runners. Most errands can be tackled for $10 or less, and they cover the gamut of food delivery, courier services, IKEA runs, grocery trips, dry cleaning pick up, and more.

Small start-up takes an idea and runs with it

So far, the first-time entrepreneur has done just about everything right. She has a great origin story: One night in February 2008, she and her husband, Kevin, were heading out to dinner when they realized there was no food left for their Labrador retriever. Musing over Mexican food about the possibility of a service that would handle small tasks like buying and schlepping a big bag of dog food, Busque used her iPhone to check whether the Web domain RunMyErrand.com was available. She snapped it up, and spent the next few months researching the idea.

‘Rev’ing’ it up with Facebook

After a national competition, RunMyErrand was one of 25 companies invited to be part of Facebook’s fbFund Rev 2009 incubator program this summer in Palo Alto, CA. The program will last 10 weeks, and RunMyErrand team members from the engineering and business realm will be participating. We arrived into SFO late the night of Tuesday, June 16, drove to Palo Alto Wednesday morning...

Online marketplace for help with errands

Besides simply helping busy people get things done, RunMyErrand promises environmental benefits by aggregating errands more efficiently and also offers sellsumers a flexible way to earn a little extra money as runners.

RunMyErrand startup in Facebook incubator program

Boston startup RunMyErrand is running to Palo Alto. The consumer web company, which provides an online marketplace for odd jobs and errands, has won a spot in Facebook Inc.’s fbFund REV incubator program. The 10-week program starts in June...

Facebook’s fbFund ‘09 Names First Batch Of Winners

Facebook has just named 25 of the finalists for the latest round of fbFund, the social network’s joint program with Accel and Founders Fund meant to help foster quality applications on Facebook Platform. ... a select number of winners will be invited to the incubator program, where they can receive as much as $100,000 in equity investment along with training alongside Facebook executives and mentors. The program’s latest round has also shifted focus from solely applications built on Facebook Platform to include those using Facebook Connect both on the web and the iPhone.

Need some errands done? There's a place on Web

RunmyErrand.com is now up and running ... serving Bostonians who are willing to pay someone else to pick up diapers at Target, bags of mulch at Home Depot or dry cleaning from around the corner. “It’s like eBay meets Craigslist,” said Busque, 29, recently at Zume’s Coffee on Charlestown’s bustling Main Street. “It’s about taking social networking and making it more useful.”

RunMyErrand retrieves early-stage funding

For now, Busque said she plans to focus on business development in Boston, seeking to add corporate clients. Current clients include real estate agencies, retailers and food service companies, she said. Cold Stone Creamery in Charlestown uses the site to offer delivery service, hiring ad hoc runners to ferry ice cream to customers, Busque said.

'Service Networking' Startups Find Niche Matching Workers With Odd Jobs

RunMyErrand founder and CEO Leah Busque has an apt term for the new phenomenon: “service networking.” While RunMyErrand is a place to outsource small jobs, “what we are actually doing is harnessing the power of a community,” Busque writes on her blog. “Social networking has obviously become quite popular in recent years, and capturing this essence and leveraging it to get real things done in people’s every day life is some pretty exciting stuff.”