[jareau]

I think collaborative consumption companies changing their business to focus on a specific niche or vertical is quite common. Getable (fka Rentcycle) did it. Zaarly did it.

I'm head of sales at balancedpayments.com, a payments company that works with online marketplaces, so I interact with dozens of marketplace founders in a given week, and in my opinion the true P2P/collaborative consumption movement is a few years away.

[1]

[2pasc]

The problem of Taskrabbit is that they could not be associated with one clear repeatable need that people had, which lead to a sub par experience for almost all use cases.

Most marketplaces in this space are pretty "directed" by the Company (Postmates: deliver food, Instacart: delivery grocery, Lyft: deliver people with car, HomeJoy: deliver cleaning ladies).

Lyft is a good example of a P2P system that worked when everybody before them failed because Zimride "directed" the marketplace when all previous tentative where about "grab people on your way to work".

[rbucks]

Great point. As co-founder of Scripted, I whole-heartedly agree.

I think Leah is great -- I've never met her but have heard and read good things. However it's hard to be one size fits all anymore. Craigslist and oDesk may be the last two marketplace leaders without single focus.

[2pasc]

Indeed, especially in the era of mobile which tend to focus on remote control solutions to problems. I like Scripted a lot - funny that you work with Paul B. also ;-)

[gohrt]

Is there a service like HomeJoy but has cleaning gentlemen available?

[hkmurakami]

iirc the vast majority of exec use is house cleaning as well so it does seem that the generic -> specific refocus is quite common in this space.