SkillSlate

» see skillslate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A venture capitalist could not find anyone to clean his apartment. That is the founding story SkillSlate told, and Fortune printed it: Bartek Ringwelski was working at Canaan Partners, could not solve a problem that a hundred qualified people within walking distance were available to solve, and in May 2009 he put together fifty thousand dollars from family and friends and launched a website about it.

What he built was a directory, which was a duller thing than the era wanted. SkillSlate listed individual service providers across New York, dog walkers and handymen and tutors and DJs and movers, with no advertising on the pages and registration left optional. The pitch to the providers was not that SkillSlate would send customers their way. It was that a SkillSlate page would rank in Google for their name and their trade, which almost none of them could manage on their own. In October 2010 Canaan Partners and First Round Capital put in 1.1 million dollars to widen it past New York.

There was no version of this that reached me, and the reason is in the product rather than in the year. A local-services directory exists only inside the metro area it covers, and SkillSlate covered New York, then New York and Baltimore. In Turkey the same problem got solved through the apartment building's own network, which costs nothing and has a far better hit rate than a search result.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The field it launched into was crowded in a way that is hard to picture now. Wikipedia's own list of SkillSlate's competitors runs past a dozen names and most of them are gone without a trace: Geotoko, FoundTown, Closely, Proposable, Buzzuka, GoBuzz, Hooray. Craigslist and Thumbtack are the only two on that list anybody would recognize today. All of them were trying to put a layer of structure over the same raw material, which was people who do work for money in a city. SkillSlate came to that fight with seven employees and one metro area, on about 1.15 million dollars all in. TaskRabbit had raised 24.7 million by then and was running a different mechanism, where you posted a task and workers bid for it.

~ what got bought ~

TaskRabbit announced the acquisition on 9 January 2012, the first it had ever made, and the price was not disclosed. Ringwelski joined as director of financial planning and analysis and Rothenberg as director of online marketing. The CTO went into the engineering team, which is the standard shape of an acqui-hire and tells you roughly what was changing hands. Leah Busque and the chief executive Eric Grosse said the combination would let TaskRabbit help with practically anything.

The site did not switch off with the deal. SkillSlate kept serving its marketplace through the summer of 2012 behind a banner saying it was joining forces with TaskRabbit. The last capture of a working storefront is 16 August 2012, still listing categories for New York and Baltimore. By 15 September skillslate.com was a redirect to taskrabbit.com, and the provider pages built to win those Google searches went with it. TaskRabbit is still trading, owned by IKEA since 2017.

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