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How to Start a Multi-Million Dollar Company, According to an IBM Engineer Turned Founder Leah Solivan took her company from idea to Ikea acquisition.

By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut

Key Takeaways

  • Leah Solivan is the founder of TaskRabbit, an online marketplace connecting people to “taskers” who would do small tasks for them, like cleaning or picking up food.
  • Ikea acquired TaskRabbit in 2017, nearly a decade after it launched, in its first U.S. acquisition.

Leah Solivan was an IBM engineer, working on business collaboration tools like Lotus Notes, when she found her million-dollar startup idea: an online marketplace connecting customers with "taskers" who could run errands or do household chores for them at a price.

The idea arose from Solivan running out of dog food one night and asking why she couldn't connect with someone at that moment who could pick it up for her. It was 2008 and the first iPhone had come out a year prior. Solivan saw the potential in her iPhone for a location-based business.

Leah Solivan. Photo: Chance Yeh/WireImage

In an interview with entrepreneur Jeff Berman last week, Solivan said when looking at the problem as an engineer, she saw these three technologies: social, location, and mobile.

"I thought, there's a lot here," she said.

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Solivan decided to leave her engineering job and cashed out the $27,000 she had earned in her IBM pension plan to get her idea off the ground. Ten years later, Ikea bought TaskRabbit for an undisclosed sum after the startup carved out a valuation of about $50 million from multiple fundraising rounds.

TaskRabbit was Ikea's first acquisition in the U.S.

It wasn't easy to get to an acquisition though. Right after quitting IBM, Solivan started coding. For six to eight weeks, she worked on her idea and built the first version of it, working from a coffee shop at times and asking random people at the shop for feedback on what she had created.

When the site was ready, Solivan put out an ad on Craigslist for taskers — the people who would run errands through the site. She gave each person who responded to the ad a 30-minute interview at the coffee shop and ended up with 30 taskers for the first launch in Boston.

The launch taught Solivan that she needed to "be the first tasker." She ran errands too, all over Boston. The experience still prompts her to ask founders: "Can you be a part of the process?" Solivan says being part of the company's day-to-day is key to learning what customers really want.

Related: The Largest Franchise Operator in the U.S. Owns 2,800 Locations — And He Just Added 83 Wendy's to His Portfolio

Ikea, meanwhile, known for its must-put-together furniture, acquired TaskRabbit in 2017 after an in-store partnership in London proved lucrative. Customers could opt to have TaskRabbit deliver and assemble Ikea furniture for them instead of doing it themselves, which increased the average order value for Ikea and brought in new customers for TaskRabbit.

Ikea decided then that they wanted to own TaskRabbit.

"It was bittersweet," Solivan said. "It had been 10 years… It feels so good to me to know that even without me, it lives on."

For entrepreneurs with jobs at Meta, Microsoft, or other companies who come to her to ask if they should quit their jobs to work on their ideas, Solivan says that it's difficult to be all-in on a startup with a day job, but she knows that not everyone has the privilege to be able to pursue their idea without a safety net.

"My advice is, if you really have conviction around something, you are going to find a way to go for it," Solivan said.

Related: She Batched a Beloved Product at Home, Inspired By a Black-Owned Business From the 1960s. Then It Became a Multimillion-Dollar Brand: 'We'd Never Intended This.'

Sherin Shibu

Entrepreneur Staff

News Reporter

Sherin Shibu is a business news reporter at Entrepreneur.com. She previously worked for PCMag, Business Insider, The Messenger, and ZDNET as a reporter and copyeditor. Her areas of coverage encompass tech, business, strategy, finance, and even space. She is a Columbia University graduate.

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