1) Take a page from Exec and do flat-rate pricing in different verticals (e.g. $25/hour for Exec Errands). Doing a price auction every time is too time consuming, but that's the UI default at the moment.
2) The refocus on mobile/realtime (like Exec) is also good.
3) Figure out a way to incentivize people to do more transactions through the site. Once you meet a good service provider, right now there's an incentive to do all future interactions outside the site.
4) Re: enterprise refocus: do some sales calls with all the admin assistants of VC funds and funded startups in the Valley. Set up a bulk enterprise account for $Xk per month and have them go crazy assembling Ikea furniture.
Taskrabbit is a great concept and really should succeed with some tweaking.
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.
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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".
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.
The web version works fine, but the mobile version has serious issues.
I'm almost certain that whatever they're doing, this is an example of where a v2.0 rewrite makes sense.
So it looks to me like they're shifting to the B2B side - which is smart but also difficult given the competition in that space. oDesk has been shifting their model away from the 10% commission on small account model to a more enterprise sale - I expect TaskRabbit to move that way as well.
I never like their consumer model—but if they could become the "LinkedIn for temp workers", I think it could be a hit.
EDIT: I'm learning Rails right now and doing Tasks to bring money in while I learn... It would be so rad to work for them as a Rails dev one day. Circle of life, man.
