How Taskrabbit uses Mixpanel to get more actionable insights, faster

Taskrabbit is a global digital platform that connects people seeking help with household tasks—such as furniture assembly, TV mounting, moving, and home improvements—to skilled people to do the work (“Taskers”) in their communities. Acquired by the Ingka Group (IKEA) in 2017, Taskrabbit operates in thousands of cities across eight countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States, and is available in 200+ IKEA stores worldwide.

Key Learnings

• How employees across Taskrabbit can now access valuable insights instantly, without burdening the data team
• How to reverse-engineer success using Mixpanel’s reporting and dashboards
• How Taskrabbit’s team reduced the time it took to get basic insights from an hour or more, to seconds

Despite the company being founded in 2008, the Taskrabbit team wasn’t yet using a product analytics tool. Instead, the data team manually created spreadsheets and dashboards, which meant that obtaining even simple insights sometimes took hours. The result: the product team didn’t know which features users were engaging with, and it was difficult for marketing to figure out where drop-offs were happening in their campaigns in real-time. The whole team needed an easier and faster way to get actionable insights.

The Taskrabbit team uses Mixpanel to create dashboards and share data instantly while reducing the burden on its data and engineering teams. Through its tight integration with Twilio Segment, another key tool in Taskrabbit’s tech stack, Mixpanel makes it easier to obtain insights, test new features, and maintain a single source of truth for product data.

• Freed up 50% more time for highly skilled team members
• Reduced time to get basic insights from hours to seconds
• More actionable insights for product and marketing teams

If you’ve ever needed odd jobs done around the house, but didn’t have the time, energy, or skill to put a whole IKEA bed frame together, you might have used Taskrabbit. Taskrabbit connects everyone who needs things done around the house with skilled “Taskers” who are ready to drop by to hang that new TV on the wall, clean your home, assemble furniture, and more.

What many customers love about Taskrabbit is how quickly they can get someone in (yes, you can get same-day service) and the variety of things they can get done around the house with the help of a Tasker. On top of that, they can also choose Taskers based on their skills, reviews, and pricing.

The key ingredient to building a platform that makes this possible is, of course, data.

Insights, instantly

While Taskrabbit leveraged data masterfully for users, behind the scenes the data gathering and analysis process was not fun. The team’s previous way of gathering data and insights was manual and time-consuming, consisting of copy-pasting data into spreadsheets. For most companies, this would have been annoying on its own—but for Taskrabbit, it caused another significant problem. 

Taskrabbit’s business is by nature relatively seasonal. For example, most people who move from one home to another will choose to move between May and September (no one wants to move in the winter during a snowstorm). If Taskrabbit’s marketing team wanted to run an ad campaign to book more moving jobs and make improvements on the fly, they couldn’t wait half a year for insights into campaign performance. 

But getting insights promptly used to be nearly impossible. Dashboards took a long time to set up manually, and even if the product team could loop in the data team to help build custom data artifacts, those dashboards often didn’t update in real-time. “It would take around six hours to run all the calculations, and I’d have to check the next day to see whether things looked right,” says Nikhita Sagar, Staff Product Manager at Taskrabbit.

Needless to say, this wasn’t ideal.

“With the old way, we’d have a marketing campaign running and it would take three or four weeks to get insights on performance,” says Sagar. “The campaign had to run for a month to even collect enough data, then it took another month to set up an analytics dashboard for it. By then, we were in a new season with a new audience—even if we did finally get learnings, they were relatively useless.”

Now, Sagar and her team use Mixpanel to monitor performance daily. “In Mixpanel, I can see right away if something goes wrong, like if the number of jobs suddenly drops below our daily average. It’s instant.” 

What used to take an hour or more now takes just a second. “I used to have to wait an hour to get really basic insights—just to see if someone clicked a thing or not,” says Sagar. “Now I can do it myself.” 

Another benefit of this was it took those repetitive tasks off her teammates’ plates. “We’ve got pretty highly skilled team members with PhDs in data science,” says Sagar. “They shouldn’t be spending their time building artifacts and copying and pasting data—now that we’re using Mixpanel, we’ve freed up around 50% of their time for tasks that are a better use of their time.”

Mixpanel’s user interface, which was recently redesigned to improve ease of use and make it easier to access data, was a key reason why Taskrabbit’s team chose Mixpanel instead of a similar product.

“We needed a product that didn’t come with a steep learning curve,” says Sagar. “With Mixpanel, you can create dashboards and share them right away, really easily. Even our executives can review dashboards in Mixpanel and test hypotheses much more quickly.”

Reverse-engineering success

Besides helping Taskrabbit’s team to spot trouble more quickly, Mixpanel has also empowered them to better understand what activities are driving more business—and how to replicate that success.

“If there’s an uptick in business, we can use Mixpanel to reverse-engineer what is working well,” says Sagar. “I’d just use Mixpanel’s Funnels report to see all the users who went through, for example, the Thanksgiving promotion and analyze what other things they clicked on after seeing the ad.”

This level of insight can scale beyond product and marketing as well. “In customer service, we have people triaging jobs, and they can easily log in to Mixpanel and see what customers who are having issues are doing,” says Sagar. “It’s much easier to see what those interactions look like now.”

As a Product Manager, one of Sagar’s key goals is to optimize costs and spend. And besides Mixpanel, her team has other tools in their arsenal, such as Google Analytics and Iterable. The challenge was that these tools individually only told one part of the story.  “Before, I might see a low open rate for emails and think ‘that’s not good enough,’ and reduce spend for emails,” says Sagar. 

“But now with Mixpanel, I might be able to see that even though there are fewer opens, those opens have the strongest correlations with job bookings, which changes the whole story. Mixpanel gives us a one-stop shop for all our communications and interactions—we can see everything that’s going on and prioritize our activities and spend more effectively.”

A tightly integrated data stack

Once Taskrabbit reached a certain scale as a company, the team knew that to continue growing they had to be a lot more detailed and meticulous. The best way to do this was to make it as easy as possible to collect accurate and reliable data.

“What do our customers want, and how does our product enable that? Getting that data connection and collection piece is extremely important for us to make good strategic decisions,” says Sagar.

Of course, like any team with a strong data focus, Taskrabbit relies on a few different tools to collect and analyze data. Because of this, it was essential that Mixpanel could integrate well with those tools—specifically, Twilio Segment. Twilio Segment is a Mixpanel best-in-breed partner.

“Mixpanel’s tight partnership with Twilio Segment was really important to us,” says Sagar. “We were very intentional about how we built out Twilio Segment, and it’s unbelievably easy to integrate Mixpanel and Twilio Segment. I could integrate them in five minutes.”

This addressed a major pain point the team originally had around gathering and integrating data into different tools. “We used to have our ad platforms integrated through Google Tag Manager,” says Sagar. “The homegrown system was really hard to manage. You needed real engineering support to do that. With Mixpanel and Twilio Segment, we have the Mappings tool, which makes it really clear how the data is being received by Mixpanel, and the Event Delivery tool helps us understand if data is reaching the destination or not, and it’s much easier than involving an engineer. I can’t stress this enough—the ease of integration is just outstanding.”

Now that Sagar and her team have a more holistic and accurate view of TaskRabbit’s data, they’re excited to continue upleveling the customer experience and expanding how they can leverage insights across the business. “Mixpanel really is incredibly easy to use and the support has been great, but what’s been extremely valuable for us is that we’ve been able to unlock the value of data for non-technical folks.”

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