tasks for them such as walking dogs or picking up purchases at stores. Users can send their tasks to the TaskRabbit network to hire someone to get jobs done.
“We let you outsource any task you have from Producteev to TaskRabbit,” Abehassera says. “You set the price you’re willing to pay, you put in? a description, and then you choose the city.”
Producteev has seven employees, and Abehassera says he plans to hire more engineers as the platform evolves. “It’s a product oriented company right now. We really don’t focus on marketing,” he says.
Abehassera says Producteev’s platform is used by collaborative groups at marketing, public relations, and advertising agencies in particular. The company has about 1,000 paying business customers including the tablet marketing team at Logitech, the design team at The Financial Times, as well as work teams at universities and blogs.
Abehassera, a native of France, moved to New York in 2004 and worked in business development for startups in such segments as mobile apps and social networking before co-founding Producteev in 2008 with his brother-in-law Aric Lasry. Abehassera says during his time with other startups, project management software such as Basecamp was used in-house but not effectively. “Nobody was really sticking to those apps,” he says.
For example, he says, Basecamp can offer more functions than some users know what to do with. “It’s a more sophisticated level of productivity,” he says. “Not everyone is able to use it for project management. It’s more complicated to use.”
That frustration helped inspire the development of Producteev. Abehassera believes task management software also has untapped uses outside of the workplace. “It didn’t make sense that the task management space wasn’t bigger,” he says.
Producteev got off to a bumpy start in spite of his ambition. Abehassera says the original version of his platform tried to tackle too many functions at once. “We made lots of mistakes,” he says. “We lost a year and a half in the product development phase because we started with something very complicated.” Early versions of the platform included project management, site sharing, status updates, and everything else they could think to include, he says. “We learned we had to start with something very simple and build from there.”
The current version of Producteev is aimed at simplicity and accessibility, he says. “Task management apps are more useful if they are connected to everything you are using every day,” Abehassera says.
