By Aurore Hochard, Founder of Wayra UK startup Taskhub
To help you understand our experience at Wayra, perhaps it’s best to quickly throw some light on how Taskhub came to be.
The idea behind Taskhub stemmed from a simple incident really – observing the frustration experienced by a friend of ours after she had her baby in early 2011. As a new mum, she wanted to spend as much time as possible with her newborn child and desperately needed help with running errands, cooking and cleaning. Now in a city as populated as London, she thought it would be easy to get people to help her. Unfortunately this didn’t seem to be the case!
Not only did she struggle to find local help but when she did find available folks, they were not necessarily reliable. To help her, we looked for websites that would help people get things done within their neighbourhoods – but there weren’t any.
So we decided to build exactly this!
Taskhub (taskhub.co.uk) is an online platform where neighbours take on tasks for one another and in the process feel more like a closely knit community.
Soon after our initial design was complete, we realised that Taskhub had to be more than great lines of code. We understood that we needed help from industry experts and mentors to help us launch Taskhub and create communities.
This was the main reason behind our pitching Taskhub to a panel of entrepreneurs and experts at Wayra Week in May 2012.
Life has changed so much since then. A new world of possibilities has opened for us through the wonderful experiences we’ve had at Wayra over the last 12 weeks – it has exceeded all our expectations.
Taskhub presenting to Mayor of London Boris Johnson
To start with, the open plan setup of the offices in Wayra ensures that all 16 teams that are part of the acceleration programme are on the same floor. This encourages a lot of interaction and knowledge sharing between the startups.
The weekly Thirsty Thursdays drinks are a further opportunity for the teams and mentors to get to know each other at a more personal level.
We’ve been blown away by the level of access that Wayra have within the tech industry but the real prominence of Wayra was highlighted when Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, came to inaugurate the Wayra London academy and we had the opportunity to present Taskhub to him in French! Not only that, we already have 5 mentors who have several years of industry experience and are actively working with us to ensure that Taskhub is a great success.
In our time at Wayra, we have been able to finalise our web development and are working on our beta launch, which will take place in the near future. (Like our idea and want to be part of our beta group? Please sign up at www.taskhub.co.uk)
Over the next year, we expect to launch Taskhub all over the UK and then expand out to the rest of Europe.
Being at Wayra has been an immensely powerful experience for us and we are already looking forward to sharing our experiences and becoming mentors to future startups at Wayra.
