Etece

Etece is a Spanish startup offering an online job portal for professional service providers.

Etece is a Spanish TaskRabbit style startup that offers an online platform for people who need a job doing but don’t have the time to do it themselves. The company was founded in Madrid in late 2012. Etece said it plans to expand its coverage area, pushing out from the three Spanish cities it currently serves — namely Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia — to add four more “in the coming weeks”, namely: Seville, Malaga, Bilbao and Zaragoza. It has recruited 400 self-employed “problem solvers” to support its task-solving platform — with typical tasks including dog walking, cleaning, cooking and IKEA furniture pick ups. It’s clearly going to need to ramp that number up as it scales up to more cities but that process will likely be helped by tough times in the Spanish economy and especially high unemployment. It says it’s aiming to have 1,000 “problem solvers” supporting the business, by the end of 2013. Etece’s platform competes with traditional high street professional services providers by having its problem solvers compete with each other to win the business. It reckons this leads to an average 35% discount for the person wanting the task done. Its problem solvers take 81% of that money — with its cut being just shy of a fifth (19%).