Genius, as Thomas Edison famously declared, may owe far more to perspiration than to inspiration, but Leah Busque’s revolutionary startup was born in a moment of profound laziness. It was a wintry night in February 2008, when Busque, a 28-year-old engineer at IBM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized that she needed dog food for her yellow lab, Kobe. She wanted nothing more than to get someone else to trudge outside in the snow. “I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place online you could go,” she says. “A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighborhood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.”

Inspired, she quit her job four months later and started a company, originally called RunMyErrand, with money from angel investors and an incubator. The site launched in September 2008, and by the following March, its roughly 100 registered “runners” had performed hundreds of tasks. Today the site, since renamed TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month—everything from assembling IKEA furniture to making a beer run.

Follow The Rabbit Task Rabbit senders and runners negotiate with one another through Task Rabbit’s messaging system. Below is the real-time feed. Refresh this page to update the feed. [taskrabbit_activity]

Think of TaskRabbit as an eBay for real-world labor. When users, called senders, post a task, they also invisibly declare the maximum amount they’d pay to have it completed. Runners then bid on the task by declaring the minimum amount they would accept. Unlike on eBay, though, senders can choose freely from among the bids, since the reviews and experience levels of runners can vary significantly: Highly rated runners—or those who happen to be available immediately for a rush job—can command significant premiums. Tasks range from courier assignments that can take just a little while to jobs like moving help that can take hours and are often scheduled up to a week in advance. TaskRabbit takes a 12 to 30 percent cut of each transaction; the higher percentages are deducted from lower-value jobs. Customers pay by credit card, and the runner’s share gets deposited into a TaskRabbit account, with checks cut every Friday.

To keep the rabbits scampering, the site employs some serious game mechanics. A leaderboard ranks the top runners, displaying the level that each has achieved and their average customer review. The runners also see a videogame-style progress bar showing the number of additional points they need to jump to the next level. Points are awarded for everything from bidding accurately on a task (15 points for being within 15 percent of the sender’s maximum price) to bidding quickly (15 points for bidding within the task’s first 30 minutes) to emailing friends and urging them to join TaskRabbit (three points per email). The level system is exponential: Moving from level 0 to level 1 takes only 60 points, while going from level 20 to 21 requires adding roughly 1,700 points to your tally. The highest level reached so far is 23, achieved only by a 58-year-old former military officer in San Francisco named Alex K. (All the runners are known by their first name and last initial.)

Points earned also correspond to some modest benefits in real life. At level 5, runners get a TaskRabbit T-shirt. And at level 10, in a nod to the professional dimension of the game, they get their own business cards. Yes, TaskRabbit’s runners are gamers of a sort—but they’re also workers, making good money through a peculiarly 21st-century kind of labor market.

For users, TaskRabbit’s runners function as an on-call pair of hands. The site has become particularly addictive for executives at the pathologically understaffed startups of San Francisco, where the phrase “We can get a runner to do that” has become common parlance. One typical task is assembling desks for new employees. “One out of five jobs that get posted here makes you sign a nondisclosure agreement before you walk in the door,” jokes one top runner, Joshua L. (short for Leavitt). Since many common tasks are carried out in the senders’ homes, runners are vetted through a three-step process, which starts with an application form and progresses to an automated phone or video interview that poses a series of questions designed to weed out deadbeats. Finally, TaskRabbit pays the database giant Acxiom to perform a federal criminal background check on each prospective worker.

For the runners, meanwhile, at a time of deep and persistent unemployment, the site serves as a way to make regular money without giving up control of their days. Unlike a temp service—which sets workers’ rates and presents them to employers—TaskRabbit lets workers get hired directly by consumers and thereby build up their own reputations.

Part of what’s so remarkable about the site is the way its competitive dynamics—the bidding, the points, the reviews—have created an elite cadre of runners who tend to fit a very particular personality type. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a type of person a lot like Leah Busque (herself a level 10 runner), a Phi Beta Kappa and former ballerina who married her high school sweetheart. The top rabbits are bewilderingly energetic, gregarious to a fault. They’re the sorts of people who would make good personal assistants to celebrities, but instead they’ve become assistants to regular people—a quick succession of regular people, even, within a single day.

Many of the rabbits treat the service as a full-time job, with some using their profiles to market themselves aggressively and earning as much as $5,000 a month. One of the most active self-promoters is Leavitt, whose Twitter handle is @JoshRunsTasks and who keeps a blog ( joshrunstasks.posterous.com ) that chronicles his life as a runner. When he set up a Google Voice account for his task-running business, he made sure that the last four digits were 8275: T-A-S-K.

TaskRabbit

By the Numbers 23 Number of the site’s 1,500-plus “runners” who have performed a third of all tasks from April to June. 6 Percentage of all tasks that involve picking up and assembling IKEA furniture. 97 Percentage of posted tasks that get bids from at least one runner; 75 percent wind up being completed. 2 Number of days it takes, on average, for a posted task to be finished.

Over a hurried Sunday brunch in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, Leavitt checks his phone obsessively to make sure he’ll catch the bus in time for his next job, at Valencia and 25th Street, where a woman needs help organizing her basement storage. The lanky 23-year-old is just 50 points shy of his next level.

“I’ve already saved the draft of what I’m going to tweet,” he says, and flashes the phone over his plate of huevos rancheros. “Wishing some 8 bit video game noises and animation would herald my victory: I am a level 20 @TaskRabbit Runner!” He reaches his goal the following day—making him just the fourth runner to graduate out of the teens.

Every month, TaskRabbit hosts Runner Rallies where its player-workers can socialize. At Pete’s Tavern in the South of Market district, 20 or so active runners, along with sundry TaskRabbit employees, gather to drink beer and munch on snacks: pizza, buffalo wings, nachos, and—befitting the site’s moniker—carrots. After following one another’s activity all month through their profiles, runners get the chance to hang out in real life, which to an outsider feels like happy hour for the terminally helpful.

As expected, tales of weird tasks abound. Renee de A. recalls how she functioned for a week as a human alarm clock, physically visiting a woman’s house to wake her up every morning. The 54-year-old also had to complete grocery runs for another woman who “wanted her meat sliced so thin that Lady Gaga would have been arrested for indecent exposure.” The result for Renee—now at level 16—was addictive. “You get one task done,” she says, “and you see another and you want to do it.”

Gathered around the now-lukewarm pitchers of beer, the runners giggle about some of the most ridiculous tasks that have been posted in recent weeks. The most offensive task—entitled “Attractive Female, Please Bring an Attractive/Successful Male Some Water + Juice”—was up for 11 minutes before it got taken down by an operations manager. The top runner, former military officer Alex K., describes how he took on a task called “Prank Call Our Customer Service Rep.” It wound up requiring that he play the role of an animal-welfare activist, seeking donations to buy Viagra for soon-to-be-extinct Siberian tigers.

Just browsing around the site will uncover some similar goofiness: a request to help wrap coworkers’ desks in cellophane, an appeal for homemade oatmeal raisin cookies (“We like them crisp on the bottom, but not burnt, you know?”), and even a call to dress up as a dead Osama bin Laden and accompany a group of revelers who planned to hit the town in Navy SEAL garb.

But for all the prankish and half-serious listings, the vast majority of the tasks on offer are real work: driving, organizing, fetching, building. And TaskRabbit serves as a reliable source of that work for people who have had some trouble finding it. Alex K. is on disability and has taken to the service because he finds it a low-pressure work environment compared to his previous life. At Pete’s, out of earshot from the rest of the group, he whispers, “I would rather make jokes about Viagra and Siberian tigers than get scared when my phone rings at night.”

Similarly grateful is Michael P. (for Powell), a 61-year-old former medical scientist who is more than happy to build IKEA furniture as a stopgap between jobs. Powell applauds TaskRabbit’s positive psychological effect on those who are seeking full-time work but can’t seem to find it. “They should get a rebate from the government for creating employment,” he says. “For giving unemployed people something to do and keeping them attuned to the workplace. If you’re unemployed for a long time, you lose that workplace edge.”

Right now TaskRabbit and its competitors (which include two other startups, AirRun and Zaarly, that work on similar principles) are vanishingly small. It remains an open question whether they can ever scale up to such a degree that “running,” or something like it, would become a viable option for a sizable fraction of the workforce. But with its clever combination of work and gaming, TaskRabbit does point the way toward a far more independent mode of employment—perhaps even, as Leavitt puts it, “a different form of entrepreneurship.”

That rabbit’s got a point. In the same way that eBay made millions of people the proprietors of their own “stores,” TaskRabbit stands to turn the unemployed and underemployed into their own employment agencies, as it were, with a single temp on offer: themselves. “And unlike when you’re a temp,” Leavitt adds, “you can develop your own business model. You can actively hunt down jobs that need to be done. From one day to the next, you’re never sure what you’ll be doing. But it’s almost guaranteed to be something you weren’t expecting.”

Alexia Tsotsis is a staff writer at the technology blog TechCrunch.