Thibault Mathieu’s Latest Blog Post

Have you ever seen a movie like Batman where they make having a butler look like the coolest thing around? Maybe it’s time you got your butler. But how? For $99 a month, you can now have your very own butler, Alfred. No not the actual Alfred, Michael Caine, but your very own butler. Once a week for a month, Alfred will come to your house and perform such tasks like laundry, grocery shopping, dry cleaning, clean the house, tailoring, pharmacy requests as well as more. Alfred launched Tuesday November 18th in Boston and New York. It is a very similar service to others and as a result, Alfred is partnering with those other services. These services include Instacart (grocery), Washio (laundry), and Handy (housecleaning).

The idea behind Alfred is simple. While some may think it is very cool to have your own somewhat personal butler, the point of Alfred is to accomplish all those extra things you wanted to get to but didn’t have the time to. Alfred essentially adds the 25th hour that many people desire.

Prior to its launch, it started as just a one person service that co-founders Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck would use. They also extended it to friends while studying at Harvard Business School. They never saw it scaling to become an actual business. It has tested through a six month beta and has returned over 10,000 hours to customers.

There is a lot of confidence in Alfred as it is backed by at least $2 million in investments. These investments came from Spark Capital, SV Angel, and Crunchfund. Spark Capital has had some success with startups as they have invested in Twitter before. At the 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt competition in San Francisco, Alfred beat out 26 other startups in winning $50,000.

For more on Alfred, visit their website helloalfred.com.

from Thibault Mathieu http://ift.tt/1yMprVr