2 Harvard students built a company that will do your chores for you, and it’s made money since day one
by Maya Kosoff
While they attended Harvard Business School, Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck inadvertently came up with a startup idea thanks to their messy apartments.
The two women hired someone off of Craigslist to come do their laundry and buy their groceries weekly, and then they split the cost.
The woman they hired, Jenny, came to their apartments to take care of errands that would otherwise pile up. This would eventually evolve to become their company, Alfred.
Today, it’s a startup that hires employees — Alfred Client Managers, or just “Alfreds” — to run weekly errands: buying groceries, sorting mail, dropping off packages, and taking care of laundry for you.
You pay $32 a week for the service, plus the cost of things like your groceries. Alfred has raised $12.5 million from investors, including Spark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Sherpa Capital, and CrunchFund.
