TrustedHousesitters, a global home and pet-sitting marketplace, has appointed TaskRabbit Chief Product Officer Drew Wrangles as Board Advisor as the company prepares for its next phase of international growth, with the U.S. identified as a priority market.
Wrangles will advise TrustedHousesitters’ Chair, investors and executive team on its growth strategy, drawing on more than two decades of experience building and expanding consumer marketplaces across multiple regions.
He has served as Chief Product Officer at TaskRabbit since December 2023, where he leads product management, design, data science and machine learning.
Before joining TaskRabbit, Wrangles was Head of Product at alcohol delivery marketplace Drizly from 2019 to 2022. During his tenure, Uber acquired Drizly for approximately $1.1 billion.
Wrangles previously spent 11 years at TripAdvisor in a range of product and globalization roles. His work included helping expand the travel platform across Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Earlier in his career, he worked in product and analytics at Zopa as part of the founding team behind what became the world’s first peer-to-peer lending marketplace.
That marketplace experience is particularly relevant to TrustedHousesitters, which operates a membership-based platform connecting pet owners who need someone to care for their homes and animals with people looking for accommodation while traveling.
Founded in Brighton, UK, in 2010, TrustedHousesitters has grown to more than 280,000 community members. The company connects hosts and sitters across more than 180 countries, with a new house sit beginning somewhere in the world approximately every two minutes.
TrustedHousesitters describes its model as a community built around trust rather than individual transactions. Hosts provide accommodation while sitters care for their pets and homes, allowing pet owners to travel without relying on traditional boarding arrangements and giving sitters an alternative way to experience destinations.
Member retention and referrals have played an important role in the company’s growth. TrustedHousesitters said its community already generates significant organic recommendations, creating an opportunity to build product features that make it easier for existing members to bring new users onto the platform.
Wrangles’ advisory work will focus in part on strengthening those network effects while supporting expansion across the company’s existing markets.
TrustedHousesitters plans to improve onboarding, develop features that make trust and community more visible within the product, and create more opportunities for satisfied members to share their experiences.
The U.S. represents a particularly important growth opportunity alongside the company’s established UK business and operations in other international markets.
Wrangles’ experience expanding global marketplaces and developing product strategies across different regions could help TrustedHousesitters adapt its model as it seeks to grow membership while preserving the community dynamics that have driven adoption to date.
His appointment follows several senior additions to the company’s board and executive leadership team in recent years, including appointments across the Chair, Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer positions.
The expanded leadership structure is intended to support TrustedHousesitters as it moves into its next phase of international growth while continuing to invest in product development and member experience.
KEY QUOTES:
“Drew has spent his career building the kind of trust and network effects that make marketplaces work, including in the US. The way our members experience TrustedHousesitters has always driven everything we do, and as we continue to scale across all our markets, he builds on the strength already present on our board and in our leadership team. His perspective complements the work our team is already doing, helping us accelerate the building out of new features that delight our members and grow something they already do naturally: recommending us to people they trust.”
Mathew Prior, CEO of TrustedHousesitters
“TrustedHousesitters has something most marketplaces spend years trying to build: a community that genuinely advocates for it. The opportunity here is to take that foundation and build the systems and product decisions that let it scale across all the markets the business operates in. I’m looking forward to working with the team on that.”
Drew Wrangles, Board Advisor at TrustedHousesitters
