Building a Marketplace for Lawn Care Services

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are in the midst of a holiday season, so we had a couple holiday specials since we last spoke with Brian Clayton. This is part two of that interview. If you remember, he built a lawn service organization company and a site that goes with it and really just nailed the whole thing. The ability or the way that he has researched the competition, and as we're going to talk about in this episode, the way that he researched how to handle some of the challenges that ran into and you're going to run into in this kind of a situation are just great, excellent story. And so we're going to dive right back into our conversation with Brian Clayton. So I have to ask, as you mentioned, you also explored what happens when things go wrong with some of these. Were there things where you were like, you know, there was an Instacart delivery and you're like, I'm just going to sit back here and do nothing and see what happens? Is that sort of how you, were you sometimes, you know, like good, good employee, bad employee those kinds of situations to test those out? Absolutely. What test the tolerance is. That's what I was trying to learn because we were dealing with it is like, I mean, God, just it's like these guys want to do and like I'm not, I don't mean to be pessimistic. First off, the hardworking pros that bust their ass in this industry are like the salt of the earth. Great people. But because I was one and nobody teaches us ever how to run a small business. Nobody is taught how to run a small business. So the only way you learn how to run a small business is by screwing it up and pissing off a bunch of customers and bumping into the real world. And then you adjust. And so it's like our platform, it's our platform's job to accelerate that and eliminate a lot of those negative outcomes. And so for a while there, it was just like, it's like these guys just want to do everything but mow the yard on the day they're supposed to. Like they want to reschedule it. They want to, they don't want to not, you know, want to cancel it. Like it's like you quoted it and you're supposed to be there on Thursday and you didn't show up. And then I started to realize all the reasons that makes it suck to hire a lawn care service are now my problem. I have to solve them. It's like I'm not in the technology business. I'm really back in the lawn mowing business. And so we had to figure out how to solve these things. And Rover and Wag and Uber and DoorDash, they deal with the same stuff. And so I was trying to figure out how they dealt with it. It's like, if I screw up once, is that it? Am I in my sideline on the platform? And in every platform dealt with it a little different. And then we learned from that and applied it to our platform and then use that as a starting point. So now with that, did you run into situations, especially jumping on these other sites and seeing, because I'm sure most of them have some sort of terms and conditions and stuff like that. It's like, hey, we expect you to do this and show up at this time and things of that nature. Were there some things that you ran into where you're like, oh, wow, we haven't actually run into that problem, but I could totally see where that would be something that we need to think of before we get bit by it. Yeah, a lot of trust and safety. Because when you're at scale, like weird stuff happens. But when you have hundreds of users, that weird stuff doesn't happen. But if you have a really, really bad outcome, then I could tank the whole business because you don't have the resources to deal with it. There were a lot of things that, especially around suppliers, that Uber and Lyft and DoorDash were doing that we weren't doing. I learned from that. They were conducting full background checks, which we didn't go that far, but just stuff around like ID checks and validating an ID versus a selfie and just comparing the two. It's like, okay, this is an actual person. And so there were things like that that we didn't necessarily have to deal with yet, but it probably saved us a lot of headache getting that right and just borrowing those best practices, which at the time, 2013, 14, 15, there was no playbook for any of this. Everybody was kind of making it up. I think now there's probably a codified playbook, but everybody was just kind of making it up and figuring it out through trial and error. And I was able to kind of fast follow and learn from their mistakes on the cheap because they raised tens of millions, hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars. We self-funded this business. We haven't raised any capital. So I was learning from their mistakes and avoiding a lot of headache. Now, one of the things that I actually tease this way back in the introduction is one of the things that you mentioned is how you've used data to help grow GreenPow and how you you really, and you've touched on that a couple of times, but I want to dig a little deeper on that. I think how do you, one, did you approach it this way from the start or is this something that you sort of figured out as you went? And then what are some of like the, how do you figure out the key data points and some of the things that you've used to grow that business? I think data often, I'm no data scientist, but I've had to become a half-assed data scientist to get this business where it is. And I think data often gets confused, especially by new founders. They want to conduct A-B tests and all of these things. And it's like, you don't need to conduct an A-B test with like 95% level of significance. You need an order of magnitude more users. You need to go back to the top of the funnel and get more people using this thing before you even worry about A-B testing. And people want to like fast forward and skip those first two or three levels of the game. They don't want to pass out the door hangers. They don't want to pass out the flyers to drum up some additional liquidity. They wanted to skip to like the fun, sexy stuff. And so I think a lot of the learnings from data come in maybe year three or four or five of the game or level three, four, five of the game. But data can be small data. It can be 10 conversations with 10 customers. That's data. It's qualitative data, but you still need that data. And you really need that data in the early days. You need 10 or 20 or 30 conversations. So you know what decisions to make and how to drive the business forward. So you need that kind of data. But you really, it almost, you don't need to pop open Google Analytics or whatever you're using to measure traffic and measure what people are doing until you've got hundreds or thousands of people using it. And then you can become a little bit more data informed. And then as time goes on, you can let the data speak. And so now we're at a point where we have thousands of users. And so at any point we've got 10 or 20 A-B tests going on and we're trying to use that data, understand our customers logic a little bit better and close the gap between the way we think and the way they think. And so now we're using the hell out of it. But in the early days, it was very much qualitative data. What are our customers telling us? I've heard this 10 times today. They're pissed off because of this. That is the data we need to use to drive decision making. So I think you can't skip that. And a lot of founders that I see want to skip that part. It's like they want to go straight under the hood of measuring the data points. It's like the data really needs to be a conversation. So it evolves. Now in the, speaking of evolving things and things like that, and particularly with the age and the timeframe that your company has grown through, how do you see, and you've touched on some of the sites that are out there and Google and stuff like that, but how do you see particularly social media as being a way to grow a business, especially if you've seen differences from, actually I'd say even going back to your original business and now into this and then now in the last couple of years where you've seen those trends. It's something you can't ignore. And I've tried to ignore it because I personally am not gravitated towards those channels, but the mistakes I've made have been, first off, we have built the whole company off the back of Google organic search. That's how we get 60% of the people that use the platform. And then the other 40% come just through word of mouth. And so, and while we have experimented like hell with paid ads on every social media platform there is, we can't unlock any of those channels in terms of the ROI that we get from investing in just Google organic search. And so then you might say, well, then don't worry about them. Don't waste any time on them. If you can't unlock Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Twitter as a growth channel, then why waste your time on it? And what I came to learn, I guess in year five, six or eight, this was after talking to customers, they would tell us, website's slick. I see the reviews on there, but I looked at your Facebook page and you haven't updated it since 2013. Are you guys in business? And I looked you up on Instagram and it's six pictures, or I looked you up on Twitter and pictures, or I saw you on, I looked you up on Twitter and your profile picture is an egg. And it's like, then I started to realize that investing in social media is like, it's not an acquisition thing. It's an activation thing. Because a lot of times people will validate the buying decision off of just a quick social media search. And even though the primary channel is Google organic search, how those social media profiles look and are being updated and what is the content we're sharing and how are we engaging with people commenting and how are we growing them is kind of like an activation thing. It's what gets people over the hump of putting in their credit card number, much more than I initially thought. So we invest in social media marketing now and we have a team that does it. And we're always trying to tune it and optimize it. And hopefully one day it could be an acquisition channel. We can look and say, look, we're getting up a thousand people a week finding our Facebook page and signing up. It's not that yet. It is very much an activation thing where it's like, okay, I read your reviews on Facebook. I checked you out on Instagram. It looks beautiful. I want my yard to look like that. And like, let's do this. Now, do you have, have you set those channels up so that you could actually, so people can register through those channels and order, get order service and stuff like that, or does everything drive towards the website? And that's really where they sign up and become customers. Yeah, we've experimented. Facebook used to have a native onboarding form and they may still have it where you could basically sign up on Facebook and then get handed off to the property at some point. And we experimented with that and that caused more trouble than what it was worth because there was a disconnect between what they thought they were going to get on Facebook because we couldn't completely control the messaging around that versus what they, how the platform actually works. And so at a certain point in time, you got to leave the social channel and come over to the mothership and let's do business. And of course, all of them link back to the property or direct you to the app store to download the app, but natively being able to do business with us on one of these platforms we've experimented with. And it ended up pissing off more people than it helped. Yeah, that seems to be the typical experiences. If you allow somebody else to, if you're going through another channel, they're controlling some of that, the messaging and the acquisition and the branding and the handoff can be a lot of nuance to what we do. And it's just like, if we don't control that and manage those expectations from the first touch point, then down the road, you didn't know that if your grass is four feet tall, it's not going to look like a putting green when they get done. It's not going to look that great. So that's a big part of what we do is like a lot of people that use our platform, they've called 20 people, they can't get anybody. And by the time they get around to us, it's three weeks overdue. And so the grass is like knee high. And we have to reiterate at like 20 different places. If your grass is this tall, do not expect good results on the first mowing. It's not going to look that great. Yeah. I can't imagine why. I mean, you should be able to go for, you know, 10 feet tall to just like, you know, patch it your way through it. And it's exactly right. It's hard to manage those nuances on another party that you don't control. But that is, but that's again, that goes back to that point of it's not, you're still back in the lawn care, lawn care business. This isn't stuff you can necessarily automate. These are the kinds of things where you have to, you know, you have to be clear and you have to help out your providers as well so that they don't go into something where they're cutting insanely high grass and then they get a bad review because somebody thought more, thought something was going to look better than it did. It's like, take a couple of whacks at it to get it down to manageable. That's exactly right. And, and because at the end of the day, our success depends on one thing. They're our server provider success, the pros success. Are they getting new customers? Are they keeping those customers? Are they able to retain those customers? And so our interests are aligned 100% what theirs. And so, and so to your point, if they show up, the, the, the expectations were mismanaged, everybody's pissed off at the end, maybe the homeowner is refusing to pay. It's, it can be a disaster that, that we have to, we have to implement the fixes at the, at the source. We have to ask why five times. And that gets us back to the root cause of where it went wrong. Uh, actually that, that brings up another thing. So in your, uh, with your environment, do, does the payment go through you guys and then out to the provider or you just like connect them and then they just do everything amongst themselves? No, it's the former. If it was the latter, then, then we wouldn't be any different than an Angie's lists or home advisor or, or any of these other websites or even Craig's list, you know, where you can just get names and phone numbers and, and now you figure it out and you figure out the schedule or you figure out the payment. Uh, how do you know if they're any good or not? All of these things. And so all of the transaction flows through the platform and, and we take a cut of that anywhere between five and 20%. And, um, and then the payment goes to the, the vendor. And then we, and then we, it's our job as a platform to, to, to nudge that consumer to say, okay, it's been seven days since you last mode, you need to book another, another mowing with, with Jimmy's lawn service, or else you're going to, you're going to have this problem again, where it gets three feet tall and you've got to pay a surcharge and so on. So educating the consumer as to, as to what it means to use it and then set it up for an ongoing schedule is, is what we're built to do. Now, do you find yourself then, um, sort of driving pricing as well? Cause I know lawn care, I mean, I think it can vary quite a bit depending on where you're at and neighborhoods and all kinds of other stuff. If you found yourself sort of like also providing a, I don't know, sort of like a, uh, at least a standard or something close to that, as far as, as what services cost in a given area. We really try to let the marketplace determine that. We don't really want to influence the pricing. We want the suppliers that to influence that because there's so many, there's so many variables, um, proximity, um, you know, the, the service load that one service provider has versus another, if somebody is, you know, is looking to pick up 20 customers, they're going to be a little more hungry, uh, versus somebody who's got a full schedule. Um, the, the type of, uh, expectation, you know, is this a rental property where you just want it knocked down or do you live in the affluent part of town and you want like a more pristine manicured appearance that, that influences pricing. And so it's not our job to quote the price. It's our job to set up the mechanics of a marketplace where, where this is what it's worth. That's the spot price for lawn mowing in your zip code at your street. And, and the buyers and sellers kind of, kind of dictate that. Now, when we first started, we thought that the value proposition for consumers was this is the flat out cheapest way to get lawn mowing done. You can save $5 or $10 on your grass cutting. And, and I had that assumption because I came to the starting block as a contractor. And, and when you run a contracting business, you get jaded. You start to think that everybody just wants the cheapest price. And I did that for 15 years. And so I started this company and I thought, well, we can just deliver the cheapest price. And after talking to our first hundred customers, we came to find out that, no, they didn't, they didn't give a crap about saving $5 or $10. They just want some guy to show up and do it like, and they want them to show up tomorrow and actually do a great job. That's what the value proposition is. That's what we do. We, we help you get somebody who's actually going to show up and the price just needs to be the market price. It just needs to be competitive and rational. It doesn't have to be cheaper. Now, sometimes it is cheaper because of, we do drive efficiencies and we, we do drive a little bit of a competitive environment, almost where they're competing and earning your business. But at the end of the day, we hold them accountable. And with a rating system, a review system, we score their reliability. And that depends that that dictates how much more work they earn and so on to where then you can just hire somebody off the shelf and they actually show up and do a great job. Yeah, I think that's something that a lot of people are learning. A lot of businesses are learning that, that there it's not so much the price. A lot of times it's the, it's the convenience. It's the, Hey, if I'm, if I'm going to pay you money to do it, just do it. I will pay a little extra if I don't have to worry about it. And especially, I think lawn care is one of those areas where people like, I just, I just don't want to worry about it. I want to just, you know, done looks nice. And then I'm, and I'll, I'll have no problem paying a couple of extra bucks or whatever it is or five or 10 bucks extra, just for peace of mind. That's exactly right. And a lot of, a lot of other platforms have evolved this way. I remember in the early days, Airbnb's whole thing was I can, I can stay on somebody's couch for 25 bucks or, or I can stay in a decent place for, for 75 bucks. Now, in most cases, Airbnb is more expensive than a hotel. And, and, and, and now they have differentiated themselves as, Hey, you can get properties that you can't get in the hotel inventory and you can have a different experience. You can stay in a neighborhood rather than staying, you know, by the airport. And so, and so that, that changed for them. Same thing with Uber. Uber was, was cheaper than taxis in the early days. And that was the value proposition is, Hey, it's cheaper and it's more convenient, but it's also cheaper. Now, I think, you know, the last few times I've been to the airport and ridden back to my apartment, I could have gotten a taxi cab for five bucks cheaper, but man, then I got to like, how much do I tip? Do I tip? Here's my credit. Oh, you don't take credit cards. I don't have the cash. I mean, I got to like haggle. No, thanks. And it smells like crap. No, thanks. And so now I'm paying Uber a little bit more money for speed, reliability, consistency, and less cognitive overhead and, and more convenience. And I think that's where a lot of marketplaces evolve. So in your, now that you've, you've built a business, you're, you're building a second business. What would be some advice you'd have to somebody that is starting out to, you know, maybe like one good piece of advice, if somebody's sitting there and going, okay, like, like you did with this one, you've got a good idea. And now you're trying to get that thing off the ground. What would be an advice to, especially that maybe you'd give it to yourself earlier on to say, here's what you need to do. This is going to help you out a lot. Yeah. Since I think your audience is developers and builders. And so I think what I see a lot of times, particularly among developers is they just want to like build the thing from behind the laptop and you have to get out of the building. That's a, that's a, that's a mantra from the lean startup and, and, and also another book called the startup owner's manual. And what these books tell you in 2000 pages is you have to get out of the building and you have to go meet your first dozen customers and nothing else matters until you do that, until you get the feedback from what it is you're doing or you think you're doing and if they want to use it or not and what they wish it would do that it didn't do and so on. It's like, you need that feedback to know what to build. And I see this over and over and over again. I'll give you a quick example. I have this, there's this kid that I kind of mentor. I call him a kid. He's like 28, but I'm 43. So I guess he is a kid and, and I mentor him and he's starting this marketplace like mine, but, but for for home supply shops. And he believes because he just, he just built a house. He believed he, his, his, his theory was, well, all of these supply yards have all of this extra inventory that they can't get rid of. And when I built my house, I got a front door for a lot cheaper because I rummaged through what they had and I got a bathtub that was a little weird size, but I was able to get it for half off. And I think that these supply yards want to get rid of that inventory. I'm going to build a marketplace. That's going to take buyers and sellers for them to be able to sell that stuff as easy as they sell anything else. And I, and I think, I think, and then the consumers will save a bunch of money. And I thought, man, it's great idea. I said, please do me a favor. Do not lay down one line of code until you do this. And he's like, what? He goes, well, okay. What's the supply house that you use when you built your house and you experienced this stuff? He's like, oh, it's Haynes lumber. I said, talk to the owner and offer to sit there for a week and to sell all of that junk that they have in the backyard on offer up Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, whatever platform you can do, just manually do it. Manually sell that stuff, sell it through and don't stop until you sell a thousand dollars. And if it takes you a day, great. It takes you two weeks. Fine. But don't stop until you get, so you sell a thousand dollars. He's like, dude, I don't want to do that. That sounds terrible. I said, please, before you go design this marketplace, write all the code, build it all out, build all the payment systems, the review system, all this stuff, just please do that. He's like, all right. And so he comes back two days later. He goes, there's no business here. That is, uh, there's no business here. Uh, you just saved me two years of my life. And so please, please, please hand crank this stuff before you lay down any code because, because you might find out there's no business there or it's a business you don't want to be in, uh, because you're going to be hand cranking it for the first few years, regardless. Yeah, that is, uh, that's, that is incredibly good advice. There's a lot of, a lot of people I've, I've run into and others I've talked to that have either, they get into it and realize that there's, it's just too costly to do it. Or sometimes, yeah, they just hate it. They're like, no, this is not at all what I thought it was going to be. I thought those were going to be a cool, sexy thing to do. It is not, it is, you know, it is painful and they're trying to find a way out of it. Uh, that's sometimes probably the worst thing is when it's like, they really don't want to do it, but it's also lucrative. And so it's, you know, you got to go find some points. Okay. I just got to find somebody else that will take this away from me because I don't, I can't give it up, but I, I can't stand it either. It's that weird cost fallacy. And by the time you spent a year building the thing and, and, and you come to find all this out, then you're stuck. And so, yeah, save yourself the headache. No kidding. So, uh, you know, if somebody wants to reach out to you or, or says, Hey man, I'm looking out here and I've got four foot tall grass. What's the best way to get a hold of you? Yeah. Download Green Pal in the app store, play store, greenpal.com. It takes you 30 seconds to sign up. If, if you're, you want to be in the lawn mowing business, you can sign up there too. Excellent. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time and for coming out and giving us a lot of great advice and just a real like your story. I think it's one of those that is just in general, like a, Hey, here's some ways that you can approach building a business. And, you know, thank you for, hopefully now we can take some of those, uh, the mistakes and pain points that you had and somebody else can avoid those by saying, Oh, you know, I remember Brian talking about this and I don't think I want to do that. I think we're going to take a little different path and see if we can, if nothing else make mistakes in a, in a new, in a, you know, in a genius new way to make some mistakes. Awesome, Rob. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Please check out school.developer.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. 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