The story of Brian Clayton and his company Green Pal, a mobile app for lawn mowing 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 starting a new interview and this time we're going to talk with Brian Clayton. And this is going to be a little different. We're going to talk about the company that he built, which is Lawn Care, and the software that he built around that. And the story that he's going to get into about how he got to where he's at, how he really nailed the whole software development process, I think is one that will be very insightful and maybe challenge you quite a bit to step it up the next time around. Because he really did this right. He did all of the things, although there's mistakes. The core of how he approached it is probably one of the best stories I've heard for developing a software solution. So I'm going to go and let him tell the story as opposed to try to water it down. So here's our conversation with Brian. Well, today we're going to start a new conversation and we're going to be speaking with Brian Clayton. And we're going to get some, it'll be a little different. This is somebody that is a business creator, builder, and not necessarily a technical guy per se. We'll let you hear a little bit more about that with his background. But how he got there and some of the things that the tool sees leveraged and how he's approached growing his business, I think is something that one, if you're looking to grow a business, these are some great ideas for you. And two, if you're looking to help somebody grow a business, then these may be some great ideas for you where you can step in as well and help out. So first off, I want to thank you for your time for stepping into the show here, Brian, and why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, well, thanks for having me on, Rob. It's great to be here. So like you mentioned, I'm CEO of a company. My name is Brian Clayton. I'm CEO of a company called Green Pal. Green Pal is a mobile app that works like Uber or DoorDash or Instacart, but for lawn mowing services. So if you own or rent a home and need a grass cutting service, rather than calling all over the place, you just download Green Pal, pop your address in, get quotes really fast, and then you can hire somebody to come out and take care of it for you. And Green Pal is a 10-year overnight success. My two co-founders and I have been at this for a little over a decade and now have grown the platform to about 300,000 people using it to get lawn mowing services. And just look it out, little by little celebrating little small wins along the way is how we got here. And my first business was actually a lawn care company. I ran a landscaping business for 15 years, eventually starting out with just me and a push mower, eventually growing it to 150 employees and eight figures in revenue. And then it got acquired. And so after that, I took some time off, had the idea that somebody was going to build a platform for this industry. Why couldn't it be me? Even though I didn't know how to write any code, I didn't know the first thing about how to build a website. That naivete was an asset. I just kind of got in the game, made a bunch of mistakes and never looked back. I guess starting with that is when you started it, you had this solid background in the lawn care industry essentially, and you started into this app. Did you start with the vision of where it was going sort of the, as you describe it, like a Uber type thing for lawn care? Or is this something that sort of evolved as you actually got into seeing what was out there and building that application? The problem and solution was about the only thing we got right. I knew that the problem existed. I knew it was like a hair on fire problem because I saw it every day running my landscaping business. So as I grew that landscaping company, we no longer did residential services. We still put out 90 trucks every day in our community in Nashville, Tennessee. So people would see those trucks, call a phone number on the side of the truck and say, hey, will you come mow my yard? I saw you guys doing the bank around the corner. I live right around the corner, come mow my yard. We would have to politely tell them, no, we don't do that, but here's four or five names and phone numbers of people that do. So essentially we were this analog connector service, helping people out, connecting buyers and sellers. And so I would see this a hundred times per day running that company. And so when I sold it, I was fairly certain that the problem existed, that somebody was going to build a technological solution to it. Somebody was going to build a marketplace. And so that was the only thing we got right. And it's funny, 10 years later, we're still working on that. How do we make it more seamless, more frictionless, more delightful, cheaper, faster, smoother, more convenient to get a contractor to mow your yard for you? And then on the flip side, how do we make that experience better? How do we make their livelihood better? How do we enable them to make more money with less headache? How do we enable them to cut out wasted time and optimize their business and run their business more efficiently? So we're still working on that. 10 years in, still the same problem solution. This is interesting. You actually sort of stumbled into a little interesting. It sounds like you have essentially two customers. You've got the mowers and the mowies, for like a better term. You've got the people that need lawn services, but then your customers are also those that provide lawn services. Now, particularly in those that provide lawn services on that side of your customer area, is that something where you found that you've grown it into much more of an app servicing them other than just a connecting thing? But as you said, you sort of implied like helping them with their business and some of those other pieces. Is this trying to sort of moving into a position where it's like, hey, if you have a lawn care business, if you're not commercial, then this is like your QuickBooks or something like that that you want to get to for that industry? Yeah, as time goes on, we've had to build those things out. So basically a SaaS enabled marketplace. And I don't know who said it. I think it might have been Max Lipschkin. He said, come for the tools, stay for the network. And that's kind of a strategy with building marketplaces like these is you offer all of these free tools that suppliers can use and then they get acclimated with the platform and then they hang around to get connected with buyers. That's not really how we started. We started off with a very simple value proposition, which is, hey, we can get you 20 new customers per week. And that was what we kind of anchored down on and got our first 500 service providers that way. And then almost put them on pause for a year or two and then built out the consumer side while we learned how to code. And so it took a long time. Took like two or three years and then came back to the supplier side and said, OK, you need better scheduling tools. You need better route optimization tools. You need a better CRM. You need better public marketing for your business, like a little mini website on our platform, a place to accumulate all of the ratings and reviews and stats about how reliable you are and so on. So it took a while, but it was all rooted and built in actual user feedback and actual traction and liquidity on the platform that we knew kind of knew what to build. And it wasn't based on assumptions or guesses or anything like that. So we didn't start off with that. But that's as time goes on, we were always looking to build more tools and improve the livelihood for people that make a living in this industry. You said that you sort of put them on pause. I guess we'll start with that part. So you built up an issue. You built up the provider side of that. Now, how do you offer 20 new customers a week when you don't really have the customers at this point? What was that? How did you? Because there's always that chicken and egg problem you run into when you've got this kind of a network or social networking, those kinds of things. It's like Facebook. People come to it because there's a ton of people there. But there was nobody there. You don't have that same draw. So how did you approach that problem? Yes, it's the classic chicken and egg problem. You can also call it a cold start problem. There's a really great book about this written by a guy named Andrew Chan, who is a growth marketer for was for worked for Uber for a while. And it talks about getting over that chicken and egg problem. We certainly experienced it. Every multi-sided network platform experiences it in the early days. And how do you jumpstart that flywheel? How do you get that going? And the way we did it, well, first off, you mentioned Facebook. The way they got it was the way they did it was just focusing on college campuses and guys wanting to know if girls were single. That was how they got their first users. And like another great example is Tinder. Tinder is a worldwide powerhouse in dating. And they first got their first critical mass of users by throwing parties at the University of Southern California. And you couldn't get into the party unless you downloaded Tinder. And so figuring out ways to hand crank those first few users on both sides of the network is critical to getting over that cold start problem. And the way we did it was we hand recruited the first 500 service providers and not all at once because we didn't need that many. But the first three years was just calling them on Craigslist, Yelp, Facebook, and just pitching them on the idea like, hey, what if we can get you 10 new customers a week for free? And they would be like, eh, no, no thanks. Because Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, they have all screwed me. And I'm not interested. And so that was the conversation. So then the conversation had evolved from, hey, my name is Brian Clayton. I just sold a $10 million landscaping business in Nashville. Oh, yeah. Is this really you? Yeah. And I'm starting this new company and this is what I'm doing. And I need you to use it. It's really crappy right now, but I need you to use it. And I need you to quote when the laws come available to bid. And I need you to show up, do a great job. And in exchange for that, I'm going to give you free coaching and mentoring on how to grow your lawn mowing business. And that got me the first 50, 7,500 service providers. And all of them had my cell number. And they would call me seven days a week. And that was all I did was mentoring these guys and gals. And so that's how we kind of hand crank the supply side. And then on the consumer side, it was just as ground and pound. The first hundred or so we got just by passing out flyers. Because we had no user acquisition strategy. And then as we got a few 20, 30, 40, 50 people to use it, we then would meet with all of them. And we came to find out that a lot of people just find a lawn mowing service by Googling it. Because it's just the perfect kind of user intent with solution type of thing. And that while there's no shortage of places to get names and phone numbers of service providers, you can go to Craigslist, Yelp, Facebook, Thumbtack, Angie's List. You still have to call these people and poll them. And you still have to manually go through all that. And we were building a system where you could kind of order them off the shelf, so to speak. But we wouldn't have them on the shelf metaphorically until we got some buy-in. So that's how we did it. And then we then developed a strategy around on SEO and competing in organic search for these key phrases. And as we embarked on that, we came to find out, like, man, this is really hard. This is building this platform and the apps and the website and all of the stuff we've done is the easy part. The hard part is the distribution. Connecting this with people that need it when they need it is the hard part. It's like 10 times harder. And so we just kind of chewed our way through that and set really small goals and knocked them down and just kept going. Now, did you start in a, it's not like you did, you started in like a small geographical area. So you were sort of your boots on the ground when you initially did it. And then I guess assuming that then what, how did you, how did you grow geographically? How did you start growing? Because I'm assuming you're outside of a small geographic area at this point. Yeah, we're now, you know, 10 years in we're nationwide. We're in every city that has over 10, 15,000 people. But that took a while to figure out. It took a while to execute. And the way we, we kind of gradually eased into it. I knew there was no need to scale it. Like if, if, if 50 people use it last week and we pissed off 48 of them, there was no need to scale it. And so that was how the first few years went is people would try it. The lawn care, the lawn care service didn't show up or they showed up late or they did a terrible job or they left the fence gate open. They let the dog out. Their lawnmower broke down. They got a DUI. Their helper got a DUI. You name it. There's a million things that can go wrong between my grass is two feet tall and I got my lawn mowed perfectly by pushing a button. And so we spent two years fixing all of those things. And I knew there was no need to like put rocket boosters on the side of a wooden barn or to put rocket fuel in a Toyota Camry. And so it wasn't until we got to where, you know, if, if, if a hundred people use it, 99 of them were happy. Then we developed a little bit of a, of a playbook where we started rolling it out into other cities. And so we launched our second city was Atlanta, then Tampa. And then, and then as, as time went on, we got to where we were launching a new city every week and using all the money we were making is pouring it in the growth. And so eased into it very slow. It took four or five years to get to a point where we were scaling that to, to, to every town in America. Now, when you were, as you were going through this was your, were you essentially having to go through and like vet the, the providers that were coming in? Was that one of the things that sort of, or, or did you find a process to, to sort of work your way through that so you could automate that on board them and feel like they were, they weren't just like, you know, some fly by night thing or something like that, that was going to end up, you know, getting you those negative reviews. Yeah, it very much was a manual process in the early days. And I think you kind of have to go through that. You have to manually do a lot of these things, hand crank a lot of these things in order to know what the systems need to be. It's really hard to like nail that out of the gate. And maybe it may be impossible. And so you kind of need to hand crank these things. And so we hand cranked all of the, the vendor vetting for the first three or four years. And that would be talking to them, talking to their past customers, looking at their equipment, just making sure that they were legit. And we didn't always get it right. Even doing that, we would still get scammers onto the platform and, and people with bad intentions and, or just, or just crappy business owners, people that didn't take this business seriously and would, they would look at it like they were an employee and not a business owner. And so we, we'd had to develop all of the systems, all of the processes to prevent those things from happening and then, and then dealing with them when they do. And that just took a long time. Nowadays, you know, we get, we get a hundred or 200 service providers a day sign up and, and we have a better system. You know, we're not, it's still not perfect. Still not, we're maybe 99.5% of the way there, but it still have a, you still have some service providers that just aren't any good somehow figure out their way onto the platform. And then we have to deal with that later, but at least now we know, okay, these are the things we look for in quality service providers. And, and this is how we screen out the ones that aren't good. Now, how did you go about that? And I'm assuming that you had, how'd you go about transitioning from that, that very manual hand crank, as you mentioned, kind of approach to something that is, that is scalable and that you could, since you can do, you know, handle a hundred, 200 providers a day. Yeah. Little by little, it's like, you're almost like a ER hospital, like, like an emergency room. And you're, you know, you can go into the emergency room and, uh, you know, with a sprained ankle and somebody else that just got in a car wreck. It doesn't matter if you've been there all day, they're going to cut in front of you. And so that, that triage process is how we dealt with it. We would triage around what are the most critical things? What are the things that are happening the most? And like, and then just map it out and just figure, okay, these are the three things we need to focus on. And in the early days, it was one of the big problems was homeowners would sign up and not get any quotes and it would just be crickets. And we got 40 lawn mowing services within a, within a rock, a stone's throw where they live. It's like, why aren't they quoting? And it was just because they're busy and they're lazy and we're all lazy as human beings. We don't feel like, like doing stuff that's not in our path. And so we had to rebuild the, the, the workflow for, for vendors. Anytime you hit the app, if there's a new opportunity nearby, you, you have to either price it or decline it. They didn't like that, but that's something we had to do to make the marketplace work. And so that's just one example of like, that was year one, this one big problem. And then fast forward all the way to today, you know, we're doing thousands of transactions per day. You know, a case might be the guy didn't show up. Why didn't he show up? Well, because he didn't know that it was on a schedule. Why didn't he know it was on a schedule? Because he didn't get the text messages. Why didn't he get the text messages? Well, because he's using, he's using cricket, which is a voice over IP service. And, and our vendor doesn't, is no longer sending text messages to that type of phone. Okay. All right. Now we got to build a process to screen these types of, of, of carriers out and not let them come onto the platform. And so that's just one example of, of like asking why five times, why did something happen in implementing a fix? So it doesn't happen anymore. And you just do that thousands of times going through this process of what's, what's most important, what's happening the most and what is the fix to, to, to prevent it from happening again. That's one of the beautiful things about building a software company, by the way, is when I was running a landscaping company, there were no software solutions for all of the million things you'd face on a daily basis. And so that's, and so you just bang your head against the wall and it's solved the same 20 problems every day over and over and over again. And so that's one of the cool things about running a tech business is that a lot of times you can solve a problem once and not have to deal with it anymore. Then you move on to the next problem. That's what makes it fun and rewarding. And that's, yeah, that's, I think that's the goal. Usually, I don't know if we have, it seems like you don't always solve it once takes two or three times to get it right. But once you do that, you're like, there's a, there is a, you know, an end to that where you're like, we've got this figured out. We've nailed it down. We've got it a hundred percent. It's on auto and you can move on to the next, you know, to the next problem. Cause there's never, it's never done. You never get to the end. And the reason why you never get to the end is because one of my favorite quotes by Jeff Bezos, he says, the thing I love the most about the customer is they are divinely discontent. And today's innovation is, is, is like tomorrow's old news. And so it always has to get better. And then we're all competing with Amazon. Well, you might say, well, Amazon doesn't offer lawn mowing. Well, no, but Amazon has conditioned the American consumer. If I order a box of toothpicks, it shows up an hour. And so I'm competing with that experience. It's not good enough that I can hook you up with a lawn care service is going to come next week. It's got to come today. And so I'm competing with that conditioning and, and, and so it's never done. It's never over. That's a, as you mentioned, is that, where are some of the, the places that you've gotten your, I will call it your inspiration as you have grown the company out and, and expanded from what you originally were, because you, you know, you mentioned competing against Amazon. Where do you get ideas to, or, or maybe it is like an Amazon, where do you get ideas to grow and to say, okay, how do I move from where I'm at? Let's say I'm, you know, I'm doing pretty good. I've got things going on. Where do I go? Where do I take it to? How do I figure out where that next level is or where that next goal needs to be? One thing I've always, I guess, gotten inspiration from and, and also just kind of like honed our roadmap. First off is customer feedback. That's the main thing. It's free R and D every day. I, even though we have a few hundred thousand people using the app and we have a customer support team, I still do an hour per day minimum of customer support myself, because I I never want there to be a gap to develop, to develop between me, my logic, the founder logic and the customer logic. And so I'm always wanting to close that gap. So that's the first thing, customer feedback, free R and D voice of the customer. And, and this stuff sounds simple, but you kind of have to intentionally put it in your daily habits. And then the second thing that I, that I did in the early years is I didn't know what the hell I was doing. My team, we didn't, my two co-founders and I, we had never built a software product. We had never, we had never built a website. We had never invented a new product. So I was paranoid and scared that I didn't know what the hell I was doing because I didn't. And so what I would do is I would look at every single multi-sided marketplace that dealt with local services of some kind. So, and then I would use the hell out of as service providers and consumers. And so I spent two years doing this. So I've delivered food on door dash. I would deliver groceries on Instacart, me personally, the two platforms, wag and Rover. These are, these are platforms for dog sitting and dog care. I would walk dogs on wag and do overnight stays at people's houses on Rover, caring for their dogs and, and drove for Uber, drove for Lyft, Airbnb. The list goes on probably 30 or 40 different platforms. Cleaned houses on this thing called home toy that went out of business. And the reason I did that was because I was wanting to reverse engineer what they were doing and how they handled all of the BS, you know, what if I'm, if I'm walking a dog on Rover and let's just say, I just don't show up. How do they handle that? Are they, do they call me? Do they text me? Do they restrict my account? Do they not? How do they score me? What's the workflow look like? What's the UX look like? Is it one and done? Am I now banned from the platform? All of these things, all these little nuances. And so I learned, I got like a, I got like an MBA and product design doing that for free. I even got paid to do it. Made some pretty good money doing it. And so that's how, and so then I would rob and steal a little bit from here and there and apply it to my humble little world of lawn mowing to make the Uber for lawn mowing work almost as good as Uber. And, and by learning from these well-funded companies, kind of doing similar things, nobody was doing what we do, but they were doing similar things. That's interesting is to do the, there's a lot of people when it's, when they're looking at market research, they're trying to find like the, you know, basically the, the direct competitors and things like that, as opposed to people that are maybe as you did, as you take, take it up a couple levels. So it's much more general, but now you've got more like more things to compare against. You can find multiple leaders across multiple industries and sort of, and really figure out what's the, you know, the best of breed. What's the best approach that works, whether it's unique in certain industries or whether it's, you know, across the board. And you can innovate. You can better innovate that way. You can get new ideas and bring new things. Cause if you're just looking at competitors and copying them, which is fine too. I've done a lot of that. You're not going to innovate cause you're just doing what they're doing. But if you can look at, you know, I mean, there's thousands of examples. One was, was door dash. They had this whole, this whole workflow. I mean, millions of things around optimization and getting and managing expectations and all these things. But one, one really small one was take a picture of the food and, and add it to your review. And this is from the consumer side. And, and then they had this little elegant little workflow of how to think of yourself as like a food blogger. And this is the angle and this is what you should do. And this is the camera setting. And this is, so the food looks good on your review. And then, and then that gets all sent over to the SEO team that gets put on a landing page somewhere. And so now, so now you have this flywheel food gets delivered rate and review, take a picture. Now I take a great looking picture rather than just some like piece of crap. And now, and then that gets sent over to, to the SEO team. And then that gets packaged in a landing page. And so it drives more signups. And so it's like usage of the platform drives more activity and more liquidity. And, and so that was just one little thing that we do because, because every time, like for the first five years, all the pictures of the completed lawn mowings look terrible. And, and it's like, nobody would be proud of any of that. And, and so we couldn't put that on a, on a landing page, but then we copied that and it's like, okay, no, actually take a good looking picture. And here's how you do it. And, you know, think of yourself as a photographer and here's why. So that was just one little thing that helped us, help us, you know, spur the flood, you know, move the flywheel faster and, you know, learn copying and stealing and, and borrowing a hundreds and maybe thousands of those to make our platform work better. And we will pause there, but don't worry. That is just part one. Part two, we're going to get into his team and how he started to, to build this platform and this, this really, this like service oriented community that he has. And again, lots of things that he ran into problems he faced, but how he did it, how he approached it and how he looked at what was out there and took the best out of those is really an excellent story. So hope you come back next time around. We'll continue our discussion with him between now and then. We'll probably have a couple of little special topics, but as always go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor 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.developa-noor.com. 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