The Exchanges

Q That's incredible. Okay. Take me back to day one. When'd you launch the company?

A Yeah, so, uh, rewinding my first company was a traditional landscaping company that I grew from just myself and a push mower to over a 125 people. So I spent 15 years in the landscaping business understanding how that business worked and growing from zero revenue to ten million in revenue. So when I sold that business in 2013, I saw what Uber was doing for ride sharing, what Lyft was doing for ride sharing, and so then I decided, ok, GreenPowl needs to exist. Recruited two co-founders, and we just started hacking on the project. Passed out, like, a 100,000 door hangers, and got the thing going in the summer of 2013, and just kept grinding and hustling on it to now where we have hundreds of thousands of people using it.

AI assessment note: “got the thing going in the summer of 2013”

Q So that was gonna be my question. Do you negotiate your take rate with each lawn care company cutting the 300,000 homeowners lawns that are on your platform? Or is it just you set one thing and it's the same for everybody?

A No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they, uh, if they're doing a lot of volume through the platform that goes down and if they just are just getting started on the platform, only do one or two yards a week, it's, it's higher. And so we, we started off with just a flat take rate of, of eight percent. And as time went on, we noticed a weird phenomenon of, of, uh, what they call a graduation rate, a graduation issue where, where vendors will grow with the platform and they're doing, you know, three, 400,000 dollars a year on the platform. And they say, well, now I want my own system. So I don't want GreenPow anymore. And so we've had to, to, to negotiate with that and deal with that by lowering the take rate where it just becomes a no brainer. It's like, well, by the time I buy all of these systems and I pay somebody to run them, I might as well just pay GreenPow.

AI assessment note: “No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they're doing a lot of volume”

Q Well, what, I was gonna say, what do those 35,000 lawn care entrepreneurs do in the winter? Don't, maybe you can help them get some other kind of business like snow removal, right?

A That's what we do. We, we, we try to, which, so that's the reason why we built it. It's like, okay, we got to help these guys and gals stay in business. We got to help them, you know, stay afloat so they'll be there in March when the grass starts growing again. So we offered, we built this snow removal, and then we also have a, a system where we, we offer discounts to homeowners to say, okay, you know, you can hire your contractor for leaf removal, for gutter cleaning, for For tree limb service, for garage cleaning, all sorts of things to, to help keep the lights on in the wintertime. And, and we're always looking for, for ways to do that. Christmas lights and things like that. So while, while lawn mowing is 90% of the, of the, uh, the sales, we're always looking for ways to expand kind of the, the cart size.

AI assessment note: “That's what we do. We, we, we try to, which, so that's the reason why we built it.”

Q Are you just only the U.S. or have you expanded to other countries?

A Just the United States for now. Um, We, the, the, the nut we're trying to crack now is how do we get more saturation and density in every major city? So a weird thing that happens with marketplaces like ours is once you get the flywheel going like the red hot center, it tends to kind of reinforce itself. But if there's no, if you don't get that flywheel spinning, it never takes off. And so one problem we face is, uh, we do more transactions in a Knoxville, Tennessee, or a Huntsville, Alabama than we do in a Seattle, Washington. And so we're trying to figure that out. How do we, how do we look at these markets where quite frankly, we don't have the liquidity and we, how do we jumpstart them? And so we have to figure that out before we go international.

AI assessment note: “Just the United States for now.”

Q Well, what, I was gonna say, what do those 35,000 lawn care entrepreneurs do in the winter? Don't, maybe you can help them get some other kind of business like snow removal, right?

A That's what we do. We, we, we try to, which, so that's the reason why we built it. It's like, okay, we got to help these guys and gals stay in business. We got to help them, you know, stay afloat so they'll be there in March when the grass starts growing again. So we offered, we built this snow removal, and then we also have a, a system where we, we offer discounts to homeowners to say, okay, you know, you can hire your contractor for leaf removal, for gutter cleaning, for For tree limb service, for garage cleaning, all sorts of things to, to help keep the lights on in the wintertime. And, and we're always looking for, for ways to do that. Christmas lights and things like that. So while, while lawn mowing is 90% of the, of the, uh, the sales, we're always looking for ways to expand kind of the, the cart size.

AI assessment note: “That's what we do... we built this snow removal”

Q So that was gonna be my question. Do you negotiate your take rate with each lawn care company cutting the 300,000 homeowners lawns that are on your platform? Or is it just you set one thing and it's the same for everybody?

A No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they, uh, if they're doing a lot of volume through the platform that goes down and if they just are just getting started on the platform, only do one or two yards a week, it's, it's higher. And so we, we started off with just a flat take rate of, of eight percent. And as time went on, we noticed a weird phenomenon of, of, uh, what they call a graduation rate, a graduation issue where, where vendors will grow with the platform and they're doing, you know, three, 400,000 dollars a year on the platform. And they say, well, now I want my own system. So I don't want GreenPow anymore. And so we've had to, to, to negotiate with that and deal with that by lowering the take rate where it just becomes a no brainer. It's like, well, by the time I buy all of these systems and I pay somebody to run them, I might as well just pay GreenPow.

AI assessment note: “No, there, there's benchmarks. So if, if they, uh, if they're doing a lot of volume”

Q Are you just only the U.S. or have you expanded to other countries?

A Just the United States for now. Um, We, the, the, the nut we're trying to crack now is how do we get more saturation and density in every major city? So a weird thing that happens with marketplaces like ours is once you get the flywheel going like the red hot center, it tends to kind of reinforce itself. But if there's no, if you don't get that flywheel spinning, it never takes off. And so one problem we face is, uh, we do more transactions in a Knoxville, Tennessee, or a Huntsville, Alabama than we do in a Seattle, Washington. And so we're trying to figure that out. How do we, how do we look at these markets where quite frankly, we don't have the liquidity and we, how do we jumpstart them? And so we have to figure that out before we go international.

AI assessment note: “Just the United States for now.”

Q That's incredible. Okay. Take me back to day one. When'd you launch the company?

A Yeah, so, uh, rewinding my first company was a traditional landscaping company that I grew from just myself and a push mower to over a 125 people. So I spent 15 years in the landscaping business understanding how that business worked and growing from zero revenue to ten million in revenue. So when I sold that business in 2013, I saw what Uber was doing for ride sharing, what Lyft was doing for ride sharing, and so then I decided, ok, GreenPowl needs to exist. Recruited two co-founders, and we just started hacking on the project. Passed out, like, a 100,000 door hangers, and got the thing going in the summer of 2013, and just kept grinding and hustling on it to now where we have hundreds of thousands of people using it.

AI assessment note: “got the thing going in the summer of 2013”

Q Okay, this is great. I think I fully understand the marketplace. We haven't talked about the one thing, though, that makes the whole thing work. Money, right? So, so walk us through an average transaction. I'm using you. I get a quote to cut my lawn for a hundred dollars. Who gets what of the cut?

A Yeah, so we take a very small transaction fee, five percent of all of the money that comes through the platform. So the vendor keeps, gets to keep 95% of all the money they make. Now, they still have to pay the, uh, the credit card processing on top of that, but we keep five percent to run the platform. We also have some, some additional tools that service providers, uh, can, can upgrade to if they want to, uh, such as like some routing tools, and there's some other things that we're building in the future to make, uh, to where they can operate their entire business on the software, and so there's some, there is, like, kind of a SaaS play there, but for, for the majority of the revenue, it's, it's the, uh, small transaction fee. For the homeowner, what the price they see is the price they pay. There's no additional fees, Uh, there's no like additional, uh, upgrades or anything like that. They pay what they see on, on their quote. Now, after that first lawn mowing goes well, then they can book them for lawn mowing for the rest of the season. And they can also add on additional services like shrub pruning, mulch, seeding, uh, fertilizing, things like that. And so we, we also get a five percent, uh, fee for that as well.

AI assessment note: “we take a very small transaction fee, five percent... vendor keeps, gets to keep 95%”

Q Okay, this is great. I think I fully understand the marketplace. We haven't talked about the one thing, though, that makes the whole thing work. Money, right? So, so walk us through an average transaction. I'm using you. I get a quote to cut my lawn for a hundred dollars. Who gets what of the cut?

A Yeah, so we take a very small transaction fee, five percent of all of the money that comes through the platform. So the vendor keeps, gets to keep 95% of all the money they make. Now, they still have to pay the, uh, the credit card processing on top of that, but we keep five percent to run the platform. We also have some, some additional tools that service providers, uh, can, can upgrade to if they want to, uh, such as like some routing tools, and there's some other things that we're building in the future to make, uh, to where they can operate their entire business on the software, and so there's some, there is, like, kind of a SaaS play there, but for, for the majority of the revenue, it's, it's the, uh, small transaction fee. For the homeowner, what the price they see is the price they pay. There's no additional fees, Uh, there's no like additional, uh, upgrades or anything like that. They pay what they see on, on their quote. Now, after that first lawn mowing goes well, then they can book them for lawn mowing for the rest of the season. And they can also add on additional services like shrub pruning, mulch, seeding, uh, fertilizing, things like that. And so we, we also get a five percent, uh, fee for that as well.

AI assessment note: “we take a very small transaction fee, five percent... vendor keeps, gets to keep 95%”

Q Yep. Well, and, and so give it, give folks a sense of the kinds of folks using you to cut their lawns. Are these big corporations with thousands of acres in the middle of nowhere? Are these homeowners with, you know, half an acre that need it cut once a month?

A Man, it's a really good question. When we first started off, uh, 10 years ago, the way we got our first hundred or maybe even a thousand customers, we passed out flyers, passed out door hangers all over Nashville. Yeah. All over Nashville, Tennessee, where I live. That's how we got our first 500 people to use the app. And the first place we went was the higher end parts of town, the affluent areas, the million dollar homes plus, and we would pass out thousands of these things and nobody signed up. Nobody cared. It wasn't until we went to the working class parts of town, the people that had, you know, dual incomes that, that, that were working all day, that didn't have time to mow their yard, but couldn't get a lawn guy to call them back. Those people signed up. So that was our customer then. And that's our customer. Now it's, it's folks that this want value folks that want convenience that don't want to pay for a private gardening service, but want somebody to come out and take care of the lawn when it gets tall.

AI assessment note: “working class parts of town, the people that had, you know, dual incomes”

Q Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. So of the lawns that were cut through GreenPow in November, how many unique lawn care companies, the supply side of your marketplace, cut those lawns?

A Around 35,000, depending, depending on the time of year, uh, that goes up and goes down, you know, November is on the, is on the latter part of the season. We are a seasonal business, but around 35,000 contractors using the platform at least once a month to mow one yard a month. Now we have thousands of contractors using it full time. This is the only system of record they have. This is how they get customers. This is how they organize them, how they manage all of their billing and routes and all of that. That's really what we're going for. We want to be the operating system for guys and gals that make their, their living in this business.

AI assessment note: “around 35,000 contractors using the platform at least once a month”

Q What tool did you use to launch a thousand landing pages at once?

A Just good old fashioned, um, you know, internal tools where we would pop up an HTML page for every single one of these, these cities. And we had to build our own internal CMS. So, uh, a content writer, which was myself for the first six, seven years would interview all of the contractors in a spring Texas and would say, okay, here are the five best contractors in spring that you can hire on GreenPow. Here's what's unique about them. Here's ratings about them. Here's all of the unique data that we have about them. And then that page ranks well for lawn mowing near me in spring, Texas. And, and, um, and, and that's how we did it for every single small city in town. It was very, it was a manual process because I saw, I learned a lot from big players like that, that were in kind of the horizontal, um, space in terms of like connecting, uh, consumers with, with home service professionals. But I saw them starting to get hit by Google because they were taking a programmatic approach to this. They were, they were just, they were just Throwing thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of pages at Google that were all the same and just based off a little bit of unique data that they had. And I thought, I don't, I don't want to like wake up one day and our traffic go to zero in five years. So we, we did a manual, a manual strategy on how to build all these pages and it took a long time,…

AI assessment note: “internal tools where we would pop up an HTML page... build our own internal CMS”

Q Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. So of the lawns that were cut through GreenPow in November, how many unique lawn care companies, the supply side of your marketplace, cut those lawns?

A Around 35,000, depending, depending on the time of year, uh, that goes up and goes down, you know, November is on the, is on the latter part of the season. We are a seasonal business, but around 35,000 contractors using the platform at least once a month to mow one yard a month. Now we have thousands of contractors using it full time. This is the only system of record they have. This is how they get customers. This is how they organize them, how they manage all of their billing and routes and all of that. That's really what we're going for. We want to be the operating system for guys and gals that make their, their living in this business.

AI assessment note: “Around 35,000, depending, depending on the time of year”

Q What tool did you use to launch a thousand landing pages at once?

A Just good old fashioned, um, you know, internal tools where we would pop up an HTML page for every single one of these, these cities. And we had to build our own internal CMS. So, uh, a content writer, which was myself for the first six, seven years would interview all of the contractors in a spring Texas and would say, okay, here are the five best contractors in spring that you can hire on GreenPow. Here's what's unique about them. Here's ratings about them. Here's all of the unique data that we have about them. And then that page ranks well for lawn mowing near me in spring, Texas. And, and, um, and, and that's how we did it for every single small city in town. It was very, it was a manual process because I saw, I learned a lot from big players like that, that were in kind of the horizontal, um, space in terms of like connecting, uh, consumers with, with home service professionals. But I saw them starting to get hit by Google because they were taking a programmatic approach to this. They were, they were just, they were just Throwing thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of pages at Google that were all the same and just based off a little bit of unique data that they had. And I thought, I don't, I don't want to like wake up one day and our traffic go to zero in five years. So we, we did a manual, a manual strategy on how to build all these pages and it took a long time,…

AI assessment note: “internal tools where we would pop up an HTML page... build our own internal CMS”

Q And can you take more than five percent?

A You can, um, but the problem is the, the more, the more that you take the, uh, the increase that you get in terms of this interest in the platform, this intermediation, uh, you also don't get the value of suppliers bringing on their, their, their demand because we also have that occur. We call that vendor-led traction, and so for us, we, we are building the platform to make this entire industry run so much smoother, and so if we take, if we start dialing up the, like, 1015, 20%. Then, then the whole thing starts to unravel, and that's kind of, you know, we've seen in the last, Six years, there's been some other Uber for lawn mowing service, uh, startups come and go and between all of them, they probably crashed about a half billion dollars of capital into the ground. And it's because they've been a little too greedy on the take rate. So for us, we have a long view of, okay, we're gonna take a very small piece of the transaction. Uh, we're not gonna be too greedy about it. So the service provider can run their entire business on our, on our software and make material income doing it.

AI assessment note: “You can, um, but the problem is the, the more, the more that you take”

Q And can you take more than five percent?

A You can, um, but the problem is the, the more, the more that you take the, uh, the increase that you get in terms of this interest in the platform, this intermediation, uh, you also don't get the value of suppliers bringing on their, their, their demand because we also have that occur. We call that vendor-led traction, and so for us, we, we are building the platform to make this entire industry run so much smoother, and so if we take, if we start dialing up the, like, 1015, 20%. Then, then the whole thing starts to unravel, and that's kind of, you know, we've seen in the last, Six years, there's been some other Uber for lawn mowing service, uh, startups come and go and between all of them, they probably crashed about a half billion dollars of capital into the ground. And it's because they've been a little too greedy on the take rate. So for us, we have a long view of, okay, we're gonna take a very small piece of the transaction. Uh, we're not gonna be too greedy about it. So the service provider can run their entire business on our, on our software and make material income doing it.

AI assessment note: “You can, um, but the problem is the, the more, the more that you take”

Q the business. It's a marketplace model. Marketplaces are two sided. You send out a 100,000 door hangers. You get your first hundred customers that way, but you got to have people to mow the lawns. Were you the Ferg, were you basically filling the need on the other side of the marketplace until you found other people that could mow lawns that you could basically bring on as service providers?

A Yeah, great question. In a marketplace, you've got this chicken and egg problem. Everybody knows that. And so for us, the way that we solved it was, was just sheer hustle, dialing for dollars. We, we found, uh, we figured out that we could call every advertiser on Craigslist on Sunday when they weren't mowing yards and actually get like five seconds of their attention and kind of pitch them on the idea to use GreenPow. And then the thing that kept them around in the early days was I gave free consulting, uh, to people on how to Run their lawn mowing business, how to grow their lawn mowing business, because I know that, I know that innately, uh, how to, how to be successful in the lawn care business. And so I would give free consulting to like the first 500 service providers that used our platform as a way to kind of be like the honey and the glue, uh, to keep their attention in the early days when the product was just god awful. And so, you know, developing that early relationship with them allowed me to kind of keep their attention to where we had the service providers that Homeowners could hire off the shelf, so to speak. And then also learn from them about, uh, the things that I didn't know, like where the product really sucked and where we needed to improve. So for us, like that, that, that user feedback constantly coming in like a river has just been core to our success. E…

AI assessment note: “we figured out that we could call every advertiser on Craigslist on Sunday”

Q Yep. Well, and, and so give it, give folks a sense of the kinds of folks using you to cut their lawns. Are these big corporations with thousands of acres in the middle of nowhere? Are these homeowners with, you know, half an acre that need it cut once a month?

A Man, it's a really good question. When we first started off, uh, 10 years ago, the way we got our first hundred or maybe even a thousand customers, we passed out flyers, passed out door hangers all over Nashville. Yeah. All over Nashville, Tennessee, where I live. That's how we got our first 500 people to use the app. And the first place we went was the higher end parts of town, the affluent areas, the million dollar homes plus, and we would pass out thousands of these things and nobody signed up. Nobody cared. It wasn't until we went to the working class parts of town, the people that had, you know, dual incomes that, that, that were working all day, that didn't have time to mow their yard, but couldn't get a lawn guy to call them back. Those people signed up. So that was our customer then. And that's our customer. Now it's, it's folks that this want value folks that want convenience that don't want to pay for a private gardening service, but want somebody to come out and take care of the lawn when it gets tall.

AI assessment note: “working class parts of town, the people that had, you know, dual incomes”

Q the business. It's a marketplace model. Marketplaces are two sided. You send out a 100,000 door hangers. You get your first hundred customers that way, but you got to have people to mow the lawns. Were you the Ferg, were you basically filling the need on the other side of the marketplace until you found other people that could mow lawns that you could basically bring on as service providers?

A Yeah, great question. In a marketplace, you've got this chicken and egg problem. Everybody knows that. And so for us, the way that we solved it was, was just sheer hustle, dialing for dollars. We, we found, uh, we figured out that we could call every advertiser on Craigslist on Sunday when they weren't mowing yards and actually get like five seconds of their attention and kind of pitch them on the idea to use GreenPow. And then the thing that kept them around in the early days was I gave free consulting, uh, to people on how to Run their lawn mowing business, how to grow their lawn mowing business, because I know that, I know that innately, uh, how to, how to be successful in the lawn care business. And so I would give free consulting to like the first 500 service providers that used our platform as a way to kind of be like the honey and the glue, uh, to keep their attention in the early days when the product was just god awful. And so, you know, developing that early relationship with them allowed me to kind of keep their attention to where we had the service providers that Homeowners could hire off the shelf, so to speak. And then also learn from them about, uh, the things that I didn't know, like where the product really sucked and where we needed to improve. So for us, like that, that, that user feedback constantly coming in like a river has just been core to our success. E…

AI assessment note: “we figured out that we could call every advertiser on Craigslist on Sunday”

Q Fascinating. Okay. Let me then ask a different question. I'm curious what portion of your full marketplace is quote unquote active monthly. So if you look at all of your signups since 2013, how many total service providers have signed up relative to the 10,000 that are active?

A Yeah, so we add about 40 or 50 a day, so roughly 70% have entered the year with us, and so they're legacy users. We don't like to scale the supply side too much, because then you have, you have too many people at the party. So we kind of have to throttle it, and we kind of have to be careful, especially on a market-by-market basis. There are some places where we desperately need service providers, but there's other places where we really don't. And so we kind of have to, we have to be really careful about we don't let on too many in some, some markets, and we get just the right amount between the delicate balance between supply and demand.

AI assessment note: “roughly 70% have entered the year with us, and so they're legacy users”

Q Fascinating. Okay. Let me then ask a different question. I'm curious what portion of your full marketplace is quote unquote active monthly. So if you look at all of your signups since 2013, how many total service providers have signed up relative to the 10,000 that are active?

A Yeah, so we add about 40 or 50 a day, so roughly 70% have entered the year with us, and so they're legacy users. We don't like to scale the supply side too much, because then you have, you have too many people at the party. So we kind of have to throttle it, and we kind of have to be careful, especially on a market-by-market basis. There are some places where we desperately need service providers, but there's other places where we really don't. And so we kind of have to, we have to be really careful about we don't let on too many in some, some markets, and we get just the right amount between the delicate balance between supply and demand.

AI assessment note: “roughly 70% have entered the year with us, and so they're legacy users”

Q In September of 2020, you said there was a 100,000 homeowners that paid at least a dollar to a service provider to get a lawn, you know, cut. How many of your 10 days K service providers in September of 2020 made at least a dollar through your platform?

A So in, as of right now, we have 10,000 active service providers. Now, some of them are only doing one yard a week. Some of them are doing several hundred. So, uh, our sweet spot is if you, uh, let's say you're mowing 10 yards a week and you want to get to a hundred yards, that's where we can really add value. The really big companies that are doing like, like four or five crews out there mowing yards, we don't really add a lot of value because they already have their systems, but it's the smaller service provider That's doing a handful that wants to do, uh, wants to do this full time. That's how we get them from here to here.

AI assessment note: “our sweet spot is if you, uh, let's say you're mowing 10 yards”

Q In September of 2020, you said there was a 100,000 homeowners that paid at least a dollar to a service provider to get a lawn, you know, cut. How many of your 10 days K service providers in September of 2020 made at least a dollar through your platform?

A So in, as of right now, we have 10,000 active service providers. Now, some of them are only doing one yard a week. Some of them are doing several hundred. So, uh, our sweet spot is if you, uh, let's say you're mowing 10 yards a week and you want to get to a hundred yards, that's where we can really add value. The really big companies that are doing like, like four or five crews out there mowing yards, we don't really add a lot of value because they already have their systems, but it's the smaller service provider That's doing a handful that wants to do, uh, wants to do this full time. That's how we get them from here to here.

AI assessment note: “our sweet spot is if you, uh, let's say you're mowing 10 yards”