SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
From Student to Successful Entrepreneur Fast
31 Dec 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday, you guys heard from Jim Fowler. He's a SaaS entrepreneur and Salesforce bought his company for 175 million bucks in 2010. You're not gonna believe what he's doing now. Okay, Top Tribe, I am stoked you're with us again this morning. I hope your jog's going well. I'm tucked here in the Appalachian Mountains as usual, excited.
The Redskins seem to finally be doing well, getting their groove on, and you're gonna love our guest today. His name is Ryan Farley. Now, Ryan is the co-founder of a company called Lawn Starter, a startup focused on making it easy to order lawn care. He currently leads growth and marketing for the company, and outside of work, enjoys getting out in Austin and playing with his dog named Trevor.
Ryan, are you ready to take us to the top?
I'm ready.
All right, dude, I'm excited for this. Um, you know, we knew each, I don't know what's four or five years ago. We knew each other through pallet, this crazy thing called pallet town. You took a job at city bank or city group, which one? Capital one. Oh, neither capital one. Um, close enough. Steve, your co-founder started working on this. I thought it was a dumb ass idea.
And I told him that, and you guys have proved me wrong. So I'm looking forward to this, but long story short, what did I miss about what long starter does?
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Chapter 2: How did Ryan Farley transition from banking to entrepreneurship?
And then let's build the story backwards.
Yeah, so we're a two-sided on-demand sort of marketplace. You know, on the consumer side, if you need lawn care for your home, rather than having to call around and play phone tag, you just enter your address, we price it for you, schedule it for you, all automatically takes about a minute. And the local lawn care provider is actually doing the work.
We provide a lot of backend infrastructure and software to help them run their businesses better. So it's kind of like a two-sided marketplace that really benefits both sides.
Now, this episode is going to be great, Top Tribe. For those of you that are students looking to start your own business or drop out and start your own business, and also people looking to drop out of corporate and start your own thing, Ryan left a job at Capital One. Ryan, how much were you making at Capital One?
So I quit the day I got promoted. I would have been making about $100 all in the next year.
So that's kind of ballsy.
I guess, yeah.
Why'd you do it?
Um, well, I mean, it was just like, I was working with a lot of really smart people and I kind of just realized that like, they were too smart to ever do something like this. Um, and you know, my thought was like, you know, if I leave work, you know, I'll, There's never a better time to try than right now.
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Chapter 3: What is Lawn Starter and how does it operate?
And like, we got like 10 customers for me passing out these shitty looking black and white flyers. And it was like, okay, like, at least there's something here. Like, you know, that was enough traction to make me think, okay, like this, this could be done.
So like, I, I'll never forget the conversations we had. Cause I'm going, you guys don't know this about, you know, listeners, you don't know this about Ryan and Steve, but they were, they're both like extremely intelligent in anything financial related. They both ran a group called seed at Virginia tech, which managed what over $4 million of equities.
Uh, I think it was five or six, five or 6 million bucks in equities. And you know, yeah, capital one. And I'm like, you guys are freaking crazy. Like you need to build like a, like a financial startup or something like, so Ryan, why on earth lawn care? Who the hell cares about lawns?
Uh, well, a lot of people, um, Basically, the kind of the way we got the idea is Steve's friend decided to quit his accounting job and start a lawn care company. And that just kind of got us digging into the industry. And, you know, it was something that it was a huge market, 74 billion annually. And.
like very very obvious problems it wasn't like a business where it's like you know a lot of you know really successful social networks where it's like we the need doesn't not yet exist it was like this need is so obvious and it was something that we could really get into so it's not like we went into this being passionate about lawn and landscaping but it was something that we could become passionate about and something it was just so obvious that needed to be done
So let me real quick, there are people listening right now wondering, should I keep listening to this or should I stop now? Let me just ask a few questions because this is, I mean, your story is really, really relatable to listeners. How many total employees now do you guys have in Austin?
19.
Okay. And total amount of money raised?
7.25 million.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Ryan face when starting Lawn Starter?
Sometimes we have these things called droughts here in Texas. And when that happens, we have to switch to monthly.
Got it. Okay. Interesting. So the subscription services. So are you guys thinking about things like lifetime value and CAC and ARPU? A lot of the listeners are SaaS entrepreneurs.
Yeah, so we definitely think about lifetime value. We've only had one season where we've had a lot of customers, so we don't quite know our lifetime value because we don't know how many people are going to stay the following season and the year after that. But we think of everything in terms of yearly value right now, and that's kind of how we peg all of our marketing costs and whatnot.
So what's the yearly value of a customer on average?
It's between $200 and $300.
Got it. And how much are you willing to spend to acquire that $200 or $300 customer?
Well, this past spring, we were pretty aggressive about it, and we went close to that $200 mark because we were collecting so much data by doing that. Right now, we kind of have a $100 limit or so just based on how we budgeted everything out.
Well, and you tell the story and it's like such a sexy way, but like, I remember you guys with direct response, like printed eight and a half by 11 sheets and new spark and Blacksburg going like, okay, there's a copy at the top of this page going to work when we put it in someone's like inbox. Should we do a postcard or should we do an envelope?
Because if they don't have an envelope, then the thing inside doesn't matter. I mean, you guys tested all this stuff just using pure hustle.
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