SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to build a $4.5m revenue company with 0 Full Time Employees
19 Dec 2023
Chapter 1: What is GreenPal and how does it operate?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Guys, getgreenpal.com launched in 2013.
Last month in November of 2023, 300,000 individual homeowners had their lawn cut in November. Those lawns were cut by over 35,000 lawn care companies that make their living on GreenPal. The company will do 30 million of GMV this year here in 2023. of which about 4.5 million GreenPal keeps as their take rate.
Chapter 2: How does GreenPal achieve $4.5 million in revenue with no full-time employees?
Their take rate goes between 5% to 20% per job with an average 15% take rate as they look to continue to expand. No full-time employees, just three founders. Hey folks, my guest today is Brian Clayton. He's the co-founder and CEO of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the Uber for lawn care by Entrepreneur Magazine.
Chapter 3: What strategies did GreenPal use to acquire its first customers?
It has over 300,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Brian, you ready to take us to the top? Right on, Nathan. Good to be back. It's good to see you again, man.
Chapter 4: What challenges does GreenPal face in seasonal business?
I get so excited about these marketplace plays because you basically have two customers. Well, first of all, it's harder because you have two customers you have to sell into. But once you have them and you're adding value, you can put all kinds of other cool things for them, whether it's a SaaS play or something else. Tell people, what is GreenPal today?
Is it pure marketplace or is there a SaaS component too?
Chapter 5: How does GreenPal maintain its growth without external funding?
Yeah, GreenPal is a 10-year overnight success. And we're still doing the same thing 10 years in that we started off doing. How do we make ordering a lawn mowing service as easy as getting groceries on Instacart or ordering an Uber or ordering food on DoorDash? And so you push a button and you can hire somebody to mow your yard. And yeah, we're a marketplace.
Chapter 6: What is GreenPal's unique selling proposition for lawn care?
We don't charge a SaaS fee or anything like that. We just make a cut of each transaction. And the things that make it hard, like you mentioned, make it durable. The people that use it tend to stick with it.
Yep.
Chapter 7: How does GreenPal utilize SEO to drive customer acquisition?
Well, and so 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 half an acre that need it cut once a month?
Man, it's a really good question. When we first started off 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, Tennessee, where I live.
Chapter 8: What are the future growth plans for GreenPal?
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 dual incomes, 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 folks that just 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.
I love this. Okay. So, so today, I mean, can you give us numbers from November? How many unique people cut their lawn with green pal?
Yeah, we have 300,000 people using the app to get this chore done. And that's growing 30% year over year. And we haven't raised any outside capital. So we're growing organically. We grow on organic search. People look for a lawn mowing service nearby me in Lincoln, Nebraska. They come across GreenPow, they sign up and they use it.
Are you just only the US or have you expanded to other countries?
Just the United States for now. The nut we're trying to crack now is how do we get more saturation and density in every major city? A weird thing that happens with marketplaces like ours is once you get the flywheel going, like the red hot center, it tends to reinforce itself. But if you don't get that flywheel spinning, it never takes off. One problem we face is
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.
Well, it's okay. So 300,000... When you say 300,000 people, you use the words, use the app. Does that mean there were 300,000 unique lawns cut in November? Yeah, using it every month.
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