Bridging Homeowners and Garden Artisans in the Digital Marketplace

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah. So GreenPal is an online marketplace that connects homeowners or people who rent a home with gardeners, lawn care professionals, landscaping contractors, basically people to maintain the outside of the home.

And GreenPal is the largest network of long-term care services that you can hire in the United States. And it started 10 years ago. I guess you could say it’s a 10-year overnight success, but now around 300, 000 people every week are using the app and website to get lawn mowing services. I started GreenPal because my first business was a lawn care business.

I started mowing grass in high school as a way to make extra cash and stuck with that little lawn mowing business. Little by little over about 15 years. Built it to around 150 employees. And then in 2013, it was acquired by a national company in the lawn care industry. And so, after I sold that, I took some time off.

And I was fairly confident after looking at what Airbnb and Uber were doing in 2014, I thought somebody was going to build a marketplace for lawn mowing services so you can hire them very easily. Why can’t that be me? And so, I recruited two co-founders and we started working on the idea and never looked back.

Yeah, so there’s no shortage of places where you can look online and get the names and phone numbers of service providers.

So, if you need a home cleaner, or you need a house painter, or you need a lawn care service, you can go online. You can go to Craigslist, Facebook, or Yelp, or in the United States, we have Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, and Angie’s List. These are large directories where you can search for contractors and get an endless number list of names and phone numbers, but you still have to manually poll these people.

You have to call them. You have to figure out what their availability is. You have to figure out what their pricing is. Maybe there might be some reviews about them, but you don’t know if they’ll show up. You don’t know if they’re any good. And so, most of the process is done still like it was in 1990, where you’re manually going through the headache of wrangling this contractor to come out and take care of the job for you.

GreenPal is the only solution where you can put your address in. You’ll get five quotes back within a minute, and you can read reviews and stats about how often they show up on time. How often do they get booked a second time? Things like that. Then you can hire the best fit that you want to work with directly through the website.

And then if it goes well, you can push a button and they come out every week or every two weeks, whatever you decide. And so, you go from, I don’t know anybody, I don’t know how much this should cost to somebody’s coming to do it tomorrow and they’re going to show up every week thereafter. It’s the only solution that does that.

While we compete more with the status quo than other online ways to get this done we differentiate ourselves by being the only end-to-end solution for this chore.

Yeah, it’s not enough to make something just a little more convenient. It’s not enough to make something just a little easier to get done.

It’s got to be 10 times better. It’s got to be, it’s got to be drastically better or else nobody’s going to use the product. So, we’ve always looked for ways, every single step of the way from If you’re a homeowner, okay, I need to get, I need to get pricing done. Okay. So how do we get prices back to the homeowner in 60 seconds or less?

Okay. Let’s just spend six months on that. And then, okay when I hire them, they don’t. Necessarily show up on the day I want so how do we architect the platform and the rules of the platform and motivate service providers to show up on the day that the homeowner wants and then okay they did an okay job, but they didn’t do a great job.

Okay. So how do we incentivize contractors to do a great job on the property and it’s on every little step of the way we’ve looked for ways to craft the product to correct to build the marketplace to where it is. And incentivizes participants in the marketplace to act in that way and technology has a lot to do with it.

User experience has a lot to do with it. But also architecting the marketplace in such a way where the rules to use it. Lead you towards that outcome. And it’s a balance between carrot and stick. We use the carrot to try to entice service providers to act in a certain way, and we use the stick to reprimand demote, or expel them from the platform when they don’t meet the expectations of what the platform and the marketplace require.

And so, it’s always a mix of all these things of how do we leverage technology such as. Very quick payments. Very quick. Response times for when people are interacting with our product how do we leverage things like publicly available data around the size of properties and things of that sort and Google Maps and Google Street View imagery and things like that to help speed up the process?

Zillow has a bunch of information that we use. How do we leverage all of this technology? How do we package it up in such a way where the user experience is just so much easier to do this way than the old way and then how do we architect? The marketplace to where things run smoother in our marketplace versus the old way. So, it’s a combination of all those things.

You’re always looking at one piece of the user journey. So, there’s the way we look at it is a funnel for-get, and then in the middle, there’s keep, and then there’s another funnel for grow. So, get-keep-grow is how we look at it. So how do we get new users into the platform?

How do we get the word out? How do we? Be where they are when they’re looking for a gardener. How do we activate them in such a way that makes sense for them? Not selling them but architecting our value proposition in such a way that makes sense to them.

And then once we have them, how do we keep them? How do we make sure they’re happy? That’s probably the most important piece. How do we make sure that they stick around and how do we make sure that they use the product for as long as They’re in their home, if you use it once, you should use it forever.

And so that’s, we’re all the time trying to figure out ways to keep the people that use the product. And then the other piece is growing. How do we, now we’ve got X number of users using the platform? How do we leverage that user base to get their neighbors on the platform? This business is based on routes route density and route optimization.

A contractor doesn’t want to come 15 minutes over onto your side of town and just mow your yard. He wants to mow your yard and five more yards on your street. So, we’re always looking for ways to leverage the user base to grow and so they refer their neighbors and bring their neighbors on board because that’s how we, that’s how we saturate.

The route for the service provider and make them more money with less headache.

Yeah, we last year introduced a partnership where we would give 50 percent off the 1st mowing if they refer their neighbours and the service provider would offer half of that. So, they would share that, that, that discount with us. So that worked well, but it was very clunky. It was very hand-cranking very hands-on. We had to, we had a lot of it wrong with spreadsheets and in a very manual process. So, we’re in the, we’re in the process now of streamlining that.

We did it in three markets. We’re in over a hundred markets, but we picked three of our best markets and ran that campaign and it worked out well, but now we’re building all of the back end to make that run a lot smoother.

Yeah, we want to be the, uh, I guess you could like, like a market maker of what long care services should cost.

And so, when you come onto the platform. If you want to get your lawn mowed and you want to get weekly lawn mowing services, you get five quotes back from contractors nearby you. That is the spot price of what it costs to mow your yard. Five, or 20 different contractors have looked at it.

Five have gotten their bid into the system and this is what the fair market value price is. And it’s like a lot of. A lot of startups have tried to tackle this in such a way where the platform sets the price and they say, no, we believe that it’s a $ 45 lawn mowing. No 1 person could ever know that because there’s new market entrance into the market.

Their contractors are leaving the market. There are labor issues on a very local level. There are weather conditions. It could be raining for two weeks and everybody’s behind. There could be fuel issues where fuel has skyrocketed and now contractors need more money to recuperate the costs.

There’s all of these conditions were. No one person knows that. And so, we believe the bidding system is the best way to understand, okay, this is what it costs this week to get this done, and this is the fair market price for it, and you arrived at that in a very efficient way, rather than having to do it the old way of calling, leaving voicemails and it also, if you hire this price, they’ll show up and do it.

That’s another piece of it. When, when we learned in the early days, we thought our value proposition was to deliver the cheapest price. But actually, the value proposition is to deliver a fair price where it’ll get done. Because, what is a bid, Matt? What good is an estimate a bid or a quote if the contractor isn’t going to show up on Thursday and do it before your party on Thursday afternoon?

So that’s what we set out to do. And we. Made a bet early on that an auction bidding type system was the best way to do it. And we have yet to figure out a better way to do it. We still believe that’s the best way.

Yeah, we learned early on when we weren’t profitable, we weren’t making any money and we wasted all of our money on paid channels.

We wasted all of our little bit of seed capital that we pulled together across the founders on Google AdWords and Facebook and other paid channels and just never could figure out a way, to make it unit economically positive where we would, spend X to get a customer and make it back in, in 12 months or less, hopefully never could figure out a way.

And after beating our head against the wall for a year, 2 years, we just say, you know what, we’re going to play the long game and we’re just going to develop the best content we can. About lawn care services in every town in the United States, and we’re going to interview these contractors and we’re going, we’re going to talk to them and we’re going to figure out what makes their business different.

And we’re going to do a little write-up about them, then bring them into the platform and let them do transactions, and then based on those transactions, rank them in such a way and create content around that. If you live in. Lincoln, Nebraska, you type log care services, nearby me and Lincoln, Nebraska.

Our landing page pops up as one of the top five choices you can look at. And so, we made that bet early on probably in year two. It was a bet on the company decision because in order to compete in SEO, it has to be part of the exhaust of the company. The core competency of what the company is doing.

And it’s not like you can build a product or marketplace and then sprinkle some SEO all over the top of it. It doesn’t work that way. The SEO has to. The organic search strategy has to come within, it’s part of the product. It’s part of what the company is doing. It’s like the SEO has a seat at the table in every discussion.

And that’s how it started for us. And there was an early bet that we made and it was a good bet because now that’s how we get 60, 70 percent of new people that come in, to use the product is just through a good, good old fashioned Google search. Lawn mowing services and grass-cutting services near me in Buffalo, New York.

And then we pop up as an option and they can check us out.

Yeah, you’re always.

One thing about SEO is I’ve got a little bit of ADD and it’s great because SEO is always changing. And so, you’re always you’re, there’s never a dull moment. And so, you’re always looking for ways to, enhance the on-page strategy and figuring out, okay, what are we doing?

It’s working. What are our competitors doing, that are outranking us that we can learn from and do a little bit better? What are some people in other industries doing? Those are unrelated to ours, but. But that’s pretty cool that we could start learning and we’re always looking for ways to productize the SEO.

The, and it’s not easy it’s hard. Then, one of the classic examples of this is the Zillow Zestimate. And if you’re in the United States, Zillow has. Has a thing called a Zestimate for every single property in the United States where you can go on there and they have crunched the numbers on the sales data on that piece of property.

They can tell you what the property is worth. And so, we’re always looking for ways. How do we productize what it is we do in such a way that we can offer value to, searchers? When they’re searching for lawn care services or related topics, we can use our data and productize it.

So that’s what we’re working on now, in terms of, okay, this is what based on our data, it should cost to, to mow your yard every week, based off of 45, 000 transactions in your zip code. This is what it’s going to cost. Here are 5 contractors who can do it for that price. And so that’s what we’re working on now.

And looking for ways to leverage our first-party data, the data that’s coming through the platform that only we have. And then take that and then productize that and put that forth and to, to Google so Google can service it for searchers and we can reward searchers unlike anybody else.

And so that’s like the holy grail. That’s what we’re working on now. But you’re always looking for ways to, you’re always looking for inspiration from competitors and also people in other industries. They are just kicking butt at SEO and trying to borrow from their strategies to uplevel what it is you’re doing.

Yeah, local SEO probably shares 50 percent in common with just a general SEO strategy. And then the other 50 percent is unique and different things you have to do. And it’s just a different set of things that have to be done and a different skill set.

Different people doing different things for us, it starts with, okay, where do we have a little local office? We maintain a little local office, in about 30 different cities throughout the country. And these are places where vendors can come and they can get help if they need it.

If there are places where we have a local support person that can help if there’s an issue. And so, if we have a local office. We will then do local SEO. And so that starts with things that have been the same for 10 or 15 years. You get a Google My Business location and you start building signals around that, and then you build references and citations around that, although that stuff doesn’t matter as much as it did five or 10 years ago, it still matters.

And then the other thing is local reviews. And then making sure all that stuff is consistent across every Piece of the property, in terms of the landing page and all of that. And then also local press we reach out to the local press and talk about, hey, we’ve got a contractor who’s a single mother who started mowing grass on green pal in March.

And now here it is October. She’s got 10 employees. She paid off her medical debt and she just bought a home. That’s a pretty cool story. Do you want to write a story about it? And so, we reach out to the local press and then the local press does a story about this kind of feel-good story, it doesn’t have to be the contractor’s focus.

It could be like, hey, winter is coming up. Here are 10 things you should do. In Buffalo, New York to get your home ready for winter based on a survey of green power contractors. And so, the local press will cover it and link back to the local page. And so local SEO is a little different.

It’s not rocket science. It’s just a lot of manual work.

I think that link-building is important. And, some people say it’s not important. I think it’s still important. I think especially in the age of chat GPT that I think mentions and links are going to be one of the most important things, because in a world where all the output, all the information, all of the texts are commoditized, how do you know what’s.

Authoritative and not. And so, I think links are going to become more important than ever. That’s just a theory of mine. But so, link building has been important for us since day one and the way we do it is not scalable. It’s very founder-led, my two co-founders and I still build links every single day, whether it be reaching out to journalists and talking about ways that we can help them with stories they’re working on press mentions, it’s very much of a press lead like a PR led link building strategy.

I guess you could call it where we reach out to the press and we talk about things that we’re doing that they might want to write about, but it’s not scalable and it’s really hard and we’ve just done it one link at a time and I don’t know of a way to scale it. I, one thing I do know is like the traditional.

Link building at a sense of, spray and pray and you spam a bunch of people and beg them for links. I’m pretty sure that’s a waste of time., I’ve been doing this for 12 years and I get 50 of those a day and I block and delete reports, and spam all of them. I’ve never built a link that way and I’ve never added a link.

So I think that’s probably a waste of time. Yeah, I think it, I think whatever time and money you’re spending doing that, I think you should. Put that back into the content and maybe rather than reaching out to 10, 000 people spamming them reach out to 20 and just write them a really good Pitch and have something really good for them I know that that’s probably a waste of time too because you may just go for 20 but I think it goes back to This is cliche, but like just focus more on, on what it is you’re pitching and not the pitching itself.

I can, I think that link building in a sense of like just spray and pray is probably a waste of time. Yeah, it makes sense.

We’re in North America now United States, any major city in the United States any town that has over 15 or 20,000 people, you can use GreenPal to get a lawn mowing service.

And we’re spending the next year, probably focusing on how do we get more. How do we get the flywheel spinning faster in the places where it’s not? So, for example, a Huntsville, Alabama, we’ll do more transactions. Then Seattle, Washington, and Seattle, Washington is probably 30 times the size of Huntsville.

So why is that? Why is it that this town? So that’s so much smaller is generating more transactions in this other city. That’s bigger. It’s because we haven’t got the flywheel going in this other city. So, there’s no reason to go to any new territories until we figure that out. So, we’re working on that.

After we get that kind of figured out, then we’re going to move into Canada, the UK, Australia, but that may be another year or two Internet internationalizing a marketplace like this is a lot harder than I thought it would be. It’s there’s a lot more to it. These invisible lines between us are very real and things are different from country to country.

Although you wouldn’t think much is different between the United States and Canada in terms of how things are done for some reason it is. And that’s going to happen but we have more, more low-hanging fruit, higher priorities before we do that.

I hear a lot of SEOs talking about how you shouldn’t rank, and how you shouldn’t track page rank as a KPI. Where you’re ranking on the page for certain keywords Oh, don’t worry about that. And I think that’s bullshit. I know that’s very, it’s very important. Like that’s one of the only things. And so, I don’t know if that’s like a myth that’s being that’s a myth. That’s being disseminated by SEOs because they’re tired of being anchored against that and they can’t control that.

And it’s they work for a client and page rank goes through the floor and they’re like then I’m not paying you, you’re not paying this 50, 000 a month anymore. So, they’re trying to put out this myth that page rank doesn’t matter, like where you rank on the search engine results page. So, I think it’s very important. Like we track the hell out of that.

Yeah. It’s crazy. So that’s a critical one. We, which, where are we ranking on the pages for, maybe because ours is just so much simpler, we’re, where do we rank for lawn mowing services, Nashville, Tennessee, like we, we need to rank one, two or three.

And if we’re not, there’s something wrong as we track that track sales by market. That’s huge. And it, and we can tell. Sales and transactions go down whenever we’re adversely affected by a Google algorithm change. And so that’s huge.

We like local; we like whitespark. I have tried like hell it’s expensive, but. I’ve tried like hell to get SEM Rush or Ahrefs Or five other tools to show me the local ranking data. But Whitespark is the best local SEO tool that I have found.

And we also use SEMrush and ahrefs and pay for their premium stuff as well, because each of them is good at one little thing. And so, we track sales by market. We track page rank, we track on-page conversion by March by market, and about two or three other things, but we don’t get crazy with it.

We don’t like real, like we know pretty well if we’re doing good or if we’re not, or it’s something that we shipped improved ranking or didn’t, and we don’t really. We’re a small team. We’re only like 40-something people and the growth team is around 14 people. And so, it’s not like we can just, it’s not like we have a hundred or 200 or 500 people that can pour over this stuff.

We try to keep it simple and we look at a few metrics that we can focus on and move and don’t worry about anything else.

I used to, but then that got me in trouble. We used to have a competitor that was, they were kicking ass at creating all of this content that was like link bait.

And so, they would create content like the top 10 best pizza restaurants in Dallas, Texas. And man, they would get all of these links. And it was like an inner, it was like a, it was like a. A survey that they would run and they would just create all this content. I’m like, man, that’s working.

They’re getting all these links, their domain authorities going up, but that had nothing to do with the lawn care industry. And so, I started to copy that a little bit. And then like they got slammed by an algorithm update and then I got hurt by it too. And then I decided then on. I wasn’t even going to look at any more competitor stuff.

I was just going to; I was just going to glance at it and really. Look at not necessarily my competitors, but like the real powerhouses and other industries. What is Nerd Wallet doing for credit cards? What is true? com doing for job listings? What is Yelp doing for small businesses and trying to look at those powerhouses?

These are multi-billion-dollar companies and trying to learn from them and not necessarily worrying about like competitors that were at my level.

Sounds good.

We’re self-funded. We’ve always been. And so, it’s as a startup founder, you’re all, you’re wearing the hat of a capital allocator. So, a little bit of money comes in and then you put money to work and then some stuff works out, some stuff doesn’t, you make bets, and some pan out, some don’t.

So, what’s holding us back is always resources. If at any given time, you gave me a million or 10 million, I could put it to work. Yeah, but then on the other hand, I don’t want to I don’t want to like, I don’t want to raise any capital because I don’t want any people dictating what it is we do and we’ve been very lucky to not raise capital.

It’s one of the reasons why we’re still here today. And so, it’s always people you want to hire. There are always 2 or 3 key people you want to hire who make really good salaries. And so that’s hard. And yeah, that’s always been what was, what’s held us back, but that’s what makes it challenging.

And that’s what makes it fun. Figuring out unique ways to solve these problems.

I’m more of a creative shoot-from-the-hip level kind of guy. Let’s take action. Let’s, get an idea.

Let’s try it out. I’m not an analysis spreadsheets pour over the data kind of guy. And so, I hate pouring over spreadsheets and it doesn’t matter if it’s a financial model, or if it’s a spreadsheet of a thousand landing pages and 10 different attributes across all of them, I hate that stuff.

But I employ people that are good at that stuff. I then have regular weekly check-ins which forces me to be good at that stuff. So, it’s a tripwire. It’s some, it’s like a forcing function that causes me to do the stuff that I don’t want to do.

I love the subject of behavioral economics. So, it’s okay, one little weird thing we changed about the presentation of an offering caused it to increase, it’s books that Robert Cialdini wrote influence and I can’t remember the name of the second book with the orange cover Predictably Irrational.

No that’s not, that’s a different guy. But anyway, Robert Cialdini and the book Predictably Irrational are really good books about behavioral economics and weird things that people do. When they’re presented with offerings in a different way. And so, like that, the concept of price anchoring, as you look at a, if you go to a restaurant, you look at a menu, there is a there’s a 10, there’s a 15 steak and there’s a 25 steak.

And then there’s 130 steaks. And nobody orders the 130 steaks, but just its presence there drives the sales of the 25 steaks because people are anchored against that and they say that’s not a this is I’m not doing that, but that makes this look pretty good. So weird stuff like that, it fascinates me.

Oh, let me see. I am trying to book a trip for New Year’s to St. Bart’s. So, my last Google search was Googling the best routes, and how to get there. Stuff to do there, this research, I’ve never been there.

And so, it’s funny, I don’t know how ChatGPT is going to replace all of that. All of the nuances around trying to figure out a new place to go are so much based on opinion and gut and different kinds of signals and different resources and different places. And it’s like you, as a traveler, you bring all of this in, you collate it and then you come up with your decision.

And I don’t know that ChatGPT can replace. All of that. And it’s interesting. I’ve tried some of these ChatGPT products for travel. They all suck. But maybe one day they won’t, one day they’ll be incredible. Maybe, one day there’ll be incredible and they’ll know what I like and they’ll know what I’m looking for.

I hope because it’s a real drag trying to figure out things about a place you’ve never been and trying to make your best bet based on what you find on 20 Google searches. But yeah, that was my last one.

Thanks. Thank you. I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.