Featured Startup Pitch: Uber for lawn mowing: GreenPal wants to make lawn care simple for homeowners and more profitable for service providers

By Bryan Clayton, GreenPal co-founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: GreenPal is lawn care made easy. Now a busy homeowner can order lawn mowing from their smartphone and never leave another voicemail or check under the mat again.

Product/Service Description

GreenPal is lawn mowing made easy. Currently, if a homeowner wants to get their lawn mowed, they would need to ask around for referrals and even search through Google or Craigslist. They would then have to call several vendors and leave a bunch of voicemails for estimates, maybe get a quote or two, and then hope the lawn guy shows up on the day they are supposed to. After that, they have to leave a check or cash under the mat, or even mail a check to the vendor.

GreenPal is the only way for a homeowner to find, schedule and pay for lawn mowing online. Our customers describe it as ‘Uber for lawn mowing.’ A homeowner simply enters their details, and they get five quotes from vetted and rated lawn pros near them. Then they can schedule and pay all in the app, and if they want, set it and forget it for the rest of the growing season.

Founder’s Story

Life as a landscaping professional is tough. I have spent my entire life in the landscaping industry, founding a lawn care company in high school—ultimately growing it to over 125 employees and $7 million in sales. While seeing the challenges and inefficiencies in the lawn care marketplace, the vision for GreenPal was born. Hardworking lawn care pros have to pass out flyers, mail invoices, field phone calls, and manage their schedules, all while mowing lawns six days-a-week. This is all still done in a very cumbersome, inefficient way, but now with GreenPal, lawn care professionals can manage their entire business with their smartphone. Now they can easily get new clients near the ones they already have, and get paid for the work they do without the headaches of flyers and invoices. When they get home, they can spend time with their family and not waste their evenings with bookkeeping.

Market Opportunity

The lawn care industry is a highly-fragmented $50 billion industry serviced by 77,000 service providers. GreenPal’s mission is to make that industry operate in a hyper-efficient manner with better technology and smarter, more effective marketing practices. GreenPal is free for consumers to use, and monetizes through a small transaction fee for each service our vendors perform. Our vendor partners tell us they are happy to part ways with a small slice of the pie because we bring them the new customer and get them paid fast for the work they do.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Marketing is part of our team’s core competency. Our job is to attract as many customers as possible for our vendor partners. We have established traction though our primary acquisition channels, including well executed SEO, direct mail, and email marketing campaigns. Our mission is to become the best marketer of lawn mowing services in the world so we can achieve our vision of making this one household chore as easy as pushing a button anytime, anywhere.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

While GreenPal has no direct competition, there are several great players in the home services space such as Angie’s List, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor. However, these sites offer a wide range of services with a diluted value proposition that does not resonate with the lawn mowing professional. GreenPal is the only platform focused on one thing—lawn mowing made easy. This affords us a strong value proposition to vendors—improving their lives, which in turn delivers a delightful experience to consumers.

Current Needs

Currently, we have launched a beta product in Nashville, Tennessee, gaining early traction while continuously experimenting refining our product and processes. We are meeting with every user we can to guide our feature set for version two, which will be released summer, 2014. We will be launching into three additional markets in 2015. We are currently bootstrapped and self-funded. Once we establish sound unit economics we will be raising a Series A round of funding to fuel growth into additional markets.

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Headquarters: Nashville, Tennessee