The full transcript

Oleg

Hi everybody! Welcome to Devico Breakfast Bar! Here we speak with different people involved in the business landscape, share their expertise, delve into the latest tech trends, and explore the ins and outs of IT outsourcing. I'm Oleg Sadikov, and today I'm excited to have Bryan Clayton, the CEO and co-founder at GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss new episodes. Hi Bryan!

Bryan

Hey Oleg! How are you doing? Great to connect with you today.

Oleg

I'm doing great. Thanks for finding time to join me today. Could you please start by telling us a bit about your professional background and yourself?

Bryan

Yeah. So, I'm CEO and co-founder of a company called GreenPal. And GreenPal is a website, mobile app, marketplace that works like DoorDash, or Postmates, or Instacart, or Uber but for lawn care services. So, if you have a home, you have grass outside, you need somebody to mow it. Rather than calling around all over the place, you just download GreenPal, you pop your address in, and you get competitive quotes from lawn care services nearby you. They compete for your business. And then you can hire one with your account. And if everything goes well, and you liked how they did the first service for you, you can book them right through your account, just to happen every week or two weeks. And GreenPal is a 10-year overnight success. My two co-founders and I have been at this for a little over a decade, but now we have around 300,000 people using it every week for lawn mowing.

Oleg

That's impressive. What inspired you to start GreenPal, and how did you identify the need for such a platform in the market?

Bryan

Yeah, so I think when you're starting a new company like this, the specific knowledge that you have around an industry can be helpful. The authenticity can be a competitive advantage. One of the only things we had going for us when we started GreenPal was that my first business was a landscaping company. I mowed yards in high school, I mowed yards in college. And then, when I graduated college, I decided to stick with that business and ended up growing my little lawn mowing business to a decent-sized company – around 150 employees – eventually getting it to around 10 million a year in revenue. And then in 2013, a national company bought that business, so it was acquired by a national company. And so, spending 15 years in the business, I kind of knew how it worked from the inside out. I saw where it was inefficient. I saw how it was difficult for a consumer to get connected with a good, small lawn care service. And so, when I sold the business, I took like a year off, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. I thought, 'Well, somebody is going to build a platform that makes it very easy to get this chore done. And why can't that be me?' And I didn't really know what I didn't know about how difficult it is to build a technology product, how difficult it is to invent a new product. But my two co-founders and I, we just started working on the first version of the app and never looked back. And it took a long time to get it going. And it took a long time for us to figure out what the buyers and sellers in this marketplace would need. But as time went on, the numbers began to grow, and the compounding began to take hold. And a hundred customers turn into a thousand, and a thousand into ten thousand, and so on.

Oleg

Who was responsible for the tech part of that business?

Bryan

That was a challenging piece of getting started because, ideally, when you're starting a new tech company, you get a hacker and a hustler. You get somebody who knows the tech side. They've just been coding up stuff their whole life, and they love the execution of the technology. And then you get a hustler, somebody who knows the business side and is just driven to drive the business forward. And you get your Steve Jobs and your Steve Wozniak. Well, we have three hustlers. We didn't know how to code. We had never built a website before. So, we thought, 'Well, we'll just outsource all of the tech, and we'll do the marketing and sales, and we'll be off and going.' And so, that's what we did. We pulled our money together, and we spent 150,000 dollars with a local development shop to build the first version of GreenPal. And it took almost a year. And they got it done, and we launched it into the marketplace. We quickly learned that, wow, this is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be because the app was so far off the mark of what customers actually wanted. We would pass out flyers, and we would get a handful of people to use the first version of the app, and they would tell us everywhere it sucked. And we began to make a list of all of the improvements and changes that need to be made. And we thought, 'This is an unworkable situation. We can't change the order our way to success.

We can't go back to the dev shop and say, 'Hey, change this, change this, change this.' And so, what we learned was, okay, there's no chance for us to make this work unless we learn how to code, unless we learn how to write software. And so, two years in at this point, and my co-founder signs up for a coding bootcamp. In nine months, he learned enough Ruby on Rails. And really that there was a backend-focused bootcamp. He learns enough server-side knowledge to be dangerous and starts to rebuild the backend. And then I went to YouTube University and became the world's most terrible front-end developer. And so, the two of us learned how to code and rebuilt the whole platform from scratch, but this time baked in the feedback that users were giving us. And that took another two years. So, here we are. We're four years in, and we have about a hundred customers. At least now we have a platform that we built, and we understand how it works, and we now have the knowledge to proceed forward. And then, from there, we started building out our development team. We make a little bit of money, and then we would get a freelancer or hire an employee. We would understand how to delegate the development. So, it was a painful lesson that it's really hard to invent a new product from scratch if you don't have the technical acumen to kind of see your way through that.

Oleg

Looking back, what was the reason why it ended up being wrong? Was it because of the requirements? Or what was the reason?

Bryan

These were all the reasons. So, it wasn't the dev shop's fault because we didn't really know what needed to be built. You can plan these things out as much as you want, and put them in a scope of work, and put them in a spec doc, and go through this waterfall process of building the software, but that is not going to survive – the first interaction with customers. And you don't really understand what customers are going to want, what features you need, what features you don't need until you get people using it, until you get people interacting with it. And you have to be able to quickly make those changes and improvements, and scrap things that people don't want, and improve things that people do want. And so, we just didn't know. We have interactions with customers and lawn care services using it on one side of the platform and consumers using it on the other side. And so, we didn't really understand what the dev shop even needed to be built in the first place.

Looking back, it's kind of like saying, ‘I have an idea for a song that I want to create, I need to find a musician.’ And that's trying to invent a new product from scratch by completely outsourcing it. It's kind of like we didn't know what we didn't know. And the only way to figure that out is just through quick iterations, quick trial and error, quick let's build this, let's hack this together, let's put this out there. Did it work? No. Okay. Bring it back. And you've got to go through that really quickly. And to sit here and say, 'Okay, well, let me put this in another little scope of work, and let's get a price quote.' Or even if they're working by the hour. If they're not in the team, it's really, really, really hard to iterate your way through trial and error when you're inventing something brand new that does not exist. Now, if you're executing on something that's known, like if I had my landscaping company and I just wanted an online ordering system that my landscaping company could fulfill, I could hire a dev shop to do that cause it's pretty straightforward. But inventing the Uber of lawn care, there's just a million things you don't know. And the only way you can kind of trial and error your way to success is just going through those iterations very quickly.

Oleg

Entrepreneurial magazine dubbed GreenPal as Uber for lawn care, as you already mentioned. How did this comparison come about, and what similarities do you see between GreenPal and the Uber model?

Bryan

They called us that in year two or three. And so, on the one hand, it was cool because we got the press, we got some eyeballs around what we were doing. Uber for lawn care – you get it like that. And so, it's important to be able to describe what you do in about five seconds or less, especially on your homepage, especially on your landing pages in a mobile app. And so, that was good. But the comparison really breaks down because, in Uber, you don't care who takes you to the airport. You don't care who drives you to dinner, so long as it's a safe, reliable driver and a safe car. Well, lawn care is not that way. You really do care who's going to show up at your house. You want to make sure they have the right equipment. You want to make sure they're going to show up on time. You want to make sure they do a nice, neat job. And then the next visit, you want the same provider. You want the same guy or gal. You don't want a different person every time. So, the comparison really breaks down. Beyond, Uber does quickly enable you to find a driver. GreenPal does that too. It enables you to quickly find a good fit lawn care service. But that's where the comparison really breaks down. The other thing is Uber drivers are kind of contractors of Uber. Uber is the service provider. You even say, 'I'm going to Uber there.' Well, GreenPal is not a lawn care service. GreenPal is not the provider of lawn care services. GreenPal is a platform that lawn care services pay to use to market their services, where homeowners can hire them very quickly and smoothly. And so, the comparisons break down a little bit. But all of these platforms operate a little differently. They all take a little bit more control over the experience. Some take no control. So, you kind of look at the difference between Uber and Craigslist, GreenPal is somewhere in the middle between those two.

Oleg

Which were the biggest challenges that you faced in scaling your business?

Bryan

Well, the biggest challenges were kind of what I alluded to a moment ago, was just not knowing what you needed to build and what you needed to focus on. And the only way we kind of got through that was to say, 'Okay, we have 10 people using it.' – you know, this is year one – 'There's 10 people using it every week. Let's just talk to these people as much as we can. And whatever they're telling us, we're going to let that guide how we make decisions.’ And then we turned that 10 into a hundred. And so, we would meet with them at their kitchen table, meet with them at coffee shops, and watch them use the product, watch them use the service, and try to figure out, 'Okay, 5 out of 10 people are confused by this wording or don't like the fact they can't do this. So we're going to change that.' That was really challenging – not knowing what to do. And it's letting that early user feedback kind of be free R&D. And we still do it. Today we have 300,000 people using it, but I still do at least an hour a day of user support, whether it's live chat, or phone, or email, because I don't want there to be a gap that forms between my logic and the user logic. And so, that was challenging. It's still challenging now. And making the right bets on the right features, and then even painfully understanding that that bet didn't pay off and killing a feature, you know, that's challenging. And it's self-funding the business. Self-funding the business was challenging. We didn't raise any capital. We didn't raise any outside money. So, making a little bit of money, and then putting it out back to work, and staying lean and mean – that was challenging too.

Oleg

Okay. How do you build and nurture the community of users and service providers in your business?

Bryan

Yeah, so that is what GreenPal is. It's a community. It's a community of buyers and sellers. They come onto our platform, they quickly are able to get pricing and schedule, and quickly get connected up. And that's what it is. And if the community isn't thriving, then it falls apart. So, one way that you build a strong community is you have an experience that is 10 times better than doing it outside of the community.

And so, the main thing is what is the value of people coming into this community versus ignoring it? And for GreenPal, service providers for the lawn care services that pay to use it, they quickly get connected up with customers that they never would have ever been able to get introduced to. They quickly organize all of their route in one place. There's a CRM for them to keep everything organized in one place. And then they quickly get paid. They connect their Stripe account to their platform, and they get paid within 24 hours of all the work they do. So, those three things alleviate about 75% of the problems that go into running a lawn care business. It's better for them to engage with this community versus not. As a consumer, there's this weird thing as the case of the disappearing lawn guy, and GreenPal helps solve that because there's a layer of accountability that goes into the transactions that they're doing with their account. Do they show up on time? Did they do the job like they were supposed to? Did they proactively take care of their client? And if they don't, they don't do very well in the community. So, I think community is more than just engaging the community and talking to people, and, you know, whether it's on Facebook, or Reddit, or Discord, or something, it's more than just being there to respond. It's like what is the whole purpose of the community in the first place? What is the value proposition? What is it doing 10 times better than the old way? Start there, and then nurture the community from that point forward.

Oleg

Bryan, as technology continues to advance, how do you see artificial intelligence impacting the future of product development?

Bryan

Right now, it's a really good tool for just a lot of mundane BS work. We used to painstakingly describe every service that every lawn care service offered. So, whether it be shrub pruning, or gutter cleaning, or snow plowing, we would develop content around these service offerings as a content marketing strategy. And so, a lot of manual grunt work. Learning language models have been able to help us speed that up. Not create just like vomit on the screen in terms of words that don't really mean anything – ChatGPT is really good at that – but really focusing on, okay, if it takes 100 hours to do 10 of these, maybe we can reduce that to 10 hours. So, really speeding that up. So right now, it's very helpful there. It's not clear how else we can use it. Ideally, it would be nice for learned language models on top of your database to be able to ask questions like you would normally with SQL queries. Right now, we have to really technically ask a question like, 'Okay, of all the lawn care services in San Diego, California, how many of them last year grew their business by 30%, and what were the common attributes across that 30%, and how often did they service their customers on time?' And so, we need to try to figure out how we can get more of those service providers in San Diego. Well, that's a very complex query. I think AI ultimately, sometime soon, ride on top of your database, and you can sit there and just literally speak into it and ask it that question. And it'll consume everything you have and say, 'Okay, well, here's the answer.' And we're 100% certain that the answer is not hallucinating. I think that's where we are now. It's really good at automating and reducing the time on really grunt work tasks. But I think we'll get to a point where you can really use it like a layman to unlock key business insights that help you deliver more value to customers. I think that's where we're going. At least, I hope.

Oleg

What's your estimation? Six months? Ten years?

Bryan

I mean, it's been a year and a half, and we're still using it the same way we did a year and a half ago. And so, I would have thought a year and a half ago we would have had something like wow by now. We don't. I'm hesitant to handicap how long. I think it's been more than a year. It's under five. I think a year from today looks very similar to today. Maybe ChatGPT 5 will come out. Maybe it hallucinates a little less. Maybe it has a little more functionality around the context window. And maybe you can put more data into it and query that data in a way that you can't in other ways. But it's still very much a tool that sits outside your organization, which is – don't get me wrong – it's amazing, and we love it. It's open in my browser all day. And every member of my team has to use it. That said, I think a year today, it's everything we're already doing, and it's just a little tighter. It's a little less hallucination. It's a little faster. It's a little more human-like. Sometimes it still surprises me, like, 'Damn it really nailed that!' I think those moments will be more frequent, but I think the magic of it is still more than a year away, less than five. Right now, these things are much more artificial than they are intelligent. I don't think things will change much in a year or two. But in five years, I think it could be different, very different, hopefully. Because it's not like there's so much waste that's sitting out there in terms of customers not getting what they want. True AI can help unlock that value. It's not a zero-sum game. There are so many users on our platform that don't get what they want. If we had true AI, we could help figure that out. And that would just create value for them, the lawn care services that use our platform and our platform. So, I'm excited about it.

Oleg

I know that you have an in-house development team. What factors have led you to abstain from considering IT outsourcing? And do you foresee any circumstances in which the decision might change in the future?

Bryan

Yeah, we have 40, all in-house. And we do use some agencies for a few things. We have, it's not really an agency, it's one consultant for SEO who's really good, helps guide a lot of our strategy. We have a really good outsourced designer that we use for UI, somewhat complex, that we don't really know how to bring together. So, I think there's definitely a place to bring in people that you can't afford full-time. And you want the top elite skill set in your organization, but fractionally. And so, we do that. But for your run-of-the-mill, like coding and development, all of that's in-house. Where we would outsource something is, again, that specialization. If we really wanted to get down and dirty with implementing AI when it matures to that point, we would probably go to an agency to help us implement that because it would be cost prohibitive for us to hire a full-time person to oversee that. I think outsourcing makes a lot of sense if what you're doing is very straightforward, if you know the endpoints, and you know exactly how it needs to look, and you've kind of done it in a hand-cranking way. You are doing the experience end-to-end with spreadsheets, phone calls, emails, Airtable, and Zapier, and you've cobbled it together. And now, you need it to work cleanly and like in a magical way. Yeah. Outsource the hell outta that. But if you don't know, and the problem is you think you know, but you really don't know. At least, that's me. If you don't know what the destination is, it's really hard to outsource that without having somebody right there with you.

Oleg

What strategies have you deployed to effectively manage and nurture internal development talent?

Bryan

Real, clear expectations and real, clear processes. This is how we do it. This is why we do it this way. This is how quickly we think you should be able to do it. Here's how we gauge success. Here's how we monitor whether you're hitting your goals or not. Like really laying out roles and goals. And this applies to everybody, not just developers. If you don't have a real, clear set of specifications of what the role is and what the goals are, then you can't be upset when your freelancer or your employee doesn't hit that. That's been the problem most of the time in my 25 years of being in a blue-collar business, the same as being in a tech business. It's usually the role and the goals around that role are not clearly defined, and the way in which to execute is not clearly defined. Every time I'm ever at a loss, I can usually diagnose it there.

Oleg

To wrap up, Bryan, what key takeaway or advice would you like to leave to our listeners regarding the role of AI in shaping product development and customer support in the coming years?

Bryan

Show me an experimenter, and I'll show you a winner. And so, what I mean by that is just treat this as one never-ending experiment. We're working, we're experimenting with all kinds of things around AI right now, particularly around customer support. The pushback is, well, what if this thing hallucinates and gives somebody a year of free lawn mowing, you know? And so, okay, well, let's just experiment with it. Let's just try to launch it and monitor ten conversations a day. And let's just see how that goes. If you can reduce initiatives, new ways of doing things, different things you want to try into a little, small experiment, it can help determine if you want to double down and continue to do that. But the problem is a lot of founders, whether starting a new business or improving their existing business, get overwhelmed by the implications of doing this new big thing. They don't do anything at all. And that's the problem. So, you need to reduce these initiatives down to little, small experiments, little, small bets, and then let that guide if you want to continue on that path and double down or not. But at least you tried, and at least you have some feedback. Whereas most of the time it's like, 'Oh, that's just too big of a project. We're not going to do anything.' And that's why most businesses don't ever take off or why they plateau.

Oleg

Bryan, thank you very much. It was amazing. Thanks for sharing the advice and the insights. I'm sure our listeners will find a lot of valuable information. Thanks for finding time to join me today.

Bryan

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it.

Oleg

Great. If you enjoy our discussion and want to stay updated on future episodes, don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell. That way, you will not miss on our latest insights and conversations from Devico Breakfast Bar. See you in a week!