Won't customers eventually circumvent Lawn Love and hire your lawn care providers themselves? What prevents Lawn Love from just becoming a discovery platform like yellow pages for lawn techs and then getting cut out of the deals?

There are a number of key dynamics that prevent disintermediation here. Unlike in-home services like house cleaning, our customers don't have to be physically present when we do the work (they aren't home 80% of the time in our case). This naturally reduces disintermediation risk, as the customer rarely ends up interfacing directly with the provider. It also helps drive sustained platform value, as consumers need the Lawn Love platform in order to orchestrate the work. This is a distinct adva...

Defensibility - What is Lawn Love's significant advantage over existing services?

The lawn care space is old, slow, and rather low tech. It takes a week and an in-person visit just to get a quote for your yard. Quality tends to degrade over time, and churn is endemic. We're able to dramatically improve the consumer experience through the lever that is software. This is manifested in the form of things like algorithmic quotes, smart job routing, and bringing the entire payments and yard management interface online. We also see strong network effects on the supply side as we...

Can you comment a bit more on how are providers sourced? Why is it such a great deal for them?

Most lawn care techs are good at rendering the core lawn care service, and pretty terrible at things like marketing, business, accounting and customer support. We take all that pain off their plate, which allows them to focus on doing good work and getting paid. That's an obvious value to them. There's also an excess capacity consideration here. Many of these guys used to sit idle for significant portions of the week, and now have a full schedule through Lawn Love. They may make slightly more...

Sounds like a great concept! How would you contrast your company with that of lawntribe, yourgreenpal or lawnmowingonline.com? What makes your company better suited to win? What is your 5 and 10 year plan? Thanks.

We are moving faster and are in far more markets than any of the above companies. Most of those outfits are bootstrapped, and in the case of lawnmowingonline.com, run by fairly low-tech operators. We have already built a far better product, and have a distinct speed / tech advantage. In five years we'd like to serve every major market in the country. Ten years out, we'd like the be the dispatch layer for a fleet of robo-mowers.

Lawn Love

Tech meets lawn care

lawnlove.com

San Diego, CA

Y Combinator Consumer Goods Service

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Y Combinator

Raised from Y Combinator

Customer retention rate is nearly 93%.

Americans spend $76B on lawn care every year.

Y Combinator Summer 2014; Raised 1.8M in seed round.

Select investors: Alexis Ohanian, Launch Capital, Bodley Group, Jared Friedman.

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