ServeScape is the South's next generation garden center.

An end-to-end marketplace, ServeScape syncs local horticultural growers, landscape designers, and installation professionals to deliver a disruptively delightful way to accomplish your next landscape project.

🌳 ServeScape announces kick-off of next funding round at the 3rd Coast Conference in NOLA last week. Met a few interested funds. Follow up meetings next week.

🌳 ServeScape breaks all sorts of sales records in March:

Most Sales for a month: $514k

Largest 7 day stretch ((3/17-24) $255k

Biggest sales day (3/23): $55,327

Most orders in a day (3/23): 148

🌳 Plant Nerd 2.0 is released - check it out here: Plant Nerd AI

🌳 ServeScape Pro continues to make strides over the last 30 days. 124 contractors signed up (60 in February.)

🌳 Scapify has its first big issue and loses its first customer. More details below.

🌳 ServeScape makes Inc. Regionals. #59 having grown 182% over the last two years.

🌳 ServeScape sells Glass Farm Nursery to ServeScape investor and friend, Richard and Kristen Bryson. The proceeds from the sale will enable us to contribute greater funds to adverts in Atlanta and Charlotte.

🌳 ServeScape passes final API test for Tractor Supply! Launch of $250k worth of inventory supply forthcoming over the next week.

🌳 ServeScape has launched our Series A fundraise. If you have an investor we should meet with please provide a name or intro. Send me a quick note (mario@servescape.com) for a forwardable email to your favorite Series A VC focused on supply-chain, marketplaces, or ag-tech.

🌿 On The Boards

AI, internally through process and externally through product, will be our defining characteristic.

Gen AI - Thoroughly impressed with the first five outputs of our GenAI trials. What we found with some customer feedback is that the AI designs are often too elaborate. Could be the prompt engineer at fault here but I'm beginning to understand that our original "concept vision" product is good for "planting plan" concepts and the GenAI for "landscape plan" concepts. What is the difference between a planting vs a landscape plan you might wonder. Planting plan is all about the plants - landscape plans include plants but also incorporate drainage, hardscape elements like gravel and stone, and lighting.

LLM AI - Plant Nerd 2.0 is released! Yay, only took 5 months and it still has a way to go. New features: 1) allow you upload a photo, 2) search and discovery tools are linked with real-time inventory data, 3) allow users to shop "in-stock" inventories.

Is the best plant app on the planet? Nope, no way. But here is what is does and will do even better after a few iterations; It will allow you to take a photo of a plant in your local landscape, correctly identified the plant, and allow you to purchase the plant with the option of having it installed for you. 

Give the new Plant Nerd AI a go and please share with me some feedback on your experience.

Marketing - Bad Marketing continues to crush on some numbers. CAC has jumped a little to $87 but it’s still 38% lower than last year. Meanwhile, the AOV has been moving north as well. Additionally, we have upped the ad spend to ~$750/day. Most impressive is the conversion rate. The quality of customers coming to the site are high intent audiences.

Scapify - Loses its first customer. Probably can't call this "churn" as we were not able to launch their project. The crux of the issue is two fold; One, our client was dealing with some major change management issues which shaped the scope into an exact replica of their legacy ERP solution. This direction was revealed over many months of development which continually delayed the project. Two, when matched against Epicore,their ERP system of record, our pricing is way better but there are some things related to PO structures and inventory management reporting that our client felt was better with the incumbent. Big take aways for me: 1) Beef up the intake / scope sheet form. 2) Large legacy teams need 60-90 days training / change management before the start of the season. 3) Take a harder look at the existing systems, especially if they have been in use for 10+ years - muscle memory is tough to train. 

Glass Farm Nursery - Simply put; it was a distraction. We did work out a deal to retain a portion of the property to continue our switchyard operations. Big picture; We were able to prove that purchasing an independent garden center, digitizing it, and having it play into a larger ServeScape strategy works. And works well. Technically, we were profitable. But it saps our leaderships energy. Even though its good, its not great, so we need to move on. We are excited for Richard Bryson, a ServeScape investor from our pre-seed round, and will support him on his journey. We believe, should Richard continue to purchase IGCs across the region we can further our beneficial relationship.

Series A pitch - Here's the reality: the landscaping industry is ridiculously inefficient and fragmented. There's no direct line to growers, and every touchpoint is compromised: big-box retailers offer poor quality—not good enough for prime-time television. Local independent garden centers have limited selection. Contractors and re-wholesalers provide unpredictable quality, unclear pricing, and unreliable availability.

I needed direct access to growers—clear pricing, high-quality plants, and reliable availability. At the time, that simply didn't exist. That was the moment ServeScape was born.

ServeScape is the digital hub for everything landscaping—an end-to-end marketplace delivering dream landscapes seamlessly. We synchronize over $100 million worth of live plant inventory from growers across the U.S., delivering directly to job sites and homes within five to seven days—completely inventory-free. In short, we deliver everything Amazon can't.

We've built an ecosystem integrating local designers and contractors with our extensive digital plant catalog. From our initial thousand plants in year one, we've expanded to over 10,000 plant profiles today.

Our business operates with two core revenue streams:

• A SaaS platform digitizing horticultural growers, generating $300K in annual recurring revenue, rapidly growing at over 200% year-over-year.

• A consumer-facing marketplace generating $2.5M in Gross Merchandise Value over the past year alone, with over a quarter-million dollars transacted just this past week.

We've scaled quickly over the last five years, recently expanding beyond our initial market in Atlanta to Nashville, Chattanooga, Charlotte, Greenville, and as far south as Tallahassee—setting the stage for national expansion from Texas to Connecticut.

Our marketplace metrics prove strong scalability. We've attracted 8,500 customers, with an impressive 43% returning for repeat purchases. Our efficient growth strategy achieves a customer acquisition cost of just $82, while generating $273 in lifetime profit per customer.

Now, we're raising a $5 million round to accelerate this momentum and hit $2M of SaaS and $10M of marketplace GMV. Our vision includes enhancing our SaaS platform with best-in-class AI tools for landscape design and plant management, accelerating customer acquisition, and expanding our geographic footprint. Our customers already love us—with a 4.9 Google rating and three fresh 5-star reviews just this morning.

ServeScape proves that anyone can have their ultimate dream yard—at a fraction of the usual time, cost, and energy.

So, if you're interested in partnering with the future leader of the landscaping industry, let’s chat.

Let's keep growing—together!

🖥 Product

1st Quarter Dev work

1. Retooling the "Project Packages" for a "ServeScape Signature Package" - DONE
2. Plant Nerd AI - Optimize for "in-stock" items DONE
3. New Customer Portal - PARTIAL
4. Concept Vision 2.0 - PARTIAL

2nd Quarter Dev

1. Fix the search -
2. Too many little things preventing it from being great.
3. Refine Plant Nerd AI
4. Customer Portal
5. Concept Vision 2.0

Many of our products are working but they are far from optimized. Over the next few weeks I will be speaking with a few Chief Product Officers to see why we have a good products and not great user experience yet.

If you know of a CPO with marketplace experience that would be willing to roll up some sleeves, please send an intro.

🎯 Strategy

Three core objectives for 2025

1. Raise Next Round of Funding ~$5M.
2. Successful 1st day of funding process at the 3rd Coast Conference in NOLA.
3. Continue 50% YoY growth on the marketplace;
4. Strengthen the Summer and Winter sales
5. Hardscape, Mulch, Firewood, Sod
6. Get to $500k in Scapify in ARR sales
7. Need to get to 10 new accounts by end of the year.
8. Booked for three conferences this summer.
9. Look for additional sales and/or on-boarding support.

Partnerships

1. Tractor Supply - the 7th test order passed! Target launch date set for April 1st.
2. Outdoor Living Supply - To launch the hardscape collection we are going to make it only available to ServeScape Designers to start. This will allow for more days to deliver and coordinate as our operations team better understands the OLS team.

ServeScape Design Studio meeting with Outdoor Living Supply team to review products for the catalog in Duluth.

📈 KPIs

As we enter into Series A territory we are updating our KPIs.

SaaS: 

• Accounts: 19 
• ARR: $300,000

Marketplace Sales: excludes retail nursery sales and Scapify sales

• Mar: $514k (+40% yoy)
• TTM: $2.4M (+20% yoy)

Marketplace Retention Rate: returning customers / total customers at beginning of period

• Mar: 7.8% (-59 bps YOY)
• TTM: 18.9% (+15 bp MOM)

Marketplace CAC: advertising $ / new customers

• Mar: $87
• TTM: $155

Marketplace LTV: avg. sales per user x avg. customer lifetime

• TTM ARPU: $697
• Avg Customer Lifetime: 1.45 Years
• LTV: $1,014

🌻 Community & Culture

ServeScape is now an ATDC portfolio company. We'll be presenting at the ATDC Venture Showcase. Click the link to sign up. Tuesday, April 22.

SS team will holding a booth at the North Fulton Master Gardeners' Garden Faire - April 12th 9am - 3pm Wills Park in Alpharetta.

ServeScape will be partnering with the City of Chamblee to host its first "Scapes of the South" garden show on the brand new lawn at its 1-year old and quite beautiful City Hall. More details to follow for this first week in May show. Thanks to Lori Conway for her continued support.

🙏 Asks

What VC should we reach out to? Please share any intros to Series A investors! Investment Deck.

There are a number of start-up conferences for founders looking to raise. Any we should pitch at?

Keep going and growing,

🌿 Mario

Mario@ServeScape.com

706-461-0029

ServeScape.com

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