How GreenPal CEO Bryan Clayton grew GreenPal to $30M revenue and 300K customers in 2024.

guys get crep pal.com launched in 2013 last month in November of 2023 300,000 individual homeowners had their lawn cut in November those Lawns were cut by over 35,000 lawn care companies that make their living on green pal the company does thir will do 30 million of gmv this year here in 2023 of which about 4.5 million green pal keeps as their take rate their take rate goes between 5 to 20% per job with an average 15% take rate as they look to continue to expand no full-time employees just three founders hey folks my guest today is Brian Clayton he's the co-founder and CEO of green pal Online Marketplace that connects homeowners with local Lawn Care Professionals green pal has been called The Uber for lawn care by Entrepreneur magazine it has over 300,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day Brian you ready to take us to the top right on Nathan good to be back it's good to see you again man I get so excited about these Marketplace plays because you basically have two c well first of it's harder because you have two customer you have to sell into to but once you have them and you're adding value you can build all kinds of other cool things for them whether it's a SAS play or something else tell people what is green pal today is it pure Marketplace or is there a SAS component too yeah Green pal is a 10year overnight success and we're still doing the same thing 10 years in that we started off doing how do we make ordering a lawn boing Service as easy as getting groceries on instacart or ordering an Uber or you know ordering food on door Dash and so you push a button and you can hire somebody to mow your yard and yeah we're Marketplace we don't charge a SAS fee or anything like that we just make a cut of each transaction and uh the things that make it hard like you mentioned make it durable the people that use it tend to stick with it yeah well and and so give it give folks a sense of the kinds of folks using you to cut their lawns are these big corporations with thousands of acres in the middle of nowhere are these homeowners with you know half an acre that need it cut once a month man it's a really good question when we first started off uh 10 years ago the way we got our first UND or maybe even a thousand customers we passed out flyers passed out door hangers all over Nash yeah all over Nashville Tennessee where I live that's how we got our first 500 people to use the app and the first place we went was the higher-end parts of town the affluent areas the million-dollar homes plus and we would pass out thousands of these things and nobody signed up nobody cared it wasn't until we went to the working class parts of town the people that had you know dual incomes that that that were working all day that didn't have time to mow their yard but couldn't get a lawn guy to call them back those people signed up so that was our customer then and that's our customer now it's it's folks that just want value folks that want convenience that don't want to pay for a private gardening service but want somebody to come out and take care of the lawn when it gets tall I love this okay so so today I mean can you give us numbers from November how many unique people cut their lawn with green pal yeah we have 300,000 people using the app to get this chore done and uh you know that's growing 30% year-over-year and and we haven't raised any outside Capital so we're growing organically we grow on organic search people look for a lawnmowing service nearby me and Lincoln Nebraska they come across green pal they sign up and they use it are you just only the us or have you expanded it other countries just the United States for now um we the the the nut we're trying to crack now is how do we get more saturation and density in every major city so a weird thing that happens with marketplaces like is once you get the flywheel going like the red hot Center it tends to kind of reinforce itself but if there's no if you don't get that Flywheel spinning it never takes off and so one problem we face is uh we do more transactions than a Knoxville Tennessee or a Huntsville Alabama than we do in a Seattle Washington and so we're trying to figure that out how do we how do we look at these markets where quite frankly we don't have the liquidity and we how do we jump start them and so we have to figure that out before we go international well it's okay so 300,000 when you say 300,000 people you use the words use the app does that mean there were 300,000 unique Lawns cut in November yeah using it every month that's right wow okay guys so at least one did some of them cut it twice per month yeah and some weekly and so we have a three- we option A 10 an every 10day option an every two week option and a weekly option most people the most popular is every two weeks what's the cost for that anywhere from $25 on the low end uh to on up to1 $200 a mode just depending on how big the property is and we take anywhere from five to 20% of the transaction depending on how much volume the uh the vendor doing through the platform so that was gonna be my question do you negotiate your take rate with each lawn care company cutting the 300,000 homeowners Lawns that that are on your platform or is it just you set one thing and it's the same for everybody no there there's benchmarks so if if they uh if they're doing a lot of volume through the platform that goes down and if they just are just getting started on the platform only do one or two yards a week it it's it's higher and so we we started off with just a flat take rate of of 8% and as time went on we noticed a weird phenomenon of of a what they call a graduation rate a graduation issue where where vendors will grow with the platform and they're doing you know three $400,000 a year on the platform and they say well now I want my own system so I don't want green pal anymore and so we've had to to to negotiate with that and deal with that by lower bring the take rate where it just becomes a no-brainer was like well by the time I buy all of these systems and I pay somebody to run them I might as well just pay green pal oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,877 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripee account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder paath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your 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up and goes down you know November is on the is on the latter part of the Season we are a seasonal business but around 35,000 contractors using the platform at least once a month to mow one yard a month now we have thousands of contractors using it full-time this is the only system of record they have this...