How GreenPal Reached $4.5M Revenue and $30M GMV in 2023 (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Bryan Clayton)

Introduction and GreenPal Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, getgreenpal.com launched in 2013. Last month in November 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 GreenPal. The company does will do 30,000,000 of GMV this year here in 2023, of which about 4,500,000 GreenPal keeps as their take rate. Their take rate goes between five to 20% per job with an average 15% take rate as they look to continue to

00:29expand. No full time employees, just three founders. Hey, folks. My guest today is Brian Clayton. He's the cofounder and CEO of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the Uber for lawn care by Entrepreneur Magazine and has over 300,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Brian, you ready to take us to the top?

Guest Introduction: Bryan Clayton, Co-Founder and CEO

Bryan Clayton

00:51>> Right on, Nathan. Good to be back.

Nathan Latka

00:53It's good to see you again, man. I get so excited about these marketplace plays because you basically have two cust well, first of it's harder because you have two customers you have to sell into. But once you have them and you're adding value, you can put all kinds of other cool things for them, whether it's a SaaS play or something else. Tell people, what is GreenPal today? Is it pure marketplace, or is there a SaaS component

01:10too?

What GreenPal Is Today: Pure Marketplace, No SaaS Fee

Bryan Clayton

01:11>> Yeah. GreenPal is a ten year overnight success, and we're still doing the same thing ten years in that we started off doing. How do we make ordering a lawn mowing service as easy as getting groceries on Instacart or ordering an Uber or, you know, ordering food on DoorDash? And so you push a button and you can hire somebody to mow your yard. And, yeah, we're our marketplace. We don't charge a SaaS fee or anything like that.

01:32>> We just make a a cut of each transaction. And, the things that make it hard, like you mentioned, make it durable. The people that use it tend to stick with it.

Finding the Right Customer: Working-Class Homeowners

Nathan Latka

01:41Yep. Well and and so give 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?

Bryan Clayton

01:54>> Man, it's a really good question. When we first started off, ten years ago, the way we got our first 100 or maybe even a thousand customers, we passed out flyers, passed out door hangers all over Nashville. 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

02:17>> 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

02:39>> value, folks that want convenience, that don't wanna pay for a private gardening service, but want somebody to come out and take care of the lawn when it gets tall.

November 2023 Usage Numbers and Organic Growth

Nathan Latka

02:47I 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?

Bryan Clayton

02:54>> Yeah. We have 300,000 people using the app to get this chore done, and, you know, that's growing 30% year over year, and and we haven't raised any outside capitals. We're growing organically. We grow on organic search. People look for a lawn mowing service nearby me in Lincoln, Nebraska. They come across GreenPal. They sign up and they use it.

Nathan Latka

03:14Are you just only The US, or have you expanded to other countries?

Bryan Clayton

03:18>> Just The United States for now. 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 ours 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 if you don't get that flywheel spinning, it never takes off. And so one problem we face

03:41>> is we do more transactions in 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.

US-Only Focus and Marketplace Density Challenge

Nathan Latka

03:59Well, 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?

Bryan Clayton

04:07>> Yeah. Using it every month. That's right.

Nathan Latka

04:09Wow. Okay. Got it. So at least one. Do some of them cut it twice per month?

Bryan Clayton

04:12>> Yeah. And some weekly. And so we have a three week option, a ten an every ten day option, and every two week option, and a weekly option. Most people the the most popular is every two weeks.

Nathan Latka

04:22What's the cost for that?

Bryan Clayton

04:24>> Anywhere from $25 on the low end, to on up to a $102,100 dollars a mow 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, the vendor's doing to the platform.

Nathan Latka

04:40So 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?

Bryan Clayton

04:52>> No. There there's benchmarks. So if if they, if they're doing a lot of volume through the platform that goes down and if they just are 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, what they call a graduation rate, a graduation

05:14>> issue where where vendors will grow with the platform and they're doing, you know, $3,400,000 a year on the platform. And they say, well, now I want my own system. So I don't want GreenPal anymore. And so we've had to to to negotiate with that and deal with that by lowering the take rate where it just becomes a no brainer. It was like, well, by the time I buy all of these systems and I pay somebody to

05:35>> run them, I might as well just pay GreenPal.

Nathan Latka

05:37Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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

06:01connect your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company,

06:25you're gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is

Supply Side: 35,000 Lawn Care Contractors

Nathan Latka

06:47this is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple.

07:12Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founder Path. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a

07:34second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hoveroverproducts, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into

08:01the interview. Yep. Okay. That's interesting. So of the lawns that were cut through Greenpao in November, how many unique lawn care companies, the supply side of your marketplace, cut those lawns?

Bryan Clayton

08:13>> Around 35,000. Depending on the time of year that goes 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 is how they get customers. This is how they

08:36>> organize them, how they manage all of their billing and routes and all of that. That's really what we're going for. We wanna be the operating system for guys and gals that make their their living in this business.

Nathan Latka

08:46Have you built software to sell those long to those lawn care companies that that help them run their business, or you haven't you haven't touched that yet?

GMV, Seasonality, and Off-Season Services

Bryan Clayton

08:53>> You know, one of the hard things about marketplaces is, you know, the marketplace founder envies the SaaS founder, and the SaaS founder envies the the market Everybody else. Yeah. One reason why I envy SaaS founders is, like, I had to build all that anyway. Like, I gotta build the route optimization. I gotta build the CRM. I gotta build the bidding system. I gotta build the review system. I gotta build every single system to make it work.

09:15>> It's kinda like, I don't know who said it, but come for the the tools, stay for the network. That's how we've tackled it. You know, for for consumers, it's an easy way to to hire a contractor. For vendors, it's an operating system. It's a way to get all the customers you want, keep it all organized, and get paid in twenty four hours. Those are the main value propositions for them.

Nathan Latka

09:34Yep. And can you so we we talk demand. We talk supply. We talk your take rates and sort of ranges. If I ask you, you know, what was the total project volume that flew through Greenpea in November? Are you comfortable sharing that number?

Bryan Clayton

09:45>> We're doing about $30,000,000 a year. So and that and that's seasonal. So that that, you know, November is the latter part of the year. December, January, February, the business really kinda goes down to a around 10% of of the, of what we do in July. So that's one of the things that makes it challenging is is the business almost turns off, in December, January, and February. We've tried to combat that by offering snow removal. You can

10:11>> now use GreenPal to hire a snow removing contractor.

Nathan Latka

10:13But Oh, cool.

Bryan Clayton

10:14>> But it's it's it's not the same as lawn mowing. Lawn mowing is our bread and butter.

Nathan Latka

10:18Well, what I was gonna say, what do those 35,000 lawn care entrepreneurs do in the winter? Don't maybe you can help them get some other kind of business like snow removal. Right?

Bryan Clayton

10:25>> That's what we do. We we we try to which that's the reason why we built it. Was like, okay. We gotta help these guys and gals stay in business. We gotta help them

Nathan Latka

10:32Yes.

Bryan Clayton

10:33>> You know, stay afloat so they'll be there in March when the grass starts growing again. So we offered, we built in snow removal, and then we also have a a system where we we offer discounts to homeowners to say, okay. You know, you can hire your contractor for leaf removal, for gutter cleaning, for for tree limb, service, for garage cleaning, all sorts of things to to help keep the lights on in the wintertime. And and we're

10:55>> always looking for for ways to do that, Christmas lights and things like that. So while while lawn mowing is 90% of the of the, the sales, we're always looking for ways to expand kind of the the cart size.

Take Rate Structure and the Graduation Rate Problem

Nathan Latka

11:06Yep. Yep. And and I guess if we can convert the GMV to a GreenPower revenue number, you said between a five to 20% take rate. I imagine some of those bigger companies using you, you probably give them, you know, seven, eight, 9% because you want them to leave the platform. I mean, could I take that 30,000,000 GMV and multiply times like an average take rate of, like, 8% and guess you're somewhere around 2.4, maybe 3,000,000 a

11:27year in revenue?

Bryan Clayton

11:28>> A little higher than that, actually. Closer to 15 is is what we average out to.

Nathan Latka

11:32Oh, you okay. That's actually so why is my why are my assumptions wrong there? Why is your average much higher in terms of your take rate than I thought it would be?

Bryan Clayton

11:39>> Well, the the of the 35,000 contractors using the platform, only three to 4,000 of them are are on that lower tier of take rate. Most of them are on the higher tier. And so we we step them down as they do more volume through the platform. And so while we want to get most of them in that cohort of people that are running their whole business on the platform, not all of them are in that, obviously.

Nathan Latka

12:02I see. Okay. Okay. So 4.5 is the number in 2023. Can you help us understand growth? What was it last year in 2022?

Bryan Clayton

12:09>> Yeah. We're we're doing about 20% a year is is what we're growing. And and, you know, if we can continue to grow You're

Nathan Latka

12:17almost shy about saying that because it's not like a 100 year over year growth, but I love that. You probably still own a 100% of the company.

12:22>> We do.

12:22Have to

12:23listen to a board. I mean, this is great.

Bryan Clayton

12:25>> You know? And, yeah, our cap table has three line items on it, three cofounders. And and, you know, in the early days, we we thought we're gonna raise capital. We tried it, and it was just a big waste of time. So we said, you know what? Let's just build a business. And and I'm glad we made that decision. The first five years really sucked. But, now we're ten, eleven years in, and and, we're in charge of

12:45>> our own destiny. One thing I like to do personally is travel. I I travel eleven months out of the year, and I couldn't do that if I had a board. I couldn't do that if I if I had investors that I was beholden So it it's it's become kind of like a fast growing lifestyle business.

Nathan Latka

12:59Do you remember when, so you launched in 2013. You're ten years in now at this point. Do you remember what year you did, a million your first year of a million dollars of revenue?

Bryan Clayton

13:08>> Yeah. It was at least four years in. It was it was 1516. Yeah. The we spent a year learning teaching ourselves how to code, and and and we're working on the product while we were building it. So that was a year, maybe even two, just getting in the game. So it was probably 2015 before we had more than a 100 customers. And and then after that, we started to figure out, okay. Well, we can't pass out

13:29>> flyers all day. Because I got one time I got bit by a dog passing out a a door So so, like, 10 customers per dog bite is not a is not a scalable user acquisition strategy.

Nathan Latka

13:40That doesn't work.

Bryan Clayton

13:41>> You have no legs left at the end that.

13:42>> Yeah. That's right. Yeah. You only got only got one leg left. And so, and so we we we bet the company on on organic SEO, and we started figuring out, okay. How do we how do we reverse engineer what big players like Angie's List and Thumbtack are doing and and apply it to to lawn mowing? And and we started to really just just bet the company on that. How do we create great content? How do we

14:01>> get people to find us when they're looking for us? And and that's when things really started to grow.

Nathan Latka

14:06How how many organic clicks do you get from Google per month right now?

Bryan Clayton

14:13>> We're getting about a 100,000, people sign up a month, through through Google organic search, and that's across that's across thousands of landing pages. We have we have landing pages, for every single little city and town all over the country. So if you live in, you know, Lincoln, Nebraska or or Peoria, Illinois, you know, there's a landing page for you to sign up for GreenPal, and it's taken us a long time to to build out that content.

14:39>> None of the tool

Nathan Latka

14:40did you use to launch a thousand landing pages at once?

Bryan Clayton

14:43>> Just good old fashioned, you know, internal tools where we would pop up an HTML page for every single one of these these cities. And and we Oh, wow. We had to build our own internal CMS. So, a content writer, which was myself for the first six, seven years, would interview all of the contractors in a Spring, Texas and would say, okay. Here are the five best contractors in spring that you can hire on Greenpile. Here's what's

15:07>> unique about them. Here's ratings about them. Here's all of the unique data that we have about them. And then that page ranks well for lawn mowing near me in Spring, Texas. And and, and and that's how we did it for every single small city in town. It was very it's a manual process because I saw I learned a lot from big players, like, that that were in kind of the horizontal, space in terms of, like, connecting,

15:31>> consumers with with home service professionals. But I saw them starting to get hit by Google because they were taking a programmatic approach to this. They were Yep. They were just they were just throwing thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of pages at Google that were all the same and just based off a little bit of unique data that they had. And I thought, I don't I don't wanna, like, wake up one day and our traffic go

15:52>> to zero in five years. So we we did a manual a manual strategy on how to build all these pages, and it took a long time. But but now it's starting to, starting to pay its dividends.

Revenue Confirmation: $4.5M in 2023 at 15% Average Take Rate

Nathan Latka

16:02I love that rapid fire stuff here, Brian, as we wrap up. First thing really quick. What's team size today? How many folks full time?

Bryan Clayton

16:07>> We're 47, all of them freelancers and contractors. Full full time is is just the three cofounders. We have zero employees, like w two employees. My first business was a landscaping company that I grew to a 150 people. And I after that, I didn't want any more employees. And so, and so now we're all freelancers and contractors, and it and it and we're all distributed. Works pretty well.

Nathan Latka

16:30I love that. Alright. Famous Five here. Number one, favorite book.

Bryan Clayton

16:34>> Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, doctor Stephen Covey.

Nathan Latka

16:37Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Bryan Clayton

16:41>> You know, my favorite CEO was Travis Kalanick. And and and since since he's no longer the CEO of GreenPal or or of Uber five years ago, you know, you know, since Elon Musk told everybody this to go screw themselves the other day, you know, that that's fun. Maybe follow him.

Nathan Latka

16:58Alright. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building GreenPal?

Bryan Clayton

17:02>> Well, I'm a big SEO nerd, so I love SEMrush. And if it wasn't for that, Trello.

Growth Rate and Cap Table: Three Co-Founders, No Outside Capital

Nathan Latka

17:07Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Bryan Clayton

17:10>> Ten.

Nathan Latka

17:11And situation, married, single, kiddos?

Bryan Clayton

17:14>> Single, no kids. And that might be my big competitive advantage.

Nathan Latka

17:18That's awesome. How old are you?

Bryan Clayton

17:20>> I'm 43.

Nathan Latka

17:21Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Bryan Clayton

17:24>> The benefits of comp of compound interest. So, these you know, when you're when we were first starting GreenPal, it took us four years to get to a 100 customers. And like, when we got to a 100 customers, we've celebrated it like it was a million. So these small numbers, so long as you can keep growing them, compounding eventually takes hold.

Nathan Latka

17:41Guys, getgreenpal.com launched in 2013. Last month in November of twenty twenty three, three hundred thousand 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 will do 30,000,000 of GMV this year here in 2023, of which about 4,500,000 GreenPal keeps as their take rate. Their take rate goes between five to 20% per job with an average 15% take rate

18:09as they look to continue to expand. No full time employees, just three founders. Brian, living the dream. Brian, thanks for taking us to top.

Bryan Clayton

18:16>> Nathan, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me on.

Nathan Latka

18:19One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

18:44Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise,

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19:28that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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