Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. Fist bump to you. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy.com, where my goal is to deep, probing interviews with entrepreneurs to understand how they came up with their ideas for their businesses, figure out how they grew them, where they got their customers.
And frankly what separates me from so many other people who have followed in my lead and started doing interviews is I don’t have a routine set of questions. “What’s your favorite color?” “What’s your favorite movie?” “What’s your favorite book?” I want to really understand how he built or she built their company.
And today I’ve got with me Jeremy Yamaguchi, the founder of LawnLove. That’s a company that I’ve heard does over $1 million in sales, but we’ll find out in this interview how far they’ve come. Lawn Love brings tech-enabled approach to lawn care industry. Somebody on my team came up with that line.
Here’s what they do. If you need somebody to mow your lawn and you happen to be in a city that they service, you just go to Lawn Love, you type in your zip code and you find somebody to come and mow your lawn and take care of your garden. That’s the idea behind Lawn Love. I’m going to find out how he built his business.
And the whole thing is sponsored by HostGator. If you’re looking build a business, maybe you want to do something like what Jeremy has done and you need somebody to host your site, all you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. You setup your site within minutes and it will scale up as you grow. It will continue to grow with you and stay up. If it doesn’t or if you have any issues, they have a good tech support number for you to call.
Go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. You’ll get 30 percent off and I want to see what you built in the comments. If you use it within the next 30 days, I will help promote it. HostGator.com/Mixergy.
Jeremy, welcome.
Jeremy: Thanks for having me.
Andrew: Hey, the $1 million number in sales–that’s since 2013. You’re a little over a year old at this point, right?
Jeremy: Yes. That’s correct.
Andrew: So, is it true that you’ve done over $1 million in sales?
Jeremy: So, we don’t actually disclose revenue. But we have, let’s just say we launched our first market a little over a year ago and are now in 17 cities across the US. We have booked tens of thousands of lawn care services.
Andrew: Tens of thousands?
Jeremy: Over 10,000. So, I guess that constitutes tens of thousands and have mowed millions, tens of millions of square feet of grass. So, take that as far as you need to, but those are our stats.
Andrew: I don’t mean to take a confrontational style. But is it in fact true that you contracted malaria at some point in your life?
Jeremy: Yes. That is in fact true.
Andrew: It is. I thought that when you get malaria you pretty much are done.
Jeremy: Yeah. Prior to the advent of quinine that used to be the case. But thanks to medical science, we can now survive that disease at a rather high rate.
Andrew: Wow.
Jeremy: I also was fortunate enough to have a non-recurring variant of malaria. So, it was a one and done sort of affair and I no longer have to battle with it.
Andrew: How do you get malaria?
Jeremy: Pardon me?
Andrew: How do you get malaria?
Jeremy: Tons out in Africa. And I’m almost certain by virtue of a mosquito. But yeah, I lived in Africa for a year at 15, Uganda specifically and travelled all over East Africa, actually Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and spent a lot of time there. My parents are missionaries originally. So, I guess at some point I encountered a malaria-laden mosquito and was blessed with this disease temporarily.
Andrew: Wow. Once you survived that, do you feel invincible?
Jeremy: You know, I don’t think it has Spiderman-esque effects. It really is just a particularly terrible series of days followed by a return to normal life. I don’t think it has granted me any additional functions, at least that I’m aware of.
Andrew: Really? I survived near bankruptcy and then I started to feel like I was invincible. Bring it on. I could do anything.
Jeremy: Yeah. Maybe it wasn’t sufficiently near death in order to introduce that sort of feeling. But it was definitely unpleasant. I was very delirious and ended up running around a hospital for a while trying to find a place to lay down and was basically just hallucinating for a few days.
Andrew: Wow. So, basically it’s like taking mushrooms. It’s not that bad.
Jeremy: So, I hear. You could have to inform me of that.
Andrew: Let me ask you about this–I’ve never taken mushrooms either–but let me ask you this, you do have a sense of confidence that I noticed when we met in person and when we talked before the interview started. You have a sense of self and awareness. Where does that come from? I thought it came from malaria. I figured you conquered malaria. You could conquer any conversation with me. You could conquer anything and you feel very sure of yourself. But if that’s not where it comes from, where is it from?
Jeremy: You know, I think the answer to that question is almost irreducibly complex. It’s like asking how anyone develops into the person they ultimately become. It is a series of factors, some of which they probably observed and can report on and the vast majority of which have influenced them in near subliminal fashion. So, I don’t know. I’m the product of all of my experiences and my environment.
Andrew: Is there any one experience that had outsized effect on your self-confidence?
Jeremy: Sure. Starting and selling a company–I’ve been entrepreneurial for as long as I can remember. I was home-schooled. I finished high school at 16 right after I emigrated here to the US and immediately started my first business, which was like a digital media consultancy. I ran that to what a 17-year old certainly would consider huge success and ran that for a number of years before eventually starting another company in an adjacent space to Lawn Love. It was an online household services marketplace. We did maids, carpets, windows, everything like that. We paired pre-screen qualified service pros with consumers.
So, grew that pretty quickly. We were 100 percent bootstrapped, no funding. We were ranked the fifth fastest-growing privately owned company in San Diego in 2013. We scaled it up to three markets–San Diego, Orange County and LA–and were acquired the same year by some private equity guys.
Andrew: I see. So, it’s the idea that you built these companies early on, one of them you sold, you keep getting traction. That’s where the confidence comes from.
Jeremy: Sure. At least in this category. That drives confidence in business because you know how to execute on the things that you need to do. It does just fundamentally come down to execution. Ideas are only so valuable. Success and performance is almost entirely predicated on execution. So, the comfort in knowing where to go and that roadmap having function is totally valuable.
Andrew: That first company that you started at 17 was Aeron Creative. It designed websites. But your copy said, “We build goal-oriented websites,” right?
Jeremy: Sure. Yeah. I’m actually surprised it’s still online. I have no idea where that’s hosted. It’s probably going to run forever.
Andrew: You even did web hosting. You had hosting for $10 a month or the Ultra Package. I can’t tell what the Ultra Package cost.
Jeremy: It’s like a walk through memory lane.
Andrew: Is it?
Jeremy: Yes.
Andrew: Were you just doing WordPress installs with strong efficiency and goal-oriented design?
Jeremy: So, the goal-oriented part I think was mostly modeled around conversion optimization. So, we have a lot of experience in user behavior, optimizing for conversion, building sites that aren’t just pretty but actually work really well. Yeah. I’m sure we built lots of WordPress sites. We built on tons of different platforms. At that point, [inaudible 00:07:39] was kind of big. I understand it’s less so today. But we built a lot of sites on that.
Andrew: You did flash design even. I’m trying to figure out what made you so special. There are so many other sites that did web design. Why did you do that with your brows when I said, “What made you special?” Why was that bothering you?
Jeremy: It doesn’t bother me. I didn’t purport that I was special.
Andrew: I feel like there’s something special. That’s part of where you get your confidence because you did well with this company at 17. Why did that company do well?
Jeremy: So, first off, at that point the web was a very different landscape. Web design as a service was actually something that you could do in relatively small form. So, it allowed you to get your early customers and kind of get your plan off the ground. Now, there are so many phenomenal websites as a service that exist, Weebly and all these types, that you don’t have quite as strong a selling proposition to just get something online.
You have to build something much more functional and complex in order to build a really substantial digital agency around this service. So, that was helpful, the fact that I started it when I did at that time in the internet.
Andrew: I see. We’re talking 2009.
Jeremy: Yeah, which seems like a long time to me, but I guess it’s not that long ago. Actually, no Aeron Creative was well before 2009.
Andrew: Oh, excuse me, 2005.
Jeremy: Yeah. That’s right.
Andrew: 2009 was Golden Shine, which we’ll talk about in a bit. Alright. I see. There weren’t any easy solutions, like you talked about Weebly, but there’s also–what’s the one that keeps advertising?
Jeremy: Wix.
Andrew: No, there’s one that keeps advertising on podcasts that for some reason I can’t think of right now.
Jeremy: Are they the guys that ran a Super Bowl ad? I know website SaaS companies ran a Super Bowl ad this year. So, it’s clearly big business at this point.
Andrew: So, that’s part of the reason why you did well. How well did you do with that business?
Jeremy: So, it wasn’t like rock star status. At the age of 18, I was probably close to six figures. Yeah, I past six figures at 18. I was making a decent personal living. But it turns out that those businesses are very difficult to scale past your individual performance. So, it was nearly inextricably tied to my time and the energy I had and the total available hours I had in a day.
Andrew: Were you the only designer?
Jeremy: Pardon me?
Andrew: Were you the only designer?
Jeremy: Yes. I was the only designer and my background was actualy in design. I did a lot of design work growing up. I loved art and aesthetics. But I did also teach myself how to write code in order to create function out of the form and turn these designs into something that actually behaved and did something. So, I was originally just a single service one-man shop and evnetulaly started bringing on a couple of engineers and programmers to help build the things that I designed. But customer-facing stuff–meetings, pitches, all that–was 100 percent me. I never got to a point where I sufficiently extracted myself from the day to day that I was able to really scale it that far past me as a solo individual service pro, I guess.
Andrew: I see. Alright. And then you had a problem with your place, with your apartment. You were trying to clean it up and what ahppeend?
Jeremy: Yeah. I just needed a cleaner in order to get this thing in order. I went online to find someone to clean my home and it turns out that there was really no good solution available. All of the current options were craigslist or Yelp where you were presented with a list of service providers you’d call and wait hours to hear back from. When they actually did show up, they were terribly unreliable. They never showed up when they said they were going to. Payments were antiquated.
There were no branded presences that allowed you to manage the service. There were a few large national chains like Molly Maid and Merry Maids. They did have a brand, but they were substantially more expensive than any other individual you could work with or any smaller time operation.
So, no one was like marrying brand–and even they were like very low-tech. So, they had like operational processes down and some marketing stuff down. But technologically, they were still thoroughly antiquated. It was sufficiently painful that I decided to go out there and build a solution for it. That’s how I started this next company.
Andrew: You built your site for it, which was fairly easy.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Andrew: Finding the cleaning people–I’ve done several interviews with entrepreneurs who have built businesses in that space and finding the cleaning people was hard for them. It must have been hard for you too, right?
Jeremy: Sure. Yeah. I mean any two-sided marketplace has this challenge of needing to scale supply in tandem with demand. You need to scale it in almost perfect linear lockstep where if you get too much supply and not enough demand, your service pros are going to leave you and they’re going to churn out because you’re not sending out enough work.
Inversely, if you get too much demand and not enough supply, bookings go out for weeks, you have reliability issues. It’s difficult to scale these sorts of businesses because you have to scale essentially two different businesses in perfect tandem. So, yeah, that was challenging.
Andrew: So, how did you find them?
Jeremy: The good news is that we built a business that allowed us to pay these service providers enough so that it was, in fact, pretty compelling for them to come and work with us versus doing this all on their own. And that value prop is actually largely consistent through Lawn Love as well.
With Lawn Love, one of the core–we’ll probably get into this in greater depth in a little bit–but being able to build something that’s compelling for the supply side of your market is absolutely essential to succeeding in these sorts of businesses. And we thankfully were able to do that with Golden Shine and it seemed to work well. We just were slow. We were bootstrapped. We didn’t grow very quickly. We grew quickly by some measures, but not quickly by–
Andrew: Let me break it down. You still needed to find both sides of your two-sided marketplace. I hadn’t realized that. If you have a marketplace of designers, you don’t need to give your designers work all the time for them to be interested. But if you a marketplace that includes cleaning people and they don’t find enough business from you, they’re just going to find it on their own and stop paying attention to you, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. Exactly.
Andrew: So, how did you find the cleaning people first before we get into how you kept them in the right supply?
Jeremy: Sure. So, actually it was a blend of craigslist and Yelp and places where they were already hanging the shingles, I guess. You’d reach out to them and tell them about what you were building and the core prop is that we can send you a lot more business.
There’s sort of an under-utilized time consideration here where a lot of these service pros–and this is true across tons of these sort of household local service industries, but also in taxis and other spaces. They’re good at rendering the core service, but they’re not typically very strong in marketing, accounting, customer service, all the sort of management stuff around running a business.
So, we extracted all of that pain from their plate and allowed them to just focus on showing up, cleaning carpets, cleaning windows or cleaning homes. That was compelling for them. We were able to sign up a lot of service providers. Supply side scaling in Golden Shine was not all that difficult.
Andrew: What about consistent service? Different cleaning people do different things. How did you keep them in line?
Jeremy: So, you’re not selling something that’s uniform and assembly line produced. You’re selling human labor. By virtue of humans being what they are, they’re variable creatures and consistency can be a problem. So, first and foremost, it starts with the screening process. You make sure that you have great onboarding protocols that allow you to find the best service providers in a geo.
Learn how to pattern match and identify the people who do have characteristics that are going to allow them to succeed and then work to bring as many of those people on board and follow that on with a bunch of post facto quality control measures–ratings, reviews, all that sort of stuff helps to ensure that quality doesn’t grade over time. Tier-based compensation so that if they have great performance and it’s persistent, they make more money per job.
Andrew: Let me break that down. We’re talking about within a year–to do pattern matching within a year seems like a lot to ask for.
Jeremy: Humans are inherently pattern matching creatures. We match patterns all the time and you just have to institutionalize that matching and share it across other people who work at your company.
Andrew: And you can get it updated within six months to know the kind of cleaning person that you want?
Jeremy: Yeah, because I already identified what was not great. I’m not going to say that you arrive at the sort of sophistication that you eventually get to over time. You definitely continue to improve. But I think like a lot of things, you realize 80 percent of the improvement with your first few iterations and without too much effort and then the subsequent steps are progressively more difficult to attain.
Andrew: What was part of the 80 percent when you were looking for people?
Jeremy: Our first criteria was just that we would background check them, make sure they weren’t criminally oriented, that they were communicative, responsive, answer their phone when you called them. That already like ruled out probably 50 percent of the supply base.
Andrew: Okay.
Jeremy: And then you have speak great English so customers could easily communicate their needs. This originally just started as a function of me not speaking Spanish. But it turns out that’s actually what a lot of our customers wanted and asked for.
Andrew: What did they want?
Jeremy: They wanted service providers who spoke good English so they could easily communicate their needs. Originally, I just didn’t speak Spanish. That’s why I worked with people who spoke English. It turns out that customers actually really wanted that, largely because they didn’t share or they shared the same non-Spanish speaking properties that I do. So, that was a core prop that I think a lot of people appreciated. We got there very quickly. Those initial traits were easy to identify. That did represent a lot of the major upfront benefits of working with us.
Andrew: Okay. You said that you also had good onboarding. What was your onboarding?
Jeremy: So, that’s just how you institutionalize these screening processes and allow you to repeat them and have other people who are tasked with finding these service providers repeat them as well. And then also how you communicate your ethos and your philosophy and how you do business to your service providers as well and how you communicate these things clearly so that expectations are–
Andrew: Be more specific. How do you do that? We’re all trying to be really communicative, really clear, but some of us have better onboarding than others. What does that look like concretely?
Jeremy: Okay. It’s a series of documents, first and foremost. These documents outline both what sort of policies you have and procedures you have as a company, how you operate so that that’s not ambiguous and it’s really obvious to everyone, like, “In Y scenario, X happens.” That reduction of ambiguity is very healthy and really helps ensure that you have successful experiences.
Andrew: And you put that into a document that you give a cleaning person.
Jeremy: Yes. It would create like this master plan for onboarding where all of the service providers read it. They understand how things work. They have reference to it. We also built back-end software, where they would actually be able to manage the service. Being really smart about how you design that software, making it super user-friendly so that they don’t get confused or they don’t make mistakes and it’s basically bullet proof and pairing it with a lot of onboarding and user walkthrough and workflow stuff–
Andrew: So, the documentation is actually a set of documents. Are cleaning people actually reading these documents? I see a lot of my entrepreneur friends who create these beautifully written documents that actually read like human beings have written them and they’re detailed and they tell you what to do in every scenario and I wonder, “Who is even reading this? This is a lot of homework for someone who just feels like they got it.”
Jeremy: So, one of the, I guess, important functions of this document is to not be too long. You don’t want to send someone a book. So, you want to distill your core values into as reduced a form as is possible. That makes it much more likely that they’re going to read it and follow it. But again, it’s not just the document. It’s in how we build our software. It’s in the tools that we give them on an ongoing basis to help them manage their performance.
If they have questions, having responsive support people who are going to be there to help them and answer their questions. Onboarding doesn’t stop once they sign up and do their first job. If you were to just ignore them from there, quality would degrade and they’d go off the rails at some point.
Andrew: So, you had the documentation. You also said software walkthrough. Maybe I’m getting too deep in the weeds with this. But the reason I’m wondering is if we can work with people in an organized way, then it’s almost like we can build our companies to bigger and bigger sizes. When you’re talking about a company like yours with a lot of humans, a lot of different kinds of people. They don’t work for you. They’re independent contractors. You don’t have full control over them.
If you know how to organize them, then I know we can learn how to organize our smaller teams of people who might be working in the office with us. So, one thing that you’ve said I’ve seen over and over. It’s good documentation–not too long, very clear and talks about how to handle every issue. The other thing you said was software. What was the software part that needed to be easy and that helped people onboard?
Jeremy: So, our core premise–we were first and foremost a software company. It just happened to be in the household service space. We were ultimately designing tools to match pre-screened and qualified service providers with customers and make the process of booking and managing your service dramatically better, which is exactly what we’re building with Lawn Love.
So, part of that is the supplier side software, where each of our service providers have in this case was it was a web app that they would be able to login. They can see all available jobs. They can request the jobs they want. They can submit reports on the jobs they completed.
There were a lot of tools there to help them manage their schedule and optimize their routes to ensure that they spend less time behind a wheel and actually more time making money, which is a really core value for the, unsurprisingly. And then you can design that same software that does that same thing in many different ways.
You could design it terribly, where it’s not particularly user-friendly. And while the core functionality exists, the behaviors and the interaction design is horrible and it ultimately confuses your user and isn’t a great experience and they make way more mistakes, user error abounds. Or you can design it well. So, onboarding and being smart about this meant designing that software as well as we could in order to improve seamless interactions and reduced friction when they used it.
Andrew: Okay. And then how did you get customers?
Jeremy: Huge variety of web channels. So, starting with the standard SEO/SEM, social, all that down to offline, inside sales lightly–we just got started in that prior to the acquisition–direct marketing, all sorts of stuff. But it was predominately web-centric. The vast majority of our inbound did come from the usual suspects of Google and Yelp and all of those primary local service channels.
Andrew: Were you buying ads on Yelp?
Jeremy: We tested it. It turns out that the Yelp advertising programs at the time were horrendous. I did some internal math and we were on their paid self-serve option for a few of our markets. They were trying to convince us to sign up for this yearly subscription where we had the privilege–I reduced them down and got them to give me a number of what their CTRs were on the banners.
We would have the privilege of signing up for a year’s contract to pay 4x per customer acquisition cost than we were paying for the self-serve, pay as you go option. So, it was thoroughly compelling and we never signed up for it. But I’ve since negotiated a much better deal with them for Lawn Love. We’re happy advertisers on Yelp today.
Andrew: I see. Direct marketing you said worked for you. What kind of direct marketing?
Jeremy: Direct mail, in some cases door hangers. We ran a lot of tests.
Andrew: You just sent somebody out to put these brochures essentially on people’s doors attached by rubber bands.
Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. And just built sufficiently good tracking and attributions so that we could measure performance and know what worked and what didn’t. It turns out that there was a high variance in outcome, even with the same exact creative and it felt kind of random. But it, in a lot of cases, did work.
Andrew: Could it be based on location, that maybe some parts of town got better results than others?
Jeremy: Yeah, maybe location or other difficult or unobservable factors like maybe there’s a cadence at which people clean their homes and we hit them right after the greater percentage of that population had just finished cleaning it and wasn’t feeling the dirty pain. I don’t know. Maybe it was just like bad markets for other reasons. Maybe this was a subset of the population that didn’t outsource the service. But there was a lot of variance in results and it was an interesting experiment.
Andrew: How much did you grow the business to in sales?
Jeremy: So, when I sold the company, we were at $1.5 million.
Andrew: Wow. And you guys were profitable?
Jeremy: Oh yeah. We were bootstrapped. So, we were always profitable.
Andrew: Over half a million in profit?
Jeremy: Yeah, easily.
Andrew: Wow. So, why did you sell? You were doing really well. You discovered a problem that could scale across the country.
Jeremy: Oh, why did I sell? A variety of reasons, to be honest with you. The first and foremost of which is that it turns out that while I was building this company in sort of 100 percent bootstrap form, other players had come along that had raised substantial venture funding.
So, it was really a decision from me of either go out and try to raise a bunch of VC or sell the company. But I probably wasn’t going to continue doing it without raising capital and just totally bootstrapping it because there were such well-funded players a couple years into it. I started this in ’09. Most of them got started in 2012.
So, a couple years in, we raised a bunch of funding and we’re essentially artificially subsidizing their costs using venture capital that it was going to–it’s still a large market and consumers demand choice and we had built a really good service, but we’re structurally disadvantaged in that we can’t afford to give away house cleanings for $19. That’s dramatically below the actual cost of rendering the service.
So, you either have to go out and raise money to be able to compete on price or sell the company and go do something else that’s also equally interesting. It turned out that I decided to do the latter.
Andrew: I’m looking at all these different companies that I’ve interviewed that do cleaning services. We’re looking at MyClean, which is a big company, Gmaids, Maids in Black, Amber Maids, unreal.
Jeremy: There are a lot of them.
Andrew: But they discovered a problem.
Jeremy: Most of them started around ’11 or ’12 if I’m not mistaken. So, there was this gold rush around cleaning at some point. We proceeded like any observable similar player in the space. But it wasn’t–it’s just like in hindsight, sure, we should have gone out and raised a metric ton of venture capital and scaled this nationally. But I was also not interested in pursuing that route at that point and didn’t appropriately, I guess, assess the structural advantage that that would represent and not just a speed advantage. It could have been like an existential one.
Andrew: What do you mean?
Jeremy: Well, the reason you do these aggressive discounting behaviors is essentially to drive your competitors out of the market. We weren’t under immediate threat. I saw them launching a lot of markets adjacent to us. It was clear that the space was no longer as wide open and easily accessible with super low tax and like low hanging fruit across the board. It was going to get more expensive to acquire customers.
Your unique value prop of being this tech enabled service was also shared by other companies who had also built similar tech, so you’re less differentiated. I think it’s just quite clear that lots of competition makes industries harder, right? Presumably, we were still growing very quickly. We, at that point, had just been ranked the fifth fastest rowing privately owned company in San Diego. It’s just a safe assumption that future growth was going to be more difficult by tooth and claw. And I didn’t expect that there was going to be a great opportunity to raise more venture funding in this exact space.
There were two very well-funded companies who had already started. VCs, while they, in my experience, to see other funded companies to a degree because it validates the market. If there are also very clear leaders who have raised post-series Bs, they’re probably going to be like, “Well, I’m not convinced that you’re going to be able to go from this C-stage size to beating them.”
Andrew: It sounds like your decision was really sound to not pursue it. For a minute there I thought you were regretting it a little bit though.
Jeremy: not at all. I love my life.
Andrew: It sounds like it’s a great idea and a great decision based on a really good assessment of the market. It made you into a millionaire and allowed you to have the ability to do whatever you wanted to do next without worrying about whether some partner at some VC firm is going to bless your idea, right?
Jeremy: Sure. It’s not that I don’t worry about that because now we’re running a venture-funded company in an adjacent market. I don’t spend too much time worrying about it because we are building something that’s really great.
Andrew: But I mean, before you raised money for this, you were actually turned down by Y Combinator once. It wasn’t the end of your life or wasn’t the end of the road for your idea because you were set a little bit.
Jeremy: Yeah. Absolutely. I think that’s actually one of the things that they look for. Anecdotally, I’d say a substantial portion, maybe as high as 50 percent of my current batch had applied more than once, in some cases, many times.
First off, I think it’s a really strong signal for them–and other seed stage funds or accelerators–where, if you come to them with a really early stage idea, by virtue of it being brand now, you don’t have any traction to show them because you really haven’t launched it to market. And then they say no and you go out there and you actually build this thing and you drive real traction and you’re growing impressively fast. And then you come back and you say, “Hey, look what I’ve done.”
That’s a compelling argument, right? You basically have eliminated execution risk, at least early stage execution risk on their part and they don’t have to wonder, “Is this person just here for if and only if they get in or are they actually driven and going to build something significant?”
Andrew: And you were driven. So, you took a short vacation and then you decided, “I’m going to go into lawn care.” Where did the idea for lawn care come from?
Jeremy: So, it was just an obvious adjacent vertical to me. I did look at a bunch of other spaces. I looked at in-home personal care, like elderly care. That seemed a little problematic on the litigious front. And then there were lots of other places, like nannies.
I looked at the individual characteristics of each of these markets. I liked the lawn care space because it isn’t as–unlike something like nannying where you have this deep emotional attachment between your service provider and your customer, your supply side objects aren’t as, I guess, fungible and easily replaceable. Not that you replace them as people, but if they don’t show up to a job, you can send someone else who’s sufficiently good and it’s still a great outcome for the customer.
Andrew: If my nanny can’t show up today, you can’t send me another nanny.
Jeremy: I can’t send you a random person. It just doesn’t happen. So, the logistics around those sorts of businesses are mind-numbingly difficult, at least at scale. At small sizes, everything is easy, but at scale it gets really hard. That and a bunch of other factors drove the decision to ultimately start a company in this space. So, I got into Y Combinator, raised a seed round and now we’re running very fast.
Andrew: Let me ask you this. I don’t get that in your past you had a great love for lawns or for cleaning. There’s this thing about entrepreneurship where they often will tell you–Gary Vaynerchuk will often say, “Find something you just love and you’re super passionate about.” But you don’t seem like someone who’s super passionate about grass. So, would you say that passion is not important or that there’s something else you’re passionate about that I’m not picking up on?
Jeremy: No. It’s absolutely important. There is something that I’m passionate about that you’re not picking up on. What I am passionate about is not so much like grass, like, “Oh my god, I love grass so much.” I’m really passionate about bringing tech-enabled solutions to traditionally low tech spaces because the value of the technology that you introduce to a space is directly proportionate to the traditionally low tech nature of that space because you see the greatest degree of improvement. That’s where you can measure these things in real terms. It’s like an observable and significant difference.
So, that is incredibly exciting to me. I love building companies that do exactly that. It fundamentally improves people’s lives. It might seem like it’s not the most painful thing in the world, to have to constantly be replacing your lawn tech because they’re churning on you or because they’re not showing up or because the service is bad. But if you scale that times tens of thousands of people, you’re saving people eventually millions of hours and a huge amount of headache. It’s a valuable service. You’re creating real market value.
Andrew: Alright. You’ve got the idea. You’ve started it. It seems like it was very similar to the previous business, to Golden Shine. You had to go online to find your gardeners, right? Is that where oyu got them?
Jeremy: Yeah.
Andrew: Craigslist, that sort of thing.
Jeremy: Yeah. Essentially, you go to wherever these people hang out. A lot of them are on craigslist, Yelp, where they list their services and that’s a good place to find them.
Andrew: You told Jeremy Weisz, our producer that one of the first things you did is you bought ads. Why was that a first step or an early step?
Jeremy: So, it’s essentially the Lean startup model where you want to build something that’s thoroughly MVP. Then you shoot a bunch of ads at it and see what sort of traction it has. I briefly entertained the on demand personal training business as well. That was also pretty neat and I liked some of the characteristics of it and ultimately other funded companies have started in that space since then and they seem to be doing well, so it’s clearly a great industry.
But you just want to validate any of these assumptions as quickly as possible and in as lean a fashion as possible. So, ads are a great way to do that because they don’t have this long cycle time like SEO. You can basically drive a bunch of highly targeted, intention-driven users to your website. Whether or not they take action validates any of your assumptions.
Andrew: You were buying Google ads?
Jeremy: Yeah, AdWords ads.
Andrew: AdWords ads, sending them over to a page that asks for nothing but a zip code to see will people give you a zip code to try to get a quote. There was no quote-building mechanism back there after that, was there?
Jeremy: Yeah. We’ve gotten dramatically more sophisticated in the quote process.
Andrew: But back then, when you’re talking about that MVP, minimum viable product–
Jeremy: Wholly rudimentary.
Andrew: So, let me ask you this. If somebody is listening to this and hears–I mentioned my sponsor earlier–and they’re saying, “You know what? HostGator can host whatever website I want. I’m just going to go to that site and I’ll create a business similar to Jeremy’s and see if just a landing page gets me enough conversions to validate that there’s a business here.” What business should they try? What’s one idea that you feel like you would try if you were sitting on the sidelines right now and waiting for an opportunity.
Jeremy: I just mentioned it, like personal training is great.
Andrew: You still think personal training has legs, even though you mentioned that there are some competitors in the space?
Jeremy: Yeah. They haven’t raised as much funding. They’re not, I don’t think to my observation, as tenacious or hard-working as us in the lawn care market. But yeah, personal training is great because you have this huge population of skilled trainers who just aren’t like equipped to market themselves. They’re working for LA Fitness and they’re being paid way below market. LA Fitness builds them out as these exorbitant margins. It’s a phenomenal business because there’s this great margin opportunity because LA fitness already makes so much money on them and pays the individual services so little.
Andrew: And LA Fitness is a gym?
Jeremy: So, yeah, you go out there and you pair consumers with personal trainers. I think it also has a market expanding effect, where there a lot of people who would love to hire a personal trainer and have the resources to do so but don’t like the idea of working out in front of other people. Maybe they’re self-conscious or they’re overweight or something like that and it’s just uncomfortable for them to work out at a gym. If someone comes to their home and trains them in the privacy of their home, those are users that are essentially non-existent in the market. The market is already fairly large.
Andrew: I get it.
Jeremy: So, those users would further expand the market.
Andrew: See, I love the way you think about this stuff. Your market is large already. There is also an opportunity to grow it. The customer might have a problem with going to the gym and might want someone to just come over to their house. I also get the sense that there are a lot of people who don’t necessarily need a personal trainer. All they need is an accountability buddy and if they pay them, then they feel more accountable and that person feels like there’s more of a responsibility to hold them accountability.
So, you actually did this. You created a landing page, asked for people’s zip codes. What happened with that?
Jeremy: So, I ran that in tandem with a bunch of other tests, of which Lawn Love was one. I think it might have been because it was so adjacent to what I had already been building and I had so much experience in the in home services space, but it just ended up tracking better and I ultimately decided to run with this full time. So, yeah, it was very intentional and iterative in my, “What am I going to do next process?” and I ultimately arrived at Lawn Love.
But the signals, it certainly wasn’t invalidated as a prospective business. So, if you’re looking for something to do and you don’t want to go head to head in lawns, you should look at personal training.
Andrew: That makes a lot of sense. Oh, I should say, go to HostGator.com/Mixergy to get 30 percent off your hosting if you want it.
Jeremy: Do it.
Andrew: Thank you. So then why did you go to Y Combinator? Why didn’t you say, “Hey, I did this already before. Now I have a little bit more money and more security and more knowledge than I did before. I’ll just bootstrap this thing and make it into a real company yet again.” Why did you go to Y Combinator and try to raise money?
Jeremy: I think you normally, it’s just like a normal human behavior that ambitions tend to just scale over time, right? As you accomplish something, that becomes baseline. You then have to strive for progressively bigger things. In order to reach and achieve the goals that I had set for Lawn Love, venture funding was a necessity because it is the only way that you can move as fast as we are moving.
And yeah, bootstrapping is great. There’s a really good argument for why you should do it. A lot of people do it very successfully. There are tons of examples of large, successful, 100 percent owned companies that are bootstrapped from day one. But usually they have the unfortunate property of requiring really high margins and money that they can essentially dump into the business in order to scale it.
That has a slower wrap up period because when you start with zero dollars, you either have self-funding for a long time, in which case you’re not really bootstrapped, you’re essentially just self-angeled, or it just takes a long time to get to a critical mass where you can have this progressively more accelerated pace. Venture capital does allow a shortcut of sorts to that hyper-growth speed and that’s why we pursued it.
Andrew: You sat down Y Combinator. You were facing how many partners the first time? Do you remember?
Jeremy: Seven.
Andrew: Seven. And how did they treat your interview?
Jeremy: They were great. They’re phenomenal people. I have the best things to say about everyone at Y Combinator. But let’s just say that the interview process isn’t particularly pleasant. It’s pretty adversarial and it’s intentionally so. They’re first trying to see if you rattle. They want to make sure that you’re someone who sustains pressure relatively well. Also, they’re just doing everything they can to invalidate your idea.
If you’re not able to defend it, it shows that you probably haven’t thought about it very well. People who think about things deeply and are really thoughtful tend to be more likely to succeed at these things. So, they are trying to validate a, that you’re resilient and b, that you’re really, really informed about what you’re going to build and likely to succeed.
Andrew: Do you remember one area where they pushed back where you thought, “I hadn’t realized this would be an issue and they made me think?”
Jeremy: Sure. Yeah. They immediately got really granular with economics. So, they were asking me questions around the cost to acquire customers and the total volume by lead channel and I was like, “I have no idea. This is like very new. But you shouldn’t have that. You ultimately, if you’re going to have a really credible argument for why you should take other people’s money to scale something huge, you should have a very good idea of what you’re going to do with that money and how the unit economics look at your company.
Andrew: Even at that stage, shouldn’t you figure that out once you’re in Y Combinator? I’m seeing a lot of companies that come out of Y Combinator or go into Y Combinator, excuse me, not knowing where at all they’re going to get their customers.
Jeremy: Yeah. So, I guess it depends on what stage you’re at. The old adage is that before you have traction, you can sell hopes and dreams. But once you have traction, you can no longer–
Andrew: I see. And you walked in with traction and what you were selling was traction. So, they wanted to know, “Give me the numbers behind the traction. What are your channels?” So, what channels did you have back then?
Jeremy: So, we were mostly just SEO, SEM and a few offline channels and a few social channels. We were very new, like maybe three or four or five channels, tops. It was very nascent. But yeah, exactly. Once you have traction, you have to understand it and you have to give them good arguments as to what constitutes that traction and assure them that it is not just a fiction or something that is temporary and soon to dissipate. So, that’s really important.
There are lots of great companies that are founded by incredibly smart people who go through YC and they come in with just an idea. I haven’t gotten into YC on just an idea, so I imagine the question asking process is just very different, although probably equally hard. And they just ask you questions that are probably less metrics-driven and more trying to invalidate your idea broadly.
Andrew: They turned you down?
Jeremy: Initially, yeah.
Andrew: And why didn’t you go to somebody else? Why didn’t you say there are tons of other Y Combinator competitors?
Jeremy: Yeah, but there’s no other Y Combinator.
Andrew: What was it about them?
Jeremy: They are, by many orders of magnitude, the leader in the market accelerator space. Just if you measure this exclusively as a function of valuation of the companies they’ve funded, they are so far ahead of the next runners up that it makes them look like they’re all not even competing.
Andrew: I see. And you said, “If I’m going to get money from someone else, I want it to be from the best. The best is Y Combinator. They brought up some really good points, very valid. I have to work on them anyway. I might as well work on them and come back to Y Combinator and get money from the best.”
Jeremy: That was it. Yeah. And I should rephrase this. I don’t want to disparage some of the other programs as well, like Techstars is a good program. 500 Startups–
Andrew: 500 Startups is fantastic.
Jeremy: Yeah. There are good programs. But in terms of the outcomes–they’re just the original accelerator. They’ve been around the longest. They have this density of expertise and phenomenal pattern matching skills and really just brand as well that is distinctly advantageous.
So, if I was going to go for any of them–it’s like saying, “Why would you go to a good school?” I’m not a credentialist. I didn’t even go to college. I started a company right out of high school. I was home schooled. So, if anyone probably is less impacted by credentials, it’s me. But I was more interested in the more material facts of this accelerator and it seemed to be a really strong argument.
Andrew: You went back. You reapplied. They brought you in for an interview. That time, did you have the answers to the channel questions?
Jeremy: Oh yeah. So, we had lots of growth, lots of tractions and I was intimately familiar with all the details of the business. Yeah. It went well and got in.
Andrew: What did you know better at that point about getting customers? What did you learn that you can teach us?
Jeremy: So, I learned a lot about this specific business in the interim, right? First off, the first time I didn’t even have much traction at all. So, I just launched and I think I had a month of traction. They were asking me all these channel-based questions and obviously I didn’t have the answers there. By the next time I applied, we were a few months in, six months in, actually, because every six months is the cycle.
All of our channels, I don’t think they expect you to be an expert on everything at that point because you’re still rather early. But I had a really good idea of what the landscape looked like, exactly what kind of volumes we were seeing in these various channels and how fast we expected to be able to accelerate those individual volumes and also what other channels we were thinking about that we could bring online that would be tolerably low-priced.
Andrew: So, you knew what it would cost you to acquire a customer buying ads on Google. You knew potentially how many customers you could get if you had more money. You knew other channels like search engine optimization, how effective that would be for you. It doesn’t seem like it’s super effective for you, from what I see.
Jeremy: Yeah. We have a background in this. We’re good at this stuff.
Andrew: So, is SEO actually a really good source of traffic? From what I can see, it’s not huge for you.
Jeremy: Volume is not massive. SEO, it’s interesting. The long-term market is actually twice the size of the house cleaning market in the US. But it represents about a fourth as much search volume, at least in the markets that I’ve run, both companies. It might be a function of the age demographic. People who buy lawn care might typically skew older and be more likely to go to other places like Angie’s List or Yellow Pages or something to find a service provider.
Andrew: because a 25-year old might need somebody to come clean his house because he’s working nonstop, but he’s not going to need a lawn care provider because he doesn’t have a lawn.
Jeremy: Because he lives in a dense urban environment, right? It’s hyper-suburban.
Andrew: And so, he’s going to go online and search because that’s who he is. He might even pull up his phone. I see. So, that’s one of the differences.
Jeremy: That’s a theory. I’m not certain that that’s why, but that is a theory that I’ve developed as to why there’s this volume difference despite the overall market size being smaller, but the total online intention being larger.
Andrew: It does seem, though, that lawn care makes for better copy. You’ve written blog posts about the lawn at Major League Baseball, which is not something you could do about cleaning. You’ve written posts about everything you need to know about lawns in Orange County or something like that.
Jeremy: Yeah. We have an awesome content person named Sarah. She’s phenomenal and she does a lot of that copy for us.
Andrew: What other channels worked for you?
Jeremy: So, we’re honestly super channel-agnostic. If it’s something that you can pay dollars to advertise on and you can measure and track performance, we’ll give you dollars and we’ll track it.
Andrew: So, what have you done?
Jeremy: So, we’ve done everything from Yellow Pages to, again, print, direct mail–
Andrew: Facebook is big for you?
Jeremy: We’re exploring some guerilla stuff where we’re looking at doing some offline unconventional PR hacks. PR has also been a decent channel for us, although it’s a mixed bag. It’s succeeded in some areas and not others. Yeah. Any like major social or review site that allows you to give them dollars for visits, we’ll test it.
Andrew: You mentioned Yelp earlier, that’s worked for you.
Jeremy: Yelp’s good. Yeah.
Andrew: You’ve done Groupon. Has that been positive?
Jeremy: You know, Groupon is difficult because you can drive a bunch of initial customers but the quality of those customers is rather low. And it is very dangerous to fill your entire customer base with these low quality, high churn rate customers because not only does that drag down your overall metrics pretty significantly, but it just ultimately is hard to make money with that customer source. So, yeah, we’ve tried ti. I’m not going to give you every single key to the kingdom here. But we try a lot of things. Some of them work and most of them don’t. But that’s business.
Andrew: Has Facebook worked for you?
Jeremy: Occasionally. That’s a very tough channel.
Andrew: Here’s something that I’ve noticed. You don’t give me all the keys to the kingdom, which I get, but I have to do my research and one of the things that I’ve noticed is you guys had the Stamplive virus on your site, malware.
Jeremy: How did you notice that? That’s awesome. That was a misread by Google. So, they mis-tagged us for three hours like two days ago, saying, “Hey, your URL has malware on it.” I followed up with our dedicated rep at AdWords and they’re like, “No, it doesn’t. We’ll clear this.”
Andrew: I’ll tell you actually where it came from. I’m seeing a different thing. I’ve got a SimilarWeb account, Pro.SimilarWeb.com. I go in there and see where your traffic goes. I saw a large number of your people go to Facebook, which makes sense. SumoMe, which means you were using one of the SumoMe toolbars, and then I see Stamplive.com was getting some traffic from you. That means that you must have had something that was sending people over to Stamplive.com, which means you might have had the malware. That’s where I came up with that. You’re saying you didn’t have it.
Jeremy: To Google’s analysis, we don’t. But I assume this will resurface again if there’s some issue. So, yeah, I just followed up with them and they said, “Hey, there’s no problem. We did a review. This was a false flag.”
Andrew: Interesting.
Jeremy: I’m not sufficiently deep on the IT infrastructure side to tell you whether or not that can be a masking issue or something unrelated or malicious. But if it exists, it’s easy to correct. To my knowledge, it doesn’t exist.
Andrew: Okay.
Jeremy: All good. You’re deep. You have done your research.
Andrew: I try.
Jeremy: Have you looked up our DNS servers and saved those for later or what?
Andrew: Did I what?
Jeremy: I don’t know. I’m surprised. You probably have like combed our code base and tried to find Easter eggs, which there are some. You should look.
Andrew: In some cases I do that. Actually no, I haven’t found an Easter egg. I do like to do a view source to see what’s going on, on a site. I do like to go to–actually SimilarWeb has really changed things for me. The account with SimilarWeb lets me see what your ad landing page looks like. Some people use wacky ads to try to promote stuff that they don’t usually talk about. In your case, there’s not much that I see here, but I do see your landing page.
Jeremy: Interesting. So, that would out people who are using like socially unacceptable stuff in dark corners of the internet in order to drive traffic.
Andrew: Oh, totally.
Jeremy: That’s fascinating.
Andrew: I can see what ads you buy. In your case, actually, can I see that? Let me see. Display advertising, social, let me do search and I’ll tell you what ads they show me.
Jeremy: You’re not going to find anything inappropriate.
Andrew: I don’t think I’m going to find anything inappropriate with you. This is actually really good for running on your competitors. So, if someone types in “lawn service,” you guys buy an ad that says, “Awesome lawn care service. Great rates, great lawn care and 100 percent guarantee.” “Organic lawn care,” “Danbury,” I’m guessing that’s a city that you target, and you guys bought an ad that says “lawn care service,” that’s not really especially helpful for us here. Popular keywords within search terms–let’s see if we can pull that up. They give me a lot of deep insight.
Jeremy: Nice.
Andrew: Let’s see. Are you doing anything creative? “Custom care aeration” is big for you. “Sugarland,” I don’t know what that is, but you guys are big with that term.
Jeremy: That’s a suburb in Houston.
Andrew: Okay. And Austin, Lakeworth, Texas, “advisor Dallas,” I don’t know. In this case, it’s not especially helpful.
Jeremy: Yeah. But thanks for noticing.
Andrew: That’s why the pre-interview is helpful. So, so far I’ve talked about your confidence. I’ve talked about how well you’re doing. I don’t want to leave people with the sense that you’re superman. So, what you and Jeremy Weisz our producer talked about is really helpful for us to talk about now, which is you said, “Look, entrepreneurship has peaks and valleys.” You have lived your peaks and we’ve talked about your peaks.
But we haven’t yet talked about the valleys. In your valleys, you experienced, you’ve told Jeremy, self-doubt, perception of threats, problems. Can you remember a time–are you in touch enough with that part of yourself that you can remember a time when you were full of self-doubt?
Jeremy: Sure. Entrepreneurship is this natural pendulum, I guess, between highs and lows and like confidence and doubt because–and I think that’s largely driven by the fact that when you succeed at something, it gets back to the whole progressively increased baseline and sort of incremental increase in ambition.
When you succeed at something, you reset sort of what constitutes good enough and what your baseline is. And then you have to continually strive for things you otherwise haven’t done yet and constantly do new things in order to achieve new things.
It turns out that the unknown is a source of great fear for a lot of people. That’s what drives most fear in humans, just unknown, unknown properties in things or unknown risk. When you’re doing new things, you’re constantly facing unknown challenges or at least ones where you don’t have a full and complete grasp of their characteristics.
Andrew: Give me a personal example. What’s a time when you were filled with this kind of self-doubt or this lack of certainty that hurt you?
Jeremy: Sure. Well, there was one time with Golden Shine where we received a notice from the California Economic Development Department, the EDD, which is basically the labor law board where they were auditing us for worker classification purposes, to make sure that all of our independent housecleaners and carpet cleaners were actually independent and weren’t actually employees. That would have had dramatic and catastrophic effects on the company if they were to reclassify them because they’d assess all sorts of back taxes and it totally blows up your business model and it’s very problematic.
We were very aware with what the compliance concerns were and there’s a multi-step process that the IRS and the EDD look at in order to assess worker classification issues. We were confident that we were compliant, but it’s always still a somewhat grey affair, where if you get a bad auditor who just has it in you, they can ignore a lot of your compliant arguments and areas where you are doing things well and pinpoint it on some obscure thing that then drives their case to try to reclassify.
So, that was a source of substantial stress. You wake up in the morning and you open a piece of mail that says, “You’re being audited.” That is certainly a day-ruining event for anyone. It’s a many months process. That was not a great couple months. You are concerned about real existential risks to the company that you’ve built. Thankfully, the conclusion obviously is good in that the company survived and wasn’t reclassified.
Andrew: How did you get past that? When you’re by yourself, you don’t have any investors to go to who have already done this before, you have to solve it on your own but you also have to get your head straight and you might be a little bit tired. How did you deal with that, with the head part of it, the mental game?
Jeremy: So, I think that’s a learned skill. You expose yourself to enough stressful events and they start to reduce in like the total gravity and impact. And also just having a good support network of friends–I have an incredibly supportive wife who despite the fact that I’m a solo founder, I think she in some ways fulfills the emotional role of a cofounder in that when I’m in a valley on the rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship, she’s there to support me and she is a listening ear and incredibly just insightful.
Andrew: What does she say in a situation like that? She can’t help what the IRS is going to decide. She can’t be there to solve this problem.
Jeremy: You want to actually hear what’s been an effective solution to me? It’s interesting. It is a reduction to the worst case scenario. So, I look at this and I say in the world where everything blows up and every single decision works against your favor, where are you? What are you doing? And my answer to that has ultimately come down to probably living in a cabin in the woods, which would be actually a really beautiful life and it’s really like ultimately not that bad.
Like in the worst case scenario, if everything that you’ve built implodes, you still have these core and highly valuable functions and skills. That’s marketable. That’s valuable. You can go out and build something new. You still have the energy, presumably, to continue building. Even if that energy failed and you reduce it down to its most absurd and dramatic outcome, you’re still like living a life that most people would consider to be idyllic.
When you reduce the evil and the bad down to that, it loses its power and it ceases to be as effective on you. I think that has proven to be a pretty effective counter-treatment whenever I am in the, “Oh my god, what if,” scenario phase.
Andrew: I see. That makes a lot of sense. So, when you got into that situation, before your wife said, “Hey, look, what’s the worst case?” She helped you get back to what the worst case scenario is and you were able to deal with the IRS issue at that point.
Jeremy: Yeah. It was very helpful.
Andrew: Hey, you were here in the office a few weeks ago, right?
Jeremy: Yeah. Is that the office? I was up there. Yes.
Andrew: Oh, I didn’t bring you here. I should have brought you to take a look at where the recording actually happens. But yeah, that’s the office. That’s here on the twelfth floor at Mixergy.
Jeremy: Cool. Yes. I was.
Andrew: What brought you to the event? I know Jeremy invited you. But I thought you lived in San Francisco. You don’t.
Jeremy: I live in San Diego. Yeah. I was actually up for a Y Combinator event as well and paired those two together but I also wanted to see you guys.
Andrew: I’m glad. We had such a great conversation. I could have talked to you all night. I liked your openness.
Jeremy: We need to do that again.
Andrew: I want to end it with this. I’m really curious about the Y Combinator network, the support network that you have with them now that you’ve already gone through the three-month program. What’s it like? Physically, what do you get? Do you get a chatroom where you guys chat with each other? Is it email?
Jeremy: It’s like a mailing list and a forum. It’s not the tech mechanics of it that are good. It’s the people participating. What’s really amazing about it, actually, isn’t just that they manage to aggregate this collection of some of the smartest people in entrepreneurship who agree to be in this one place. That’s hard.
But they have managed to create an environment where these people are profoundly helpful and engaged. In my previous experiences, I’ve been a member of like CEO groups and things where they get people who are accomplished and smart together and they’re like, “Hey, we’re going to help each other.” But it turns out that they’re usually just crickets after a while. It doesn’t meet that critical mass or meet some pivotal point where it actually takes off and sustains.
But I think what drives it for Y Combinator is first that they look for people who are actually generally good people. They don’t want to work with people who are assholes, generally, first that’s not individually pleasant. And they are sufficiently well-positioned that they have the choice between working with you and not working with you and they kind of select the people who they want to work with. But it’s also just you get a lot of help going through the program from alumni and people who have otherwise gone through. You feel this sense of duty to help other people.
Andrew: I see. Yeah.
Jeremy: You want to pay it back and in a sense pay it forward. Presumably, before long, you’re going to have offered far more help than you ever individually received. Many batches down the road, I’m going to have helped so many more people than I individually received help from. But I think maybe they just select people who are also intrinsically helpful, who care about other people succeeding.
Andrew: It also kind of feels like if you’re working with someone for three months, side by side, you guys know each other, you’re kidding around with each other, you’re watching each other’s growth, you’re being a little jealous but also a little bit inspired by some people, you’ve bonded with them in a way that allows that online interaction to be more meaningful and for you to care about them.
Jeremy: Oh, sure. That’s important, right? These aren’t just amorphous screennames.
Andrew: But it’s a mailing list and it’s a forum.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Andrew: The mailing list, doesn’t that get a little bit packed because of the people that have gone through it?
Jeremy: I’m pretty sure it’s curated.
Andrew: I see. So, you email in and they will only message out the ones that they want.
Jeremy: Yeah. I don’t actually know all of the background mechanics there, but I think that what works. And then the forum is a slightly less formal form of that.
Andrew: What do you guys use for the forum software?
Jeremy: It’s part of Hacker News.
Andrew: It’s all within Hacker News?
Jeremy: Yeah.
Andrew: And what does it take to get your ad to the top of Hacker News? Why do I see with so many different companies, why do I see some people’s help wanted ads but not others?
Jeremy: So, when you’re a Y Combinator company you have the advantage of being able to post job ads to Hacker News occasionally. It’s not up-voted. I think it’s just time limited. They only show so many per day because they don’t want to inundate people with nothing but job ads. It’s a free service they offer their portfolio companies. So, we obviously take advantage of it. It’s very powerful. We’re looking for amazing engineering help and it turns out that most of the best engineers in the world tend to read Hacker News.
Andrew: I see. So, any time you want, you can post a help wanted ad. It will just stay there for a short amount of time. It’s not based on how many votes you get?
Jeremy: No. There’s no voting mechanism or commenting mechanism there. There might be some kind of karma decay as a function of how many click throughs it gets. But I am totally speculating. I have no idea how it works. It might be pushed down by the acceleration of other content that ultimately supersedes it. I don’t know. It just sticks around for a while. You get a bunch of interesting people who reach out and it serves a very important function on the recruiting front.
Andrew: Alright. I’m always fascinated by the behind the scenes stuff because I do see how helpful it is.
Jeremy: That’s great. Yeah.
Andrew: Alright. Cool. Thank you for doing this. How was this interview for you? How has it been?
Jeremy: It’s been great. It’s been awesome talking to you.
Andrew: Good.
Jeremy: It’s always fun to break this stuff out. You experience it on a regular basis, but putting it into verbal form is not something that you do all the time. And I think it’s both helpful to verbalize your internal thoughts and also just I love the opportunity to talk about what we’re building with Lawn Love and hopefully inspire people to maybe go out and pursue their passions or maybe come and help us pursue ours.
Andrew: Alright. Well, thank you so much for doing this. The website of course is Lawn Love. If people got something of value out of this interview and they want to say thanks, what’s a good way for them to do that?
Jeremy: They can reach me at Jeremy@LawnLove.com or I’m on Twitter @JeremyYamaguchi. They can hit me up there as well.
Andrew: I’d especially be interested if somebody took up this idea for trainers and showed you the page that they created.
Jeremy: If they do that, definitely reach out. I will give you as much help as I can.
Andrew: Cool. I’m looking forward t seeing that. If you got anything of value out of this interview, you probably want to get more from Mixergy all for free, delivered directly to your phone, to your television, to your computer, to whatever device you choose.
All you have to do is go to your favorite podcast app and type in Mixergy and you will get Mixergy delivered if you subscribe, I should say, delivered directly into your phone, every single interview as I do it. And if you really want to go out of your way, go to iTunes and rate us and leave us a review. It really helps out a lot. I shouldn’t say us. It’s me personally. You’re going to be helping me a lot when you do that and I appreciate that you do it.
Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.
