You can't mow your lawn in 60 seconds, but anyone in the D.C. metropolitan area can now arrange to get it done that quickly thanks to LawnStarter. Uber-style service startups have mushroomed everywhere lately, so the only surprise is that there isn't a lot of competition around for LawnStarter, which recently moved base to Arlington from Blacksburg, Va. The real inspiration for the company, though, isn't Uber but rather the way so many people dislike dealing with lawn-care services.
"The customer experience can be really really bad," said Steve Corcoran, who co-founded LawnStarter with his friend Ryan Farley last August."Things would go on that wouldn't have been acceptable in any other industry."
That's where LawnStarter comes in. With a few clicks on the website, customers can get an estimate for any yard work they need done, and within a couple of days, there will be a carefully screened landscaping company taking care of your yard work. LawnStarter takes a percentage of the revenue in exchange for handling all of the customer service and related business aspects.
To get its price estimates, LawnStarter relies on public data to determine fair market cost. Even though the four companies contracted with LawnStarter right now might normally charge less or more for services, they agree to LawnStarter's payment plan when they sign on. It's a market Corcoran and Farley know well, having run a lawn care business themselves in high school.
"They save on customer service and will get more clients," Corcoran said of why companies would be willing to charge less. The approximate average lawn mowing might cost $35 or $40, he said.
People looking for convenience in so many other aspects of life could certainly think of it as just another Uber kind of service, but Corcoran thinks there's at least one major difference. "It's a long-term care service," he said. "That's very different from just a cab ride."
LawnStarter is still very new, but there has been a great deal of growth even just in the last couple of weeks. The snow and cold almost certainly slowed things down, Corcoran acknowledged, but he added that business has been picking up fast.
"We've got about 100 clients right now," he said. "We'd like to reach around 500 by the end of the season."
The company is already solvent, Corcoran said, going public after an angel investment round of $107,500. If things go well, Corcoran said they will look for another round of funding to expand to 10 cities for next year. They might even decide to go ahead without the funding round.
"If we needed to, we could bootstrap it off the ground," he said.
If you want to know more about getting lawn care with a click, check out LawnStarter's introductory video below.
