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Lawn Love Brings On-Demand Mowing Home

Lawn Love, a San Diego startup that provides on-demand mowing and outdoor services has seen incredible growth and is serving nearly 80% of suburban areas in the United States. 

Founded in 2014, it provides lawn mowing services through its website and its app. It matches consumers with vetted lawn service providers in their area. 

First launched in San Diego, Lawn Love is now operating in over 120 cities across 42 states, now aiming to sustain growth by expanding into new services and other verticals.

Over the last five years, Lawn Love has grown from two full time employees to over 185 full time employees, said Jeremy Yamaguchi, Lawn Love’s founder and chief operating officer.

All based locally, the company has partnered with more than 5,000 lawn care companies, and it has hundreds of thousands of homeowners on its platform. Revenue numbers were not disclosed.

Lawn Care a Fragmented Industry

Traditionally, the industry is known to be very fragmented and localized, leaving lawncare and landscaping as one of the areas that have remained largely undisrupted by technology.

Before Lawn Love, American households that have a lawn, either took care of mowing and upkeep themselves, or they hired a local lawn care provider the old fashioned way — a recommendation from someone they trusted.

According to Lawn Love, the company has evolved this antiquated process by bringing tech-enabled ease to the process of finding, booking, and paying a landscaping or lawn care provider.

The goal is to assist hundreds of thousands of small lawn care businesses providing them tools such as job routing, clustering optimization, accounting payments, and taxes. Lawn care providers can choose their own hours and where they work.

Its value proposition for consumers is simple. Users can punch in their home address, receive a quick estimate of the cost and be connected with a vetted local contractor in minutes.

Their solutions include tools that generate quick online or mobile quotes, provide service update notifications to customers, encourage reviews, and help them route around operational challenges such as traffic or weather. 

$98B Landscaping Market

The overall landscaping services market reaches over $98 billion in annual revenue in the U.S. each year, according to IBISWorld, an industry data analyst. Research showed that 98 percent of the $98 billion landscape industry business marketing is done through customer referrals.

Bigger franchise players include the national lawn care market leaders like TruGreen and BrightView. While those companies are big, their market shares are fairly small, Yamaguchi said, as the industry is largely composed of smaller businesses that have an average of two employees.

 “It reflects the values of many lawn care business owners. They value their independence and their autonomy,” said Yamaguchi. “We’re able to help grow their businesses significantly, scale their livelihood and enable them to be more efficient versions of themselves.”

New Sign-ups Tripled Due to COVID-19

The company faced several operational challenges while trying to figure out local level regulations but shortly found its footing as lawn care was deemed as an essential service in most states.

When COVID-19 hit, sign ups for its platform tripled overnight, resulting in a 300 percent spike of new lawn care professionals joining in the months February to March. In total, its lawn pros have completed over 600,000 jobs on the platform.

As of May 2020, Its lawn pros have mowed over 6.2 billion square feet of lawn across the U.S., equivalent of 108,000 football fields.

‘Uber for X’ Model

Bernhard Schroeder, director of Lavin Center Programs at San Diego State, said that apps similar to Uber’s business model could gain traction rapidly in almost all service-related industries.

“If you wanted to go find a good carpenter or handyman, how would you find it? If the hot water tank broke today when you went home, who would you call? You would have to use Google search, then go to Yelp, and read the reviews,” said Schroeder. “In the age of the internet, it’s hard to find some of these services, there are thousands of them but they are all over the place. I believe we are going to see all these niche categories of services. Somebody will try to aggregate them into national applications.”

Lawn Love covers a variety of large metro areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Richmond, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Seattle, among others.

Looking ahead, the company looks to expand in every state in the near future, excluding Hawaii and Alaska.

Yamaguchi taught himself at a young age how to design and write code. He built a web design business, but it was his last venture, another Uber-style service, that turned heads. Golden Shine, a business that links consumers and house cleaners through a smartphone app, grabbed the No. 5 spot on the Business Journal’s Fast 100 list in 2013; it did so by growing revenue 359 percent over two years, reaching $900,000 in 2012. Yamaguchi sold the venture in mid-2013 for undisclosed terms.

Early investors include San Francisco-based Y Combinator, Bullpen Capital, Joe Montana, Alexis Ohanian, and Barbara Corcoran. Initially, the company announced it had raised a $1.9 million seed round from backers and has since raised significantly more. The amount was not disclosed. 

“We think we can build an enormous, category defining company in this space. We’ve seen a lot of success so far, but there’s a lot of room to go,” said Yamaguchi. “In terms of our size relative to the broader industry we’re still a rounding error, which is not surprising given the size of the lawn care space. We’re excited to see how much bigger we can build this thing and our ambitions are anything but small.”

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