YardBook (YC W16) Is an Online Marketplace for the $30.9B Lawncare Business | Hacker News Reader

YardBook (YC W16) Is an Online Marketplace for the $30.9B Lawncare Business

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20 pointsbgamido23 comments

I'm surprised by the business model. You're providing business management software but monetizing through ads?

I think this means you're trying to earn dominance over the attention of business owners by providing good software for free, and that you expect to be able to charge a premium for well-targeted ads. This might make great sense for landscaping, where there are significant equipment and material costs and those vendors are highly competitive. "Hello Husqvarna, I have 300 users with $10000 of tree work booked in the next week and only one functioning chainsaw" sounds like a pretty good pitch.

It's kinda the long tail version of facebook's business model, serving a business need instead of a social one. Nifty.

There's also going to be paid product features it looks like.

But yea, if successful it's worth quite a bit to the equipment suppliers in lawncare.

I think they're probably making money of the invoicing part. Tack 1% on 100k worth of billing and your paid.

You are definitely on the right track since it is otherwise very difficult for specific brands (selling big ticket items) to target a this highly specific yet large audience. We're currently monetizing along this dimension and plan to further optimize this approach.

Cool. Thanks and good luck!

Hello HN--

I wanted to share what my Co-Founder and I have been working on. We built Yardbook to provide small landscape businesses with software tools to help them run their businesses. We have features for customer management, scheduling, billing just to name a few.

Check it out at: https://www.yardbook.com/pages/home

It’s a humble start but I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback on how we can improve the site.

Thanks in advance.

I like this. I've thought about tackling this space with something similar for years, just never made it a priority. I think your site is great but here's some feedback on that: you probably want to support Spanish language (did i miss it?). You could probably upsell the free aspect more heavily. I would remove the "why is it free" part. Just sell the FREE! Risk-free, no credit card required, sign up now!! People generally don't care why, this just distracts when you're trying to convert. Tell them why once in the app if you feel it's absolutely necessary, will make for a more natural "upgrade to remove ads" experience if that's what you're after

I would test a landing page without the background image, and a more concise benefits w/ CTA. I just get the feeling that the above the fold section isn't converting to it's full potential. The mossy forest ground doesn't make it immediately apparent this is a landscaping website. I have to read the text, so focusing on the text make sense to me.

If I click "Claim my profile" link, why does it scroll down? Seems like I want to sign up if I click that. Then if I click the "Get my Profile" button there's a popup asking if I already have an account. This flow seems very high friction.

Keep up the good work!

Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough feedback! We will definitely start tweaking and testing the items you called out.

I got my entrepreneurial start in the home service industry and always used: http://www.kickserv.com/

Couple of questions:

Can you explain the routing feature?

Do you have any plans for automated marketing features? Follow-up after submitting an estimate was always a huge pain point for us.

kickserve wasn't on my radar but I'll take a look. Was there anything that you loved with kickserve in particular?

Our routing feature allows our users to get door-to-door directions based on the scheduled jobs they have in our system. They can 'optimize their daily routes' to minimize distance traveled, or sequence their jobs if they have set times they have to be at certain properties.

We are definitely looking into potential marketing tools we can provide our users (in addition to operations software). What type of marketing features would you get the most value out of if you were still in the home services business?

Good example of choosing a niche market, but being able to jump to other markets with the core product built (e.g. any service based small business is going to need invoicing, route planning, customer management). Geoffrey Moore (crossing the chasm) would be proud.

That is part of our philosophy as well. The balancing act is how 'verticalized' you make a product. Too vertical will entail challenges when you transpose to another market. Not vertical enough will entail challenges in the go-to-market.

Please do not take this as a knock on your business. Why exactly do we need special software tools specifically for landscape business? Are there any specific challenges here that usual small businesses do not encounter (handy men, pet grooming, plumbing etc etc). I fear for the worse when I see companies starting to cater to a very specialized markets. Obviously YC and hence you have answers to all of the above and more. But these are questions I hope at least a few HN readers have.

There is a very large site that caters to landscape businesses (lawnsite.com). Browse through the forums there and you'll quickly get a feeling for how useful the software tools unique to that industry are.

Not in the business, but I used to hang out there when I was looking for software business ideas.

Great point! We frequent lawnsite as well and there is resounding consensus that companies in the space want software 'tailored enough' to their specific needs.

Sure landscapers could piecemeal this together with 4-5 different SaaS products that serve broad purposes. But they haven't. And they probably won't. Something like this helps them introduce technology to their business in an adoptable way.

You hit the nail on the head here. It is difficult enough to get companies in certain industries to use one technology, let alone 4-5 stitched together :)

Their support site shows a few that seem like they would be great selling points.

For example this: http://support.yardbook.com/faq-i-want-to-measure-lot-sizes-...

And, of course, even if it were just a re-skinned CRM, having it appear to be niche specific makes it easier to sell. "You understand me and my business..."

You touch upon a very important point. It's actually a very delicate balance regarding how 'vertical' or 'horizontal' a product should be. We found that previous companies in this space have failed because they were either too much of one or too much of the other.

We found that for industries where technology isn't ubiquitously used, the one-stop-shop model is tremendously critical.

That being said, and to your point, we have a material portion of our core technology (invoicing, scheduling, billing, etc.) that is 'transposable' to other markets. We are definitely thinking along this line but it is part of the long term vision further down the road.

Any interest in partnering with a lead provider? if so, email me at rsnyder@bid2mow.com. Actually, I plan on being a bidding platform soon.

Thanks!

Sounds great. How can I find/hire a vendor that uses YardBook, though? It's not clear from the website.

Right now Yardbook is strictly a tool for the vendor (lawn professional). You can almost think about us as Salesforce and quickbooks for landscapers and gardeners. We haven't yet built out an experience for the homeowner to find and choose vendors, but that is definitely a consideration.

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