Bryan Clayton is the co-founder and CEO of GreenPal, a leading on-demand marketplace of lawn care services for homeowners across the US. With a team of 25 remote employees, they help 300,000 homeowners connect with 35,000 landscape service providers.
GreenPal is an “overnight success that took 10 years” while the founding team learned to build a software product and recruit homeowners and services pros to the marketplace. It grew slowly at first as they learned and made mistakes, but they didn’t stop and started to expand regionally. GreenPal has no outside funding.
Bootstrapped Marketplace Topics Discussed on This Podcast
- How long it took the founders to get the GreenPal marketplace going in his home city before adding other cities and going national
- Why they are laser-focused on one segment of this massive landscape maintenance industry
- How a two-sided marketplace business is different than a B2B SaaS business
- Why they resisted taking outside investment for all the years it took them to become profitable
- Why he has “fun” working so hard for so long to make GreenPal successful
Best Quote About Starting a Startup from Bryan Clayton:
“Creating and selling my previous landscape services business was a great way for me to come into my own as a founder and then CEO. I learned through trial and error. I encourage other founders to do the same thing. You might have this big dream of starting a marketplace like what we’ve built with GreenPal, but it can behoove you to start a simple business first and get it to a million and maybe sell it.
Then you can start a more ambitious business because you already cut your teeth on what it means to run a business and what being an entrepreneur actually is. Because nobody teaches us any of this stuff. In the end, I was very fortunate to have experienced it that way.“
Links
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