Part 2 - Turning A Dead-on-Arrival App Into A 300K User Success Story

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Now let's just talk about the transition. You go from selling and it takes forever. You know, you have many stops and starts and a lot of times it's, you know, more nerve wracking than selling a house, of course, but you can, you know, selling, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollar house, you can have highs and lows and the bit, you know, the buyers come back in at the last minute with one thing and another. But selling a business, you pull it off. There comes a time you go to the close, you sign, you know it's done and there's that last day, you go in and you're not there anymore. You got to be doing something else. How far along were you into starting the Green Pal, which is of course the online marketplace that for lawn care. How far along into that were you?

So it's a really good question because it's a weird thing you go through that nobody prepares you for. So I had the idea for GreenPal, but I hadn't started it yet. I didn't even know that I was going to because I was really exhausted running the first company for, for 15 years and then getting it sold. I didn't really want to start another intense business like that ever again. And, and so got that done. And then a weird thing happens. You're no longer, you're no longer like important, you're no longer needed. You're no longer like the answer to the question. If you, if you get out of bed, if you don't get out of bed in the morning, what then? What? You know, like my business has always been the answer to that question and, and you know, if it wasn't for me, then what, and the, the business is the answer to that question. Well, if it wasn't for me, then these hundred people wouldn't get a paycheck and, and these customers wouldn't get service. And so then that was gone. All that was, was gone. And it's a weird thing, it's like a piece of you is gone. And so I really believed that I was going to kind of just be an investor. There's a book called the Cash Flow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki I was reading at the time. And one of the quadrants, he talks about the guy who's called the capitalist and this mysterious figure, he's just in deals. And he's. Maybe he's doing real estate deals, business deals. I thought, that sounds cool. Maybe I'll just do that. And I tried that for about six months, and it got really boring really quick. I learned that I needed to have some sort of mission, some sort of goal that I was trying to accomplish, some kind of thing I was trying to tackle. And I thought, well, you know, I've got this idea. You know, Uber's doing this stuff for ride sharing. Airbnb is doing this stuff for sharing a bedroom. Somebody's going to build a marketplace for the lawn care industry. And I, I'm pretty sure it'll work. And, and I thought, why can't that be me? And it was very much naivete as an asset. I had no idea how hard it was to pull something like this off. But I just came up with the idea and told two friends about it. And they said, you know what? That's a great idea, and we believe in you. I'll start that business with you tomorrow. I'll quit my job and start that with you tomorrow. And I thought, well, these guys are crazy enough to, to start this thing with me. Maybe it is a good idea. And so we started working on, you know, I remember that that first weekend we started working on, okay, this is what the app might look like. And, and we started doing little like, like drawings, what the screens would look like. And then we hired a tech company to build the first version of it. And that was our first mistake. You know, that took six months and almost 100, $150,000. But we, we, we got, we got a little, got a little prototype put out there.

Explain why that was a mistake, because that's a mistake a lot of us make. We're going to hire the tech guy who's going to solve all our problems for us.

Yeah, we didn't know how to code, we didn't know how to build software. We had never built a website before. We thought, well, we'll just outsource that piece and we'll do the marketing piece and we'll be off and going. And so we did that and we pulled together our money and I had taken all the proceeds from the sale of the first company and locked all that down and really illiquid investments, real estate, things like that. Because I didn't ever want to go backwards. I didn't want to. I didn't want to ever have to pick up a weed eater ever again. So I was like, poor all over again. I didn't have a lot of cash to put in the second business. And so that was a good thing because I would have wasted it all. But we pulled our money together and we spent 150 grand paying this, this dev shop, development shop to build what we thought the app should be. And it took them like over six months and, and they gave us the finished product and we tried to release that into the wild and, and it was just dead on arrival. It, it didn't. It had a million things wrong about it. Our vision of what it should be missed the mark of what customers wanted. It was buggy, it was hard to use, it wasn't intuitive. Lawn care guys hated. Just had a million problems. And we started to realize that where do we even start to fix this thing? And if we're going to like, change order our way to success, it's going to take a hundred years and $100 million. At this rate, it'll never happen. And so we realized that it was naive for us to think that we were going to be in the technology business and not know how to develop tech. And so looking back, it's as silly as saying, I have an idea for a song. I just need to go find a musician. You know, it's like, that's not the way it works or, or wanting to open a restaurant and you've never cooked anything other than like the microwave. So we had to learn how to code. We had to teach ourselves how to build software. My co founder went to a boot camp, a software boot camp. It was, it took, look, took like nine months. I. I watched YouTube University for every day for six months. And we learned how to build the whole thing over again, but this time build it in the feedback that customers were telling us. And it goes back to the first business. We were listening to what customers were telling us and baking that into the offering. And that took two or three years, but we finally had something that worked that people like to use and, and that we could improve upon. And then we got to, I guess you could say we got to first base about three or four years in. And then, and then it's kept making it better and better and better, growing it. And now to this day, Green Pals nationwide in the United states has around 300,000 people using it every week for lawnmower.

One thing about, I feel obligated to pass this on to those listening when you go to a developer, a programmer, I've wasted millions of dollars on this myself. And this is when I had it in my frigging garage, okay? And I had. I threw the cars out and I turned it into a. I had hired the $100,000 a year guys back in 1990, believe it or not, I had my own SQL server. I had my own email back in.

It was a lot harder back then.

Yeah. I went through three. Three years of being in my pajamas every weekend, you know, putting this thing together. But what I found was the reason I got had to learn how to build web pages, you know, and the reason why is I would go to the software guy, the guy that I paid for, okay. And I would say, this is what I want it to look like, okay? And then it would always come back totally, completely different. Does that sound familiar? This is one of my younger cousins who worked for me. Okay? So I said, come in here. You're going to work in my garage. We're right, right here. You're going to come in here every day and I'm going to sit down. We're going to do it one page at a time, and I'm going to draw on paper what I want it to look like. The first diagram, simple thing. I gave it to him. A few minutes later, he comes back and shows it to me. It's not even close. I said, edward, see this piece of paper? See what's on that screen? They're not. And he said, they look identical to me. And I thought.

Yeah, over and over and over again. And so until you feel like you're going insane and eventually you wind up with something that works and that people will like to use, but you just don't give up, you know, on the.

Coding, I will tell people the fastest way I've learned how you learn those. I'm no good at going to a. You know, they got the boot camps and watching on YouTube, you're my mind, which is I have to have someone sitting beside me.

Yeah.

And so the way I do things, I hire the expert, come in, sit next to me and say, this is what I want to do. Show me how to do it. And just, you know, no matter how slow you go to learn it, the first time you got it.

Yeah.

But if you have the experts show you, you don't have to read a book, you don't have to watch it. You have the experts show you exactly what it is you want done without all the other frou frou, you know, and then step.

Gotta get dangerously good, just enough to know how it works, how it comes together before you can even begin to delegate this stuff. That was a lesson I learned the hard way.

What was the first thing that you put on your site, the first workable feature? Can you remember back?

The big mistake that most new founders make is they want everything end to end, all the bells and whistles, and then they release it. And I heard a quote somewhere that if you're not embarrassed by your first release, then you waited too long. And so what you really want to do is you want to get something out there that's workable, that works, that's got the minimal feature set, and then you kind of hand crank the rest. And so what we did was because we had to rebuild the whole thing ourselves, we just focused on the consumer side of the app. And so we had the ordering system, the place where they could hire their contractor, the place that they could provide their credit card to them, and the place where they could see what they had scheduled. And that was it. We built those few things and then the rest. It was kind of like wizard of Oz. We were hand cranking it behind the scenes. And so everything that would come in would just get dumped into a spreadsheet. We would let the contractors know, hey, there's a lawn to be done here. Here's the address. How much is it? Okay, it's $45. We would mainly put that in and then, okay, well, they hired you. Okay, so you need to be there Thursday. And so we were just like hand cranking all of the transactions, all of the interactions. And we did that on up to, you know, three or 400 users. And that did a couple of things. It allowed us to get something out the door that consumers could use and we could get feedback from them. And then it also informed how the system needed to be built for contractors, because we saw how, how what their needs were and how they were, how they would interact with it. So we were able to build the right thing the first time. And that took a couple years to build that whole kind of workflow for both sides of the transaction to where homeowner could list their yard. Contractors would get the opportunity, they put their price in. Homeowner hires them, they do the job, they upload a photo, then they approve it, they pay them. Like that took a few years to build, but we would kind of hand crank the gaps along the way.

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Notes.

There's something about reading something, but it's just something about writing it down yourself where you know, programs in your mind like what to do with it, what it means. And I remember when I, I started running an office and we, our numbers started to go and we put out, you know, sales forces in financial services and we'd have leadersheets, competition, scoreboard, leader sheet and I, I told everybody, I said I'm going to hand print these suckers until we go over 100 grand a month which would put us, put, would put us number one in the company because I don't want you guys to think we're some kind of big deal operation. And if you have trouble reading my handwriting, let's get big fast so we can have the secretary. It forced me to, you know, they like turn in a number and it wouldn't register until I wrote it down. Oh, that guy did that. And then the meaning of that, like he hasn't done that before. We haven't had, and you would probably see like we haven't had business come in from that neighborhood. Like this is the, you know, we just went over 10 yards in that town which we haven't been in before. And those kind of, you know, step by step can dawn on you where you really have your hand on the pulse of what's going on. But there's really no shortcut to that is there?

That kind of nail it then scale it mentality when you're first trying to figure out how something is going to work and how it's going to come together. If you can hand crank the first hundred or thousand transactions then you kind of know what needs to be built. You also come to discover what your value proposition is because when we first started the company, I was starting the company from a contractor's perspective. And as a contractor you always think that consumers only care about the cheapest price and you kind of get jaded. And so we had oriented the offering of what Greenpal is to be the cheapest way you can get your lawn mowed because it's competitive bids and, and it was our hope to drive down the price. Well, as we were hand cranking this Experience. We kept running into the same problem over and over again. Contractor said he'd be there Thursday. He wasn't there Thursday. He wasn't even there Friday. He was there on Monday. So. So it was like. And it was just over and over and over and over again. I want somebody to come out for $5 cheaper. The value was I just want the guy to show up and do the job when he's supposed to. So. So it was through that discovery of.

We got a party on Saturday and I want the yard cut, you know.

Please, for the love of God. I mean, I can't tell you, like, how many times we beat our heads against the wall in those early days trying to figure out, okay, it's actually not priced. These folks will pay a normal price. They want reliability. And so that early discovery may have saved us tanking the business. Because if we had just tried to automate it all from day one and release one system that was completely done and fully baked and fully baked around this value proposition of price, we would have never discovered that reliability was the real value.

You know, I was building this information system for my financial services organization, and about. I was, you know, about 10% of the whole big monolith. And I couldn't get. I couldn't get them to do it, so I would do it for myself. I harassed them so much, they got to where they said, okay, we'll give you a direct download off the mainframe every day. That's why I had. In my garage and I had. They said, we'll give you. We'll give you 24,000, you know, information on 24,000 agents, 165 fields every day. And then you can run your own reports. You know, leave us alone. You know, rerun your own reports. Well, I did all that and spent all the money, set it up. And then we have a new CEO. He says, that's such a great idea. Why don't we do it for the whole company? He put my butt out of business. But it was great. I didn't have to do it anymore. And so, you know, they had me go down to Atlanta and, you know, walk them through the whole process and everything. So I get back home and they're trying to put it together. And this is like, where I ask you, what's the most important feature? The most important feature has got to be for the most important people you have, which is your customers, you know, so they. They did call me and Rick Kersheval, I never forget. I get a call, and he said, Got one question. He said, what's the most important thing that we should have on this? This is a data system for the company. Now you got people all over the United States and Canada making sales, and the numbers don't show up on the computer at this point until like two weeks later. So it's like playing the. Playing the World Series month is over, and you find out two weeks later who won, you know, because it's month, month to month with salespeople are like, you know, who won? You know, did they get that sale, get on or whatever. And I knew it needed to be boom, boom, boom. So they called me and said, what's the most important feature we should have on this? I said, is this candid camera, you call it? You know, is there a camera somewhere in my house? This is a joke, right? And I said, the numbers, Rick.

Yeah.

And you want to know, you know, if you play the NBA, you want it. You're LeBron. You want to know what the other guy, you know, Stephen Curry scored last night, you know what I'm saying? Or Kevin Durant, you know, you want to know who won what, your competitions, do it. And I said, the most important thing is the competition scoreboard. Here's what he said to me. Really? It's that important.

I'm living it, I'm breathing it, I'm cranking it. I know.

So. So the thing is that, you know, it's important that you find, you know, you take care of your most important element in there. And this is the customer, you know, and that's where, you know, you had your offer and then you came in with, you know, to how they could sign up. And then it's the. Is probably the. The offer, the sign up and then the follow up is why probably what took a while to develop.

Exactly. And starting with that first and then. And then just literally being wizard of Oz for the rest of it, like, don't even worry about what those systems look like. Just make sure the customer has a good experience. We'll figure out how to automate all this later. But let's start with the best customer experience we can and then build from there and.

Because otherwise they're not coming back. But if you get one customer and they're happy now you got a customer for the next, you know, X number of years until they sell the house or something, you know.

Yeah. In those early days, it was twofold. One, we needed the customer because we needed revenue. But two, we needed the customer for the R and D. We needed to know what Were the features they wanted to see. What, what were they confused by? What do they wish it would do better? Making it really frictionless for them to talk to us was key to us getting through those first few years, building something that people wanted.

So how fast are things growing now, Brian?

We're still growing about 30% a year, even on big numbers.

And so that's pretty amazingly impressive.

Yeah, you know, and one thing is we haven't raised any. Any outside capital. So all of the business has been fueled by its own revenue, which is nice because now we're still in control of it. Where, you know, it's just on our cap table was three names, which is nice. There's a. There was a lot of Uber for X ideas that kind of came and went over the last 10 years, and a lot of them raised a bunch of money. And as it turns out, that kind of helped accelerate their demise. Because when, when you raise outside capital like that, you're kind of beholden to put up like 10x growth every year. And if the business isn't ready for that, it's like trying to put rocket boosters on the side of a barn. It just blows apart. And so we were fortunate to not go down that path. And now we're still growing at a good organic rate. We want to get to a million people using it every week. That's our next big goal. And so we're at 300,000 now. We want to get to a million.

Yeah, I mean, you've got some real fun. And you, it's, it's just great to be in a market that has exponential potential, you know, unlimited potential.

It's unlimited. Yeah. And that was one thing I wanted to do with this business was I wanted to build something that would touch the mass market. My, my, my landscaping company was one of the biggest in the state, and that was great. But the next go around, I wanted to build something that, that millions of people could use, and that was important to me. So that's one thing that's fun about building this kind of business.

Yeah. And that's something to think about as people are if they're still at the stage of sorting through ideas and options is, you know, what's the market? What's the market, you know, going to be? What are the competitors in there and all? And do you have a unique take, you know, a unique idea, an idea that's right for the times, and those are big things that you can't get away from, and there's no reason to pour your energy in Unless you are convinced this thing, because it is like this. It's like the old phrase, give time for your, your efforts to compound and multiply. But if you're in a small box, it can't compound. And right when it gets to compounding, the multiplying stage, it's over. You know Exactly. You know?

Exactly. And the guy running the dry cleaning store or the corner market or the restaurant is working just as as I am. And so you might as well go after a big idea, something that has unlimited potential, because business at every level is really hard. You know, a small business is just as hard as a big business. So you might as well go after a big idea.

Yeah. What I always love is people say, you know, back in the 80s, you know, things were so easy, this, that I just don't remember, you know. You know, people were so always hard. I don't remember one day where anything was. Was easy, you know.

No. You know, and that's the thing. I mean, when I was building my first business in the 90s, it was just as hard then as it is now. It's always relatively as hard. It doesn't get any easier now. One thing is that some things that are easier today is that you can access any information to do anything you need to be able to learn how to do like that. Back in my day, I had to send off a paper check in an envelope with a coupon from a trade magazine for some cassette tapes, you know, and that came six weeks later. That was how I learned, you know, some best practices in my industry. Now you learn all that more for free on YouTube. So it is a little easier today in some ways.

Yeah. The sure firefight way to get your make your business easier is go into a slump. Then it'd be real easy, you know, because you're only doing half of the work before it won't last long, you know.

Yes.

And the thing is, if you're going to be growing, these are the pains of growing are things you have to deal with. But the thing is, the bigger you get, the bigger the rewards are.

It's more fun. The higher the levels you get. It's just a funner game to play, you know, now that whatever level I'm at, metaphorically, maybe six or seven, it's a lot more fun than levels one or two, let me tell you. And I get to make better bets now. I get to place more interesting bets. I'm doing more interesting things. So it's a lot more fun as you get further down down the road.

And you're still taking risks and you still take financial setbacks, but it's not like when you didn't have any money in the bank.

Exactly, exactly. You're just trying to keep the lights on and keep food on the table. It's a lot more fun as you get further on and that's part of the reward. I think.

I'd like to thank you for listening to part two of this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Timing is everything. You may feel that now is the time to get moving forward so you can do something even greater with your life. Now, if that sounds like you, I've got a free training video to show you how that transformation can take place. Getting introduced to how the cycle of success works has been a major transforming event for so many current million dollar earners. And that's exactly what this video is all about. And yes, it's completely free. Join us at the video@wearlyllonwinning.com and thanks for being part of our community.

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