Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You were doing Tech Stars in Austin?

Ryan Farley: Yes. We were with 10 other companies that were all just incredible. It was something that we hadn’t seen before within entrepreneurial circles. We felt like, “How the heck did we get in?” The program was an awesome experience.

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn at Tech Stars?

Ryan Farley: A lot. They almost take your focus away from the company a little bit to teach you general business skills like sales, marketing, hiring, fundraising, and engineering-specific skills. That was a big part of it. We got introduced to mentors and other founders who had built and scaled similar businesses, which gave us a sneak peak into how we would get to the next step.

One of the businesses was an Austin-based startup called Spare Foot, which was a marketplace for self storage. It’s very similar to us; it connects consumers to existing businesses. We went in for a day. We saw how they did marketing and sales. The big question for us was, “We have 100 customers. How do we get this to 1,000?” We got to see, firsthand, how they had done it. It turns out they had done a lot of the hard work for us. We just had to replicate what they did.

Sramana Mitra: What was that?

Ryan Farley: We spent a lot of time finding and talking to the original lawn care providers we had on-boarded. Looking at their sales process allowed us to say, “This is how we will do this without going to dinner. This is how we scale this and turn this into an operation.”

Sramana Mitra: What was that? Is it doing it with telesales and doing it more efficiently as a funnel?

Ryan Farley: Neither of us really understood what phone sales was before. I had a job in the Ivory tower and Steve was a college dropout. We basically took their script and replaced self storage with lawn care. The next day, we were signing up providers all day long. It allowed us to really figure out our inside sales model very quickly.

Sramana Mitra: We’re now in mid-2014. What is the next milestone?

Ryan Farley: Towards the end of Techstars, we started fundraising. We said, “What would we need to prove for you to write a check?” A couple of them wanted to write a check right away. In the meantime, my technical co-founder started working on building the technology for going to scale. We still use a lot of the groundwork he laid. I started figuring out how we were going to scale the demand side. I started working on marketing and sales. My co-founder Steve went out and started fundraising.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley
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