An Interview With Ryan Farley: How Being Scrappy Propelled LawnStarter To Success

With a background in mechanical engineering, Ryan Farley isn’t someone you would expect to have an interest in the quality of your lawn or the depth of the green in your Kentucky bluegrass.

You also wouldn’t expect that he and his co-founders would work so passionately to grow a business that connects homeowners with lawn care professionals.

But that’s exactly what their company does. Launched in 2013, Farley and his team have raised $7 million in VC funding for Austin-based LawnStarter, amid a vastly competitive $74 billion industry.

They did it all with no background in marketing – just a scrappy attitude in an industry that’s not considered very sexy. Today, they have more than 35 employees, and they are expanding into nine major metro areas.

Ryan sat down with me to share how they got started, and how sleeping on mattresses in an empty apartment shaped the values of the company to make it what it is today.

Sujan Patel: You’re in a fairly competitive industry. You’ve started one of the first subscription-based lawn care services, where you match providers with customers in their area.

It simplifies the process for residents who hate doing yard work, so they don’t have to worry about it. That couldn’t have been easy to start. It’s not super-sexy; it’s not like an Instagram launch. How did being scrappy contribute in the beginning?

Ryan Farley: We were scrappy people to begin with. We weren’t experienced people that could just go out and raise money. When we came to Techstars, there were three of us and an intern.

We shared this awful little two bedroom apartment. We lived really inexpensively and bought chicken, beef, and eggs in bulk at Costco. A lot of that mentality transferred as we hired people, but we also built it into our values. One of our core values is ‘be cheap.’

SP: Tell this story, because this is one of my favorite stories from a founder. The core value is ‘be cheap’ and there are a couple funny stories behind it.

RF: Right, so one thing we say is that we run a ‘crack house business.’ Wherever we lived together as founders, people would come over and they would call it ‘the crack house’ because we had no furniture – just mattresses on the floor.

So, whenever people would drive around and see a crappy house they would call it a LawnStarter house. When you think about a crack house, it’s not luxurious, but it makes a lot of money. Maybe it’s not the most politically-correct thing, but we thought it was funny.

The vending machine and the internet cable were other things we did on the cheap. We work out of the cheapest office we could find downtown, and we eventually got another room upstairs. We called the cable company, and they told us that we had to pay twice for internet access for two offices, despite being in the same building. So, we just ran a cable out the window up to the other office.

In that building, we didn’t have much meeting space. We just kind of took over the soda machine area by the bathrooms, and these old lawyers in the building would walk by and make jokes about us renting the space.

SP: And all of that is just incredibly scrappy. I’ve been to your office space. I’m going to be honest: you’re not hiring because of the space or because of the cool stuff you get in the startup life, yet you’re growing rapidly and recruiting a ton of people. How are you able to keep that up?

RF: The glass windows, accent wall, and all the snacks everywhere, I think is just really cliché. I think people are starting to see through that. You’re not going outcompete other people or companies like that. We’ll never ‘out-Google’ Google.

But, we are able to compete when we tell people, ‘You’re gonna solve hard problems, and work with really smart people; you’ll work longer hours than anywhere else for the same pay, but we have a huge opportunity and a ton of fun.’ That is so intrinsic to hiring and retaining people.

SP: People clearly love working there despite being paid less. People are ecstatic about working with you. We know that being scrappy and that “be cheap” value got you started, but what about now? With all the VC funding and a growing team, what do you do to be scrappy now? I know normal companies would hire a VP of marketing, but you’re the growth guy. How do you have time for that?

RF: Originally, I was doing operations, but it turns out the guy we hired for ops was a lot better at it than I was. So, I slowly stepped away. We needed to grow more, so I started learning this stuff and I liked it.

I feel like, in some respect, by hiring the expert, you’re cheating yourself out of learning. There’s no better way to learn it than to do it. It’s not to say that we haven’t hired some of the best people at what they do. Everyone at the company, including the founders, are also contributors. No one is just taking meetings or giving orders. Everyone gets their hands dirty.

SP: One of the things I see from a marketing perspective is that you’re not just scrappy founders, you’re scrappy marketers. That’s one of the things that makes you different from startups and other lawn care companies. Normally, a company would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising, but you’re doing mostly inbound marketing. That’s earned, and it’s hard.

RF: The tough thing is that it’s hard with something like lawn care to market to someone when they’re not actively looking for it. We’re not creating software or something that people are interested in learning about.

People don’t want to learn about their lawns. They just want it taken care of. We had to find what it is our audience cares about, and how we build our brand up with things that are adjacent to what we do – outdoor stuff, city pride, things like that.

SP: I’ve seen that you guys have gotten all kinds of press, like The Miami Herald and CNN, so you’re doing things that are not only scrappy, but things that get people’s attention.

I saw several pieces that earned you guys news spots, like reporting on Austin’s population growth in your blog, and pulling data from city demographers to do comparisons on water bills across different counties in Texas and Florida. Those all earned you a lot of news coverage, both online and on television.

RF: I can’t really take credit for that. One of the experts we did hire is our editor, John Egan. He had done this type of thing with insurance and self-storage, and now lawn care. He’s amazed me in that he has turned our lawn care blog into something that’s being referenced as a news source.

Build success by rolling up your sleeves and being scrappy

The success of LawnStarter shows that even in the most competitive industries, you don’t necessarily need to have a huge marketing budget. You don’t always have to be an innovator or the next Uber. You may just need to embrace that scrappy attitude, while finding creative approaches to content marketing.


What kind of scrappy methods have you used to growth hack the success of your business? Share your stories with me in the comments.

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