‘Uber for lawn care’ app expands to Spokane

Nashville-based startup GreenPal is aiming to make lawn care easier for Spokane homeowners by connecting them with local landscaping professionals.

GreenPal, described as the “Uber of lawn care,” by co-founder Gene Caballero, launched in Spokane last week.

Homeowners needing lawn care can sign up through GreenPal’s website or app, enter their address, the day they want service and then receive up to five quotes from local lawn care professionals, who are vetted through photos of their past work as well as equipment and reference checks.

Lawn care companies submit pricing to customers based on the square footage of the lot, aerial images and Google Street View. Users can then select a company based on ratings, reviews and price. Once work is completed, the landscape company sends a time-stamped photo of the yard to customers.

Caballero said GreenPal launched in Seattle last month with around 10 to 15 lawn care companies. Now, with service expansion to Spokane, GreenPal has more than 40 lawn professionals on the platform.

“It’s been great,” Cabellero said, referring to GreenPal’s launch in Spokane. “We’ve been able to confidently connect homeowners with landscaping professionals in Spokane and Seattle. We think (Spokane) is going to be a great market based on historical data.”

Caballero said GreenPal – which is available in more than 125 cities in 40 states – chooses where it wants to expand based on customer demand.

Several customers from Spokane signed up for GreenPal even before it launched in the area, he added.

“We saw an overwhelming amount of homeowners sign up in Spokane,” he said. “When we saw that, we knew that we immediately needed to launch.”

Caballero co-founded GreenPal with Zach Hendrix, the company’s chief technology officer, and CEO Bryan Clayton in 2012.

The idea for GreenPal grew from Caballero’s past experience working in landscaping to make money for expenses during college and as a corporate account manager for Dell Technologies.

“When I worked at Dell, my territory was the West Coast, so I was kind of privy to new technology that was coming out,” Caballero said. “Uber and Lyft were launching and we thought that at some point, lawn care would be the same way.”

Spokane resident Dylan Hockett, owner of DH Lawn Care, discovered GreenPal from a news posting that advertised the company’s expansion to Spokane.

“We hadn’t heard about (GreenPal) before, but it has proven to be a valuable resource for us to get more clients and get the word out about our business,” he said.

Hockett founded DH Lawn Care this year with a group of friends to make money for college and has completed about five or six jobs in the past week through GreenPal.

“It’s much more than we would normally get in that frame of time,” he said. “It’s been a real good year so far. We hope that it keeps going.”

Hockett said GreenPal is a form of security for small companies like DH Lawn Care because there’s an agreement for each job and customers are able to pay securely through the platform.

Caballero has plans to add snow removal services to GreenPal and continue expanding the platform nationally by the end of the year.

“We want to be in all 50 states by the end of 2019,” he said. “We’re probably going to do a few more markets in Washington as well.”