Senior Product Manager, LawnStarter
$150-170k
+ Equity
Lawn maintenance marketplace
Job no longer available
Lawn maintenance marketplace
201-500 employees
Job no longer available
$150-170k
+ Equity
201-500 employees
Company mission
To make life easier and enable people to save their time for what really matters. They are setting out to make running a home services business dead simple.
Role
Who you are
- Experience: You have 5+ years of experience in building large scale products and at least a few years of experience building marketplaces. Bonus if you have spent time solving problems we plan to tackle
- Education: You have a STEM or business background or relevant education that makes you suited to solving complex product problems
- Problem solving approach: You take pride in understanding problems deeply and asking the right questions. You rely on data to inform your gut. You care about having a structured and logical approach to solving ambiguous and poorly defined problems
- You are experimenting and using AI to help solve all kinds of problems faster or better. This is unlikely to be a good fit if your primary skill or interest is in executing/managing the solution building phase (project management) or engineering solutions (software engineering)
- Communication: You communicate well and often. One of the defining responsibilities of a PM at LawnStarter is articulating the problem to be solved and getting buy-in from other departments. We take pride in written communication
- You understand that being a PM often involves saying “no” with empathy and reason. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you are someone who is unable to carve time to think deeply about problems and articulate them to your peers
- Excellence: You set extremely high standards for yourself and others around you. When you say something is getting done, the team can trust you. You don’t tolerate mediocrity, but you also dedicate your time to helping others evolve and learn so that the team can operate at a higher level
- You also understand that often true differentiation only comes from executing well on very hard things, so you don’t shy away from challenges. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you don’t have a track record of impressive performance
- Bias for action: You understand that in spite of the careful approach you take to understanding problems and identifying opportunities, you actively try not to be perfectionist or get yourself tied up in knots
- You have a bias for action in order to make progress. You enjoy being scrappy and constraints enthrall you. This is unlikely to be a good fit if you, by default, like building complete and full solutions from the get go
What the job involves
- As a Senior Product Manager at LawnStarter, you will be a key member of our small team of four product managers
- You will have a high degree of autonomy to solve problems with engineers, designers, and marketers in order to improve our user experience and grow our business
- This is a high leverage role, with exposure to our entire product line and responsibility for key business metrics
- Your main responsibility will be to improve our customer acquisition, collaborating to get us more customers and with higher lifetime value
- Delighting consumers: We believe delighting consumers and obsessing about solving problems for them is at the heart of why we are on this mission
- We have built a product that our consumers love but they expect more. They want on-time service. They want it to be of high quality, always. They want competitive pricing. They want it to be easy to reschedule, pay and add/remove additional services
- So as we scale, how do we provide high quality service at great value? How do we identify the right consumer problems to be solved? We have plenty of fun and hard user activation and retention problems to solve
- Keeping providers happy: We believe we cannot succeed if we don’t have the largest number of high quality providers on the platform
- Providers who are happy with the value they derive from the platform. We are well on our way given our curated approach to acquiring, onboarding & engaging the small businesses who power the home outdoor services industry
- We have managed to build a great customer acquisition platform for our providers. But they expect more. They want us to maximize their earnings while reducing their costs such as driving time (similar to those on mobility and delivery platforms like Uber, Doordash)
- They want us to identify profitable jobs for them and create a recurring relationship (think supply/demand balance).They are eager for us to take care of their business operations challenges so that they can focus on doing great work for homeowners
- Marketplace challenges: We are a marketplace and have solved a lot of chicken-and-egg problems to seed the marketplace. We have consumers, we have providers and they exchange value on LawnStarter
- Awesome! How do we keep the marketplace healthy & growing? How do we use our supply and demand for lawn care services to solve the cold start problem for new services? How do we balance the needs of various participants as we keep growing? How do we ensure that consumers get outsized value and providers maximize their earnings?
- Network effects: The more consumers we have the more we can drive revenue for providers and cut their costs. The more high quality providers we have the more we can keep consumers happy
- Our dream is to have high quality pros providing home outdoor services to all the homes in a neighborhood on a single day. Minimize driving time, idle time for pros while maximizing their earning time. Maximize consumer delight by providing on-time, high quality service. Then replicate that for providers of different home services
Our take
When it comes to lawn maintenance, many homeowners typically have to deal with several contractors. This can make lawn care more complicated and expensive than it needs to be. LawnStarter solves this problem by aggregating lawn mowing, fertilizing, and maintenance into one convenient purchase point.
As a marketplace, LawnStarter focuses on helping existing lawn care businesses grow, rather than trying to push their own services. This differentiates them from other providers. The company has seen impressive growth since it was first founded, and it now operates in 120 cities around the US. According to LawnStarter's CEO, the company's revenue has grown at a rate of 100% a year since its inception.
To date, LawnStarter has raised around $18 million in funding and surpassed $100 million in bookings, which is a testament to investors' and customers' confidence in the product. This confidence will be instrumental to LawnStarter's future success, as the lawn care market has grown increasingly competitive in recent years.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Nov 2019
$10.5m
EARLY VC
Jun 2015
$6m
SERIES A
Total funding: $17.8m
Company benefits
- Flexible remote schedule
Company HQ
Financial District, Austin, TX
Leadership
Steve Corcoran
(Co-Founder)Previously co-founded SigmaBits, and served as Co-CEO of SEED.
Ryan Farley
(Co-Founder)Previously worked as a Senior Business Analyst in Capital One's Card Partnerships Analytics team.
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