Episode 10: Get Your Mind Into The Gutter with StreetFair

Kevin Carney 00:12

Welcome to Kingsmen Software's beyond the build podcast at Kingsmen. We pride ourselves on building enterprise quality software and we have the privilege of meeting some pretty interesting people along the way. Come join us to meet the visionaries, the disruptors, the entrepreneurs, and the innovators that envision new technology solutions, and then bring them to life. Come join. And here's what happens beyond the build. This is Kevin Carney, one of the managing partners here at Kingsmen software and I'll be hosting today's podcast from the bourbon studio at Kingsmen's office in Camp North End our sound engineer today is the one and only bill Clerici. Our intrepid CEO here at Kingsmen Software and also self proclaimed AV nerd say hello, Bill. Hello, Bill. Is the is the soundboard recording this time. Great, okay. All right. Today from the podcast studio, we are talking with Teddy Fitzgibbons and Mike Kerr from StreetFair. StreetFair is pretty new to the Charlotte market and the startup scene but coming on strong due it's straightforward and much needed offering. And you've already raised raised a surprising amount of capital. For those that don't know this, a little bit of a homecoming for Mike, who was head of engineering I kicked off a couple years ago. Welcome back, Mike. Thank you. So it's good to back. You have you back as an alum. And Teddy cheers. Welcome to the studio. Yeah, thanks for having me. Cheers. So, catch people up a little bit, you know, explain the basics of street fair, throw down some stats, how big is a company? How big is your footprint? how fast you're growing? Things like that. Give us the basics of what you guys do. And and this is why how do you how do you measure? Okay, go.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 01:50

I was gonna let the you know returning.

 

Kevin Carney 01:52

Well, that's a technical questions.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 01:56

Yeah, so Street Fair is a website for neighborhoods to find and coordinate common home maintenance services like gutter cleaning, lawn aeration, you know, window cleaning, and things like that. We I guess the origin story is probably pretty unusual for the average tech startup. We actually, during Mike and I worked together before previously at a company called passport in town. And it was during the pandemic. He and I almost bought a pool cleaning business. Oh, zero tech decent. Yeah, I guess because back to my

 

02:32

background, I was gonna clean the pool,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 02:36

Speedo marketing company, and we just thought that'd be a good distribution angle. No, but we we almost bought a pool cleaning business with like a ludicrously simple thesis in retrospect, which was we just heard that when all the you know, Hoa pools closed, and the country club pools closed and everything like that, like there was huge demand to get a pool built. And we heard there was like a three year waitlist to get a pool built. And so we very simply were like, Oh, wow, that's a lot more pools that are gonna get have to get cleaned. We should buy a pool cleaning business. I know, very little thought went into that part, and certainly no tech thesis. But as we started, we actually like diligence a few we started digging in. And the main insight we had is if you own a pool cleaning business, you want what's called route density, you want 10 pools on the same street, or 10 customers on the same street. And obviously, that's true way beyond pool cleaning, but just about all of these home maintenance businesses, you want, you know, customers clustered closely together to make your crew route overall business as efficient as possible. And then it was just like hitting a wall of while there's absolutely nothing out there that helps home maintenance businesses, you know, encourage neighbors to do these common services together or to coordinate their services. It's like it's pure chance, if you can clean two gutters, you know, on the same street, the same time, even though everyone's leaves at the same time. So that was kind of our first insight was like, well, that doesn't make any sense. And I can't believe knocking on doors is the industry standard. And as we kind of thought about it more, we started looking at our experience as homeowners in Charlotte and being like, wow, like, you know, we were working from home, it was the pandemic and we'd look out the window and we'd see like, there's 11 Different lawn care companies that come to my 12 home street, you know, in a given week. Like, I wonder why that is, because it's so much more efficient for any of these businesses to service a couple lawns. And then we got into kind of the consumer side and realize that people really do want recommendations from their neighbors next door, their neighborhood Facebook groups, things like that. That's how most people find home maintenance businesses, but there was nothing you know, there other than posting to a social network or running into a neighbor walking the dog that would actually help homeowners see which businesses their neighbors already used, much less when they're going to be coming to the neighborhood. And then we realize the same opportunity exists on the supply side, the service provider side to them helped broadcast, hey, there's a tree trimmer that's going to be in the neighborhood. The tree trimmer wants three or four customers in that neighborhood to all coordinate together. And the homeowners want to use the tree trimmer that's been vetted and verified in the neighborhood as well. And so we realized it was really a two sided opportunity, we stopped trying to buy a pool cleaning business, which was probably a good idea. Anyway, we went back to building software, which is, you know, where we both come from. And that's, that's how we got to street fair. So we make it really easy for homeowners to, you know, join their neighborhood marketplace. And you can see which local service businesses have already done a bunch of work in your neighborhood, it's all organized by how many neighbors use each company, you can see reviews, you know, within your neighborhood. And then you can see when businesses are scheduled to be in the neighborhood next. And as more homeowners, you know, sign up for the same visit or coordinate service together. The price goes down for every neighbor, who signs up together because of all the efficiency that service businesses able to get.

 

Kevin Carney 05:59

So it's like Angie's List meets Groupon. Yes. Right? Okay. Yeah. So I actually I downloaded the app and my neighborhoods on there. And I went looked, and not only is it convenient, but I saw that someone was doing power washing in my neighborhood. And I had been thinking about doing power washing for some time, but I'm like, Oh, you have to go find someone. It's a pain. But it's right there. He's going to be there on Friday. I'm like, Yes, me too. And so just come down the street, couple driveways down and get my driveway as well. And so the service providers helped. I'm help because I have to go find someone and it was kind of on my honey, honey do list anyway. Yep. And we all get a discount. So a great win win win right over

 

06:39

and over, like,

 

Kevin Carney 06:40

but it's demand generation. In

 

Mike Kerr 06:42

some ways. It's no coincidence that one of the biggest, best performing services on street fairs like dryer vent cleaning, because we all know we should do our dryer vents, drivers, but none of us do it right. And then somebody signs up for street fair. And they're like, oh, I should definitely get my dryer vents clean. And they're gonna be out here on Friday. And there's a $25 discount if I do it. So just hit the button. Add me to that right. And I'm done.

 

Kevin Carney 07:06

It's not it's not a cost thing. It's just an effort of finding the person. Exactly. And no one

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 07:10

comes to street fair to get their drive. It's like they go there because a tree just fell or they need to paint a room and then while they're there, they're like, Oh, shit. It's been six years since I had my dryer vents cleaned like, well, while they're here.

 

Kevin Carney 07:22

Yeah, yep. Yep. Yeah. Mailbox painted or gutters cleaned out? Yeah, the some wood rot repair and things like that. Yeah. It's awesome. It's awesome. Okay, so I'm going to just sidecar a little bit into an icebreaker Yeah, of the Great House debate. So some people like chocolate somebody like vanilla. Let's see where you stand is no judgment here. It's just you need to stand on one side or the other. No, no wishy washy.

 

Bill Clerici 07:44

I think there'd be some judgment. I

 

07:45

definitely will be judging. Yeah, that'd be judging. It's gonna be interesting. But don't get me Don't get me on the opposite sides of arguments. So I'm curious to see where we stand.

 

Kevin Carney 07:54

Alright. So let's start off with we're doing home service and stuff here. So mulch, or pine needles. Are you Team mulch you Team Pine Needle? Mulch? mulch? Mulch? mulch?

 

Bill Clerici 08:02

Mulch? pine needles are the worst I totally agree. Or we used to throw them away up north we throw that away. When I

 

08:10

had to go in a rake up all the pine needles right put down so I can put down some mulch the real stuff.

 

Kevin Carney 08:14

Yeah. Teddy. You're in the Northeast? No, no, I'm from

 

08:18

I do think it's a North versus south. Florida. Yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 08:21

But it's also a place for snakes to live and a place where snakes don't live. Like. Let's just call it like a spade. Besides, they can just land on fire. It's ridiculous.

 

08:31

I got an impromptu one. Why are we black mulch, brown mulch or red mulch

 

Kevin Carney 08:36

which just mulch? There's no There's no colored mulch. Disagree. Disagree. So what are you going for the Dyed Mulch is that you're going for is different? Yeah, yeah, Dyed Mulch.

 

08:48

I see. I'm a brown mulch. Blake's black mold black mulch.

 

Kevin Carney 08:54

I like I'm Brian from black trees.

 

08:57

Technically, not red mulch. Not right.

 

Bill Clerici 09:01

Unless unless you own a farm where there was a farm house. Maybe red works, but other than that, it doesn't.

 

Kevin Carney 09:07

Okay. All right. Gutter Guard. Or oh, natural light. Does the gutter guard, like prevent leaves from getting in? Or is it more of a pain to clean when you have?

 

Bill Clerici 09:17

Are you getting paid for this? No.

 

Kevin Carney 09:19

I don't mean to put gutter guard to like something a gutter mesh like something over the gutters or just let it go.

 

09:26

I mean, gutter guard all day.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 09:30

I don't have gutter guards. I probably will get them installed. So I can't speak to the pro verse con. All right. I wish I didn't have to have my gutters cleaned a couple times. Yeah, yeah, right.

 

Bill Clerici 09:42

I did my own. You did your own. Yes, but I'd rather pay somebody

 

09:46

wait you cleaned your gutters or you installed gutter I installed like

 

Bill Clerici 09:49

a like a mesh across a good portion of my front and back and it's I you know, it's one of those things you can do it yourself but I'd rather have somebody else do it but I'm gonna get it all the way

 

Kevin Carney 10:00

So I've been 25 years without a mesh or gutter guard. How often do you clean your gutters? We just got them in not nearly enough because it's too tall. And we just got them installed. It is life altering. It is it is. My quality of life is through the roof now. Yeah, perfect. Okay. Primary bedroom. First floor. Second floor

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 10:25

kind of a one floor one floor plus a basement so Oh,

 

Kevin Carney 10:27

that doesn't mean you have a basement. Yes, man.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 10:30

Where do you live? I live in Charlotte. Well it's like on a slope it's on a sloped into the basement. You know the basement has windows that kind of face the front like half above that. Should you

 

10:41

have had a two story house. What's your preference? Yeah

 

Kevin Carney 10:50

Oh, he's just main

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 10:51

floor. Yeah, main floor.

 

Kevin Carney 10:53

He came conceptualized the second floor finally stumped him. All right. Just like Master up master up. Yeah.

 

Bill Clerici 11:00

Master down for me. Master down. Hey, guys, the Fire won't be able to jump out real quick. Yeah,

 

Kevin Carney 11:05

you got people looking your windows. It's creepy, man.

 

Bill Clerici 11:07

Maybe I'm looking at other people's wonders. What's the difference?

 

Kevin Carney 11:09

Yeah, I don't want to go like I don't wanna go behind. Like the TV to go to bed. Like I need to go upstairs. There's a ceremony of turning lights off and going upstairs. Now I'm upstairs and I'm sleeping. Right. I totally agree. Yeah. Massdrop.

 

11:22

Bills, like, Oh, my kids burn upstairs.

 

Bill Clerici 11:25

He's out. They have sheets and tie them up.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 11:32

Train them to be resourceful. Yeah, I bought the drop and roll down. Literally.

 

Bill Clerici 11:37

There's a closet upstairs that has one of those safety ladder things in it and oh, really? Yes. And once a quarter we run a drill. That's right. Everybody put

 

Kevin Carney 11:44

their hand on it. Finally you build. There's like a fire pole outside the window.

 

Bill Clerici 11:48

I would install one if I could. I'm sure. Yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 11:51

So we're split. We're pretty evenly split on that one. Right. We're all mulch, but all right. Fireplace. Gas. Fireplace. wood fireplace. Wood. Wood. Yeah, I like the smell right.

 

12:03

I grew up with the wood fireplace.

 

Kevin Carney 12:05

I loved it. paying us to clean though. Yeah, I

 

12:07

mean, I have a gas fireplace now. It's just so much easier.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 12:11

I have a gas fireplace too. And it is we use it way more. But nothing beats starting a real wood fire. Yeah, if I if

 

12:19

I could choose, I would have a gas fireplace in my living room and a wood fireplace in my porch.

 

Kevin Carney 12:24

You just said both just get out. Yeah, I started off saying you can't say both. Oh, but I agree with you.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 12:37

I have to master bedroom. So I just have one upstairs and one downstairs.

 

Bill Clerici 12:42

I have a gas as well. And it's it's weird that you flip a switch to turn your fireplace on. But I mean, it's convenient. And you don't have to worry about cleaning it but I love a real fire. I'd much rather have a real fire.

 

Kevin Carney 12:56

Yeah, in hindsight. So we have a gas fireplace and it was cool. The first time you switch that thing on it was it was cool. But it smells and there's no romantic aspect to it. All right, and it's not a good heat source. See, miles does not even have it like just just like you're saying just put one outside make it woodburning put it outside.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 13:16

So our gas fireplace The house was installed it had. Its like the decorative piece was it was surrounded in like glass shards. Which kind of looks cool when he turned it on. And then we had a kid and it's just like, right there. exposed and I was like, okay, she's crawling around. Now I guess I gotta take all these glass shards sort of by hand out and it was like a two hour thing to find every glass shard and put it in a bag.

 

Kevin Carney 13:43

So they are hot. So

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 13:46

it actually looks better than you would think it it would. But it Fortunately, the underlying things just like black and kind of looks normal.

 

13:54

I gotta tell you, I'm impressed. I totally thought that you would be the one that looked over and she was eating one of the shards and

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 14:00

it wasn't my idea to take the golf shorts out. I was like, well, let's just teach her not to do that. But it was a good call.

 

Kevin Carney 14:06

It was only when she had one of her mouth. Yeah, decided it was time. Alright, so one last great House debate. Washing machine. Front Load top load.

 

14:18

Do they still make top loads?

 

Kevin Carney 14:19

This is a debate. We mean these are my top loads.

 

14:21

Oh, sounds like he's got no with wash.

 

Bill Clerici 14:24

I don't know. I just bought one. Two years ago. It was top load. Yeah. Yeah. Oh,

 

14:27

well, clearly you can front load

 

Kevin Carney 14:29

you can put stuff in after it's already started. Yeah, but

 

Bill Clerici 14:33

I think they have ones coming out that do the washing and the drying and one machine now don't they?

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 14:36

They suck. Why do they maybe the new ones like I don't know, Harmon I ever lived in New York. Had one. Yeah. And maybe it was just a bad version or a real X years ago but it was like it at best. You could run a load of underwear and it would be 80% dry if like there was nothing else in it and there was like Yeah, it was it was useless. That sucks. So is it yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 15:05

See the top load right you know you can throw stuff in afterwards while it's already running and comfort I can't

 

Bill Clerici 15:11

light it locks. You have to pause it. You can't pause

 

Kevin Carney 15:15

the front loader. You open up the water comes out.

 

15:18

How many loads of laundry Did either of you to do? Come on let's, let's let's start the vote Mike. You

 

Kevin Carney 15:24

know my OCD I do all my laundry. My wife doesn't.

 

Bill Clerici 15:28

I would say our laundry. There's at least two loads a night every night. Five to six nights a week. Are you kidding me? No, no. Maybe how many people live in your house? Five. Yeah. And there's football and there's horseback riding and gymnastics. And every night it is at least two loads. Same here.

 

Kevin Carney 15:45

Oh, wow. All right. Well, I wear the same pair of underwear.

 

Bill Clerici 15:51

And I know, we know we all know. Kevin's like that's why I stopped wearing underwear. Six years. Yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 15:58

There's a baker street fair. Please get back. Okay, so you guys both have passport. But before that, Mike, I'm gonna get into some little technology here. You were at BFA, right, you're also Kingsburg also be of a So you went from building huge enterprise Bank of america.com type websites? To take this the right way, a rare, very small application, right? Or because you barely works.

 

16:26

I gotta tell you, it's kind of nice to be worried about the 14 users, 14 million users.

 

Kevin Carney 16:32

But how do you do that? Because you weren't you. So like, predispositioned and train to make things that are scalable and make things that are, you know, deployable and multi tiered like, like, how do you do that to make an A, don't get me wrong, you've got a web app and your mobile app. And that's still complicated for just a small team to build. But

 

16:53

I think that's probably one of the most interesting debates I have on a daily or weekly basis to the state. I mean, I'm constantly building for the street fair, that I expect to have in two to three years while balancing not over engineering over architecting, the solution before finding product market fit. And at the same time, I've watched too many folks defer all scalability concerns, all security concerns, until the very end, and have a $5 million, you know, initiative to go clean up your security concerns or something ridiculous. And so I think we've done a really good job so far, if I may say, and in really do that afterwards, and really working in that capacity to take care of certain things, right. So I mean, we got off to an initial start, I hacked together, God knows what on nights and weekends, but I knew that before really taking a product to market, I'd call an old friend, who you may know, and say, Hey, let's get our infrastructure the right way, let's get all of this stuff into the CDK. Let's get all this stuff cleaned up. Because if this thing happens to take off, I really don't want to do this with 14 million users, I'd really do it with four users. And so it's been a really, really good kind of art, if you will. And luckily, I mean, for as much as I give him he's been really, really good at at understanding the importance and the need to prioritize capacity. And so So we're, we're constantly kind of reviewing, hey, when do we need to mix in some time to go solve some scalability concerns or some some security concerns, while at the same time, both of us are laser focused on like, none of this shit matters if we don't have users? Yeah, that's right. That's right.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 18:44

I, I rarely give my credit, but I'm gonna go somewhere in there. Yeah. Rarely do I let him out in public or give him credit. But I will, I will briefly here. Mike is so fucking good at this part of the business. In two things, one, I didn't like I was background data analytics, then kind of the venture finance and then product. So non technical background, like, I didn't know shit about data models. And our data model is so fucking good. It's really fair, like, we haven't done any dramatic rewrite from zero to, you know, almost 10,000 users in a pretty complex, like hyperlocal, you know, model in terms of how our product works, and how the, you know, data hits the UI. And from the beginning, Mike was like, No, I'm really going deep on the data model. Like, who cares? We don't have any data like there's no users like whatever but he really got it right. And it's it's scaled perfectly and then the second thing and I think we've it's probably one of the areas we partner best on

 

19:52

a quick Kingsmen software on the data Mall. Well, no, I just I learned the importance of the data model. Mike, Kevin and Bill, I mean, we obsessed over the data. And I mean, you get the domain, right based off before I even wrote a line of code. I just sent Teddy a Visio diagram. And we Hey, by the way, how does this look to you? He's like, I don't know what this is.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 20:12

Yeah, it looks really cool like bone. So every every street for employee, all nine of them do, like part of onboarding. In your first week, you do a data model review with Mike. And it's, it's actually as much teaching them how the business works. Like it has nothing to do with like, so you know, how the data tables are structured, it's more like, this is the pillar on which we built like the business, it is that foundational. And so I think that has really helped us move quickly through really hard problems. And then the second that Mike hit on, but I think he and I partner pretty well on is, you know, ruthlessly focused on deferring something and like create the problem first, then solve it. You know, you can be like, well, when we have 100,000 users across two different markets, this isn't gonna work. And it's like, perfect. Yeah, it's good. Let's get 100,000 users across two different markets. And we'll fix it. I want that problem. Yeah. And so we've been really good at saying like, is this a problem today? Perfect, like, we aren't blindly going down a path that's irreversible. And I think a lot of that comes down to confidence in the data model, but then just being really good at just not worrying about certain problems, or like letting some fires burned. Yeah, I agree. That's a problem. But like, for the three users that have clicked on it ever, we'll let them have a weird experience. And we'll focus on the core and like when it when we see 500 users click on it,

 

Kevin Carney 21:38

we'll fix it. Yeah. So you so you want a product? Teddy's right. Okay, So has there been? So you're telling me what to do? Which is probably good thing to keep in life.

 

21:48

But that apart? So it has ever

 

Kevin Carney 21:51

been this? This is a bit of like a, you know, tell us what your worst that kind of thing? Has there ever been a situation where you guys went down a path thinking this is exactly the customer wants, whether that's your your homeowners or whether it's your service providers, and they see this exactly they want and then you roll it out and turned out that's that's not what they want. You had to all the time,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 22:09

like, Oh, but I think that's part of building you know, you're like, the co founder of the first company I've ever worked for. I met with him when when we were really early on. And he is an angel investor and street fair, as if David Morgan and he was like, yeah, the first year CIO of a company, you're really just like tripping over yourself in the dark, like no idea where you're going in, like, obviously, you've got a vision. But it's very much like that. And I think that's where speed matters. Because if you know, I go time, yes, cycling, we're not making 12 month bets on like, I think this is what the user wants, let's spend a year building it. We're like, I think this is what the user wants. How can we figure that out this sprint, and like, validate the hypothesis. Yeah. And like, we're wrong, all the fucking like, out is zero to the amount of times we're wrong versus right. Like, it's not even close. But as long as it's an inexpensive mistake. And so we'll do stuff like when I talked about let's create the problem, like, we've ended a lot of debates in like, well, let's build the button. And and capture button clicks in the button doesn't do anything. Oh, sure. You know, like, it's not hooked up to the back end, like literally nothing happened.

 

Kevin Carney 23:21

You should put money down on this, like, oh, no, wait, do you

 

23:23

do we do all in the office? It's called a disagreeing bet wall. When we're debating around, like, no one's gonna click on that.

 

Kevin Carney 23:31

says, I get $1 A click

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 23:34

yes. But it's like, we'll do stuff like that. And it's like, cool. If 10 People click it, like, we'll make the button, do something. And if needed, apologize to those 10 users, but like, we're very comfortable doing stuff like that. And so it makes the cost of being wrong, which we very frequently are very low,

 

Bill Clerici 23:50

fail fast and fail early. It's

 

23:51

actually also one of the things that we ingrained in our culture early, right. I think we both read a book. It's called The Lean Startup, I'm sure. That's the Bible. It's, it's, we actually make everybody read it. The second that they started strove here, right? Hey, here's the domain model. What's

 

Kevin Carney 24:07

your first

 

24:11

I try to get people the copy of the book before they start and like, Hey, you're in a transition, go read this thing before you show up, but I'm sure it's a mixed bag. Who doesn't? But anyways, I mean, we save so much time, just like hey, just get the first thing out and prove that they do it. And like, a lot of times, we'll just set a number. When we get 10 people to do this thing. I'll go bill, what's behind that button? Until then, don't talk to me.

 

Kevin Carney 24:32

So what does the button do when you click on it? It's like, well, we say get like a Nelson from the citizens.

 

24:37

We make it the most minimally acceptable experience. Okay? There's literally no button that doesn't do. All right. Well, hey, we'll be awesome. Give him a thumbs

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 24:46

including even before you touch a line of code, like almost everything the product does. We did first and it was like, like a good example is probably reviews. We didn't have we built like a link would let someone leave a review after they had a service. And we didn't like wire it up to be automatically triggered upon service completion or anything like that. It was like, well, we don't know what if the providers asked them to leave a Google review, we don't know if people will figure out how to log back in the street fair, because you got to be authenticated, leave a review. And so we're like, right, I'm going to email or text the next 20 people to have a service completed. And let's see if any of them click the link and leave review. And Mike was like, hey, wouldn't 10 People leave review? I'll make it automatic. Okay, you know, or, like, invoicing. We did that super manually. And it was like, our threshold was like, when it takes more than four hours a week, we'll automate it. And then, you know, we create a new version, the business taxes, you know, and then it's like, hey, that new version is now four hours a week, great time to do another sprint on like invoice automation. And so I think we've been been able to be pretty iterative, which also helps building a consumer product, I think a huge acknowledgement is if you're building like enterprise software, b2b, you don't have the luxury of like a button that doesn't do anything. When you're like selling something to a bank or whatever

 

Kevin Carney 25:58

would be available, you have a button.

 

26:01

Less than I'm sure they have plenty of buttons.

 

Bill Clerici 26:04

I'm pretty sure all their buttons,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 26:06

but a huge advantage, like we're building you know, consumer products, we can do some of those things, right? Yeah,

 

Kevin Carney 26:11

exactly. So So Mike, have we had a lot of clients that just I know exactly what the customer wants? I just know it, I just know it. I'm gonna build, build, build, build, build for a year? And then I'm gonna deploy it, as it turns out, yeah, you don't?

 

26:23

You don't know. And most of you never took the time to build in the tracking mechanism to understand what 10% of the product are actually using in the first place. So we're all just guessing.

 

Kevin Carney 26:33

Yeah, yeah, I built products for myself, like products that I would use. And I was a product owner, and I was the user. And then I got exactly what I asked for. I started using it. And it just it was It wasn't needed. Yeah. Like, I can't predict what I want. I can't I don't know how to print it. Someone else wants boom. Okay.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 26:50

And just last thing on this point, because I think it's so unbelievably important to someone setting out to build something is like, even even in the desert, like just with a figma design, like Mike and I'll review a design and we'll both nod our head, but like, Yeah, I think this gets it done. And then we'll, you know, the contract designer have like, don't worry about the copy, I'll come in and do a pass on copy before we you know, build it. And then inevitably, I go sit down and do the copy. And I'm like, I don't think this feature makes sense anymore. And like 48 hours earlier, I'm like, this is perfect. Like, we send this to the engineering team, you know, because I'll sit down and like actually sit there and I'll start to write okay, this button should say this, because when you click on like, well, that's not how the design works today, you know, and so even just like forcing yourself to, to live it once, right, you know, is like, I just don't know any other way than like, You got to kind of take one little step. And then you're like, Well, the next step shouldn't be there. So

 

Kevin Carney 27:45

I get it. I get it. Yeah. And I download the app, and I've been using it a little bit. I haven't scheduled my first session yet, but

 

27:52

Teddy will give you $25 off your first service. Oh, he booked today. Oh, wow.

 

Kevin Carney 27:57

What did I do? power washing today.

 

Bill Clerici 28:02

Wait, there's the power of Washington with drones?

 

Kevin Carney 28:04

Oh, it's not Oh, we have to bring in lucid drones that way. They just announced their new which is a business on street fair. Is it? Yeah. Okay. I think we're

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 28:15

crashing yet. Because

 

Kevin Carney 28:17

when Andrew came in, he was talking about you. Yeah,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 28:19

sure. Andrew. Yeah. Andrew and his wife launched their neighborhood on street fair there and a brand ambassador. That's a see. They're awesome. And they he listed is rover cleaning. Is there like real services on that they're using to kind of iterate on this product and really prove it out. And they're they've been crushing. ountry fair.

 

Kevin Carney 28:37

Yeah. Okay, cool.

 

Bill Clerici 28:39

I get it. They were they were showing us robots that were going to drive when you drive. We were like, I'm in my driveway. my driveway.

 

Kevin Carney 28:47

It's like a Roomba for power wash. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 28:50

I shared the upcoming group deal with my neighbors and my neighbor across the street joined in, we got to good looking Dr. Boyce.

 

Kevin Carney 28:57

I just saw that on LinkedIn. And that that robot looks pretty freakin awesome. It looks like next level I

 

Bill Clerici 29:03

do it. I do it myself every year. So I would love to have somebody else we're

 

29:06

launching in Denver soon. So we're gonna have to do that. Okay, good. Don't give up.

 

Kevin Carney 29:10

It could be a what's the name your neighborhood?

 

Bill Clerici 29:13

Maple Leaf. All right. There

 

Kevin Carney 29:14

you go. You could be the the ambassador. Yeah, sure.

 

Bill Clerici 29:17

I always wanted to be an ambassador.

 

Kevin Carney 29:20

So you mentioned I'm going to switch gears a little here. So you mentioned you came from passport, but before that you were also at venture capitalist. Right, right by Bain. Yep. Venture capital. So you've been in this for a long time, like, like you've you've lived this on the other side of investing in companies. So how has that been brought to street fair to know how to raise capital to know how to invest in technology, invest in customer experience, things like that, like, bring it bring it to light?

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 29:53

It's a I mean, certainly very, very different building versus investing and You know, grateful for every second I spent in venture capitals there for about at Bain Capital ventures for about two years, learned a ton, and was grateful that I quickly was like, oh, I want to be on the other side of the table. And, you know, but intense environment, some of smartest people I've ever worked with. But it's very different than building. And you Yeah, it's just a different you're on a different side of the table, you're there to support and assist, but you're not solving the problems for the for the companies. But what you know, when it came time to start Street Fair, and as Mike and I are leading it, you know, it's a huge advantage that I understood how that world worked, and how to build a network. I mean, all of the folks that have invested in street fair, all of the institutional funds that have invested in street fair, came through warm introductions from my network, which was, you know, indirectly through the folks I met again,

 

Kevin Carney 31:00

you guys have raised some pretty impressive capital rounds. I mean, you're what you're two years old. Yeah. Two years old. And this is one of the rare categories, we have Teddy a lot of credit. So now, there's a thing there. Where's the soundboard.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 31:13

So we could do this when we're nice to each other? Oh?

 

Kevin Carney 31:19

Is there an applause made?

 

31:19

Literally, street first started as, hey, this is an we had like five ideas before this one. And they all fizzled out. We got we know

 

Kevin Carney 31:28

the pool when we got Malibu can with

 

31:33

real jobs at the time. We couldn't let this one go. And we just looked at are we doing this? I said, Well, I couldn't build it. Like, I'll start building it now. Like, if I can build it, you raise the money. He looked at me. He's like, I can raise money. Yeah, you go build it. And I'll raise the font and we bought, it seems like two days later, all of a sudden, there's a wire transfer, like, oh, fuck, we gotta go call the company.

 

Kevin Carney 32:00

No, it was bikes taking off a Speedo.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 32:04

Yeah, it was. It was wild. And obviously very fortunate to have been in this position with both the kind of idea honestly, what what made it really easy to raise is that Mike and I started working on the idea nights and weekends in March of 2021. And we didn't, didn't raise until October. And, you know, immediately when we had the idea, were like, This is it, let's go. But we forced ourselves to like, create some free MVPs free meaning just our time, you know, and not like,

 

32:33

and we followed the lean startup.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 32:37

But by the time we had a lot of things to point to. And yeah, it was, I had, my daughter was born two weeks before we we started street fair. And so I had a one month paternity. It's better

 

32:50

we were gonna start it before the daughter was born. His uncle was like, just please.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 32:54

Absolutely not. Yeah, they're like, look, hold off. Yeah, keep your job. It was like every mentor I had was like, Okay, you can do this. But now when your wife's eight and a half months pregnant, like with your first kid, like you have no idea what's coming. So just make sure there's 10 fingers 10 toes, like, get your sea legs and then you can go like, quit your, you know, great job with benefits and paternity leave and all those things and start the company. And so I had a one month maternity leave, and I kind of convinced my wife, I'm like, Hey, I'm gonna take two weeks fully off, will you let me start messing around with street fair, you know, after two weeks? And she was like, yep. And I think we had a term sheet like three weeks, you know, after like, it went pretty quickly. But we had laid some groundwork, and we'd made a lot of progress kind of on the side. So

 

Kevin Carney 33:38

wow, that's pretty bold. You gotta go all in. Yeah. Okay. So you you see your first term sheet. And then you're building out like, so like, how are you signing up? Are you going for neighborhoods? First, you're going for your service providers first, like chicken, the egg kind of thing, right? And a two sided marketplace? The hardest? Or the answer is yes.

 

33:57

Right? Oh, I think like the answer was, so one of our like, core core core values at Street Fair has been like be students of the game. And like, before we even started anything. We've read a billion books about marketplaces and how other people have done it and whatnot. And one of the things we realized was most important was the chicken and the egg problem and figuring out how to launch and so like we we are the beneficiary of a single neighborhood is an atomic unit, and it can be its own community. And so we actually started in my neighborhood, and we just got it working. And we're like, alright, if we can get it working in my neighborhood, we can knock down the dominoes next to it and the rest is history. And that's the approach we took. We launched my neighborhood up in Huntersville. Up and North snow so

 

Kevin Carney 34:41

your house is pristine, all your gutters are clean. All your dryer vents are are nice and shiny.

 

34:47

Right my house was very well taken care of.

 

Kevin Carney 34:51

Was this basically just a ploy to take investor money to

 

34:54

improve your house and clean our dryer? Can we cut that part? Out But no, yeah, we got it work. I mean, a lot of our sales pitch was like I would call a gutter cleaner. Hey, I need my gutters clean. Alright, cool. Well, hey, since you're gonna be out here, I think like four or five of my neighbors needed their gutters cleaned, like, can you hit them while you're out here? Will you give us like a slight discount? Right? Yeah. All right, well, hey, I own this company called street fair. You want to be a part of it. Like it was just an easy sale. It was natural.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 35:20

Even before that, like how we did our early validation, you know, again, before we went full time was, whenever Mike or I needed something, we would call around and say like, you know, that exact script gets someone to Yeah, I can come out there. Okay, well, I think it probably caught my neighbor's need it, would you give us a discount? Sure. What you have in mind, what about like, 10 bucks off per person who joins, you know, Okay, sounds good. And then we'd be like, we got one. And then Mike would spin up a webpage with like, a signup button and like no back end,

 

35:48

like you're at least getting

 

Bill Clerici 35:50

connected to an email address? No, no,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 35:53

it was not connected. Mike had to check the database and see if anyone like I couldn't I'd be like sitting there like texting me every 10 minutes, hey, do you want to sign up? They haven't signed up yet. And he'd like, let me log into the database and see, but we would take that signup link that just basically, you know, no thought for you. I just described what was going to happen in the date. And we'd post that on our neighborhood Facebook group, and we'd get like, 10 people to sign up for this thing. And we're like, this might work. And so there's just that's kind of how we started with testing stuff, you know, in our own neighborhoods, or, you know, Mike's neighborhood. And then we're really thoughtful to kind of building incrementally from there. And to go to go back to your chicken egg question. It was like, even that, that, you know, mini anecdote is similar to how you go, like, you've got to have the supplier onboard first, and it's okay to onboard a business, get them all set up and say like, okay, it may be a minute before you, you'll get some requests. But like, you know, what happens when you do get a request from street fair, and they would be totally fine going about their business, knowing that we're set up. So first, we onboard enough business businesses to, you know, that do work in the neighborhood that people in the neighborhood have referred and everything like that to satisfy like one atomic unit, which just needs to be a neighborhood, then we can start bringing users to it.

 

Kevin Carney 37:12

It sounds like you do need that neighborhood ambassador, I'm using a proxy. In college, we go to spring break. There was always one person who was trying to sign up for the cruise or the trip to Panama City Beach or something like that. And that person was motivated because if they got 20 people to sign up their trip was free. Right. So they were they were doing the matchmaking is any any thoughts around influencers? Or things like that, or neighborhood like neighborhood ambassadors that are driving that those? Because like you said, you need, you need demand to get the suppliers there. They need suppliers to drive it like it's, it's back and forth.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 37:50

Yeah, that's I mean, that's how we've we built Street Fair is, we've really focused on being kind of community driven in our growth. And we've launched a neighborhood when we connect with a resident, you know, street fairs, free for homeowners and free for neighborhoods. And so we'll connect with the residents like, Hey, I live in this neighborhood like, this sounds awesome. Like, are you guys like my neighborhood? Oh, not yet. But like, you want to help us get the word out, you want to be the neighborhood point, person or ambassador, and sure sounds good, what I have to do, and you know, we kind of help, we've got this little playbook that helps them get the word out. And you know, they'll start a group deal or something like that. And then the way that kind of products build, it's fairly social and intuitive. And we've been fortunate that the product market fit was fairly immediate on the consumer side. And so it kind of grows from there. But it's all about, you know, getting someone in the neighborhood to kind of stand up and say, Hey, this feels like a no brainer for the neighborhood. And then it bit spreads pretty quickly. From there, right? Oh,

 

Kevin Carney 38:44

by the way, any videos of the Panama City Beach trip are completely erased from this world. So what's the roadmap like? So you've, you've got, I mean, I've using the app. And you can see how there's the service provider aspect to it and how they can create their page and they can link to their Google ratings. And they can put some photos up there and describe their service. And then it can see the calendar of the events that are coming up in my neighborhood. So I can sign up for those. What's on the roadmap, but what's next, is it. Is it in app chat. Is it putting Glocal reviews like what's what's what's coming next.

 

39:24

Right now, we're building the provider side app. So right now we have like a provider facing web application that they use to field incoming service requests and whatnot. But I don't think they immediate roadmap is they've been begging for an app, they love street fair, but at times, it can be hard to use. They're like searching through their text messages, figuring out who's who and trying to, like keep track of all these leads. So we're gonna build the app. And then, you know, I think we're really excited about the in app messaging aspect of hey, like, if you need a service request right now it just fires off an email or a text message to the provider, but if you need something late handing it right into a to a conversation with the provider right on platform with you know us there to help you know, assist and make sure that everything goes smoothly. The rest is really just around helping drive virality on on both sides, getting more consumers to refer, you know, their businesses that they trust the most to bring more businesses on the street fair and as well as getting consumers to take a more active approach and organizing group deals and getting things going in their neighborhood. Or really just deepening engagement and and the kind of post booking experience to bring more and more on platform and have it as seamless as possible. And then when the we're getting ready to launch city number two, so I think we got to do some infrastructure, how things to make sure that we're ready, you know, to say, hey, there's not gonna be a second market potentially states away and so like, What didn't we think about to make sure that we can handle handle that aspect?

 

Kevin Carney 40:58

All right, so nice hand what city number two is that? Denver, North Carolina?

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 41:02

Yeah, we can use our city number one.

 

41:04

Denver, North Carolina is launches like next week. Yeah. I wrote actually,

 

Bill Clerici 41:08

there's people I mean, it's growing like crazy. It's ridiculous.

 

Kevin Carney 41:10

I think so. Alright. Well, Bill can be like DJ bill, he can be a service provider. Id to weddings and, and birthdays.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 41:20

Like he comments on his gutters? He does. Yeah, I'm gonna put you to well, but

 

Kevin Carney 41:23

he like he runs all of our AV here at the shop. J Okay. J Buffalo Bill,

 

Bill Clerici 41:28

and is the same thing at home. It's all to watch yourself. So I would, but I'm tired of it. I'm tired of cleaning and fixing. And so having some other options would be fantastic. I'm tired of it.

 

Kevin Carney 41:40

So what's the next city? What are you looking at? Like Raleigh or Columbia, South Carolina?

 

41:45

It's been a great debate. Teddy, take this. Yeah.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 41:51

We have a shortlist we haven't we haven't officially picked city number two yet. It's not Raleigh, Raleigh will be an obvious city number three. But we want to make city number two, you know, not in North Carolina. And so we're looking at, you know, cities like Austin, Denver, Colorado, Dallas, Texas. And, you know, even like in Atlanta, or Nashville or something like that. But looking at, you know, suburb heavy cities that had been growing quickly. But that aren't in North Carolina, because we know from from what we've built, like we could, we believe we can get this started anywhere. And so that's part of what we want to go solve for and kind of figure out where there's no interconnectivity to the marketplace.

 

42:47

You know, when you're building software, you try to figure out what the most risky parts are in terms of deliverables and pull them up front in the equation, and say, Hey, we're gonna eliminate all the risks, like we know that certain parts are a slam dunk. Well, we want to do is make sure hey, let's go and try to make sure that we can demonstrate product market fit in something far away from from North Carolina.

 

Kevin Carney 43:07

I know Mike's neighborhood.

 

43:10

And I got a lot of conviction that we will have a very healthy Raleigh, North Carolina marketplace. Sure. And so can we go and try to demonstrate that we can do this somewhere a little bit further away from the southeast.

 

Kevin Carney 43:22

So from a technology standpoint, is probably very easy to transfer over to Denver, Colorado, he says an example. How do you get those neighborhood ambassadors? How do you get the boots on the ground knowledge of what neighborhoods to go to? Right? Like, you know, Bill's, like he mentioned his neighborhood, and you probably know what it was? And you probably know, my neighborhood. You don't? Well, maybe you do. But I don't think you know, the neighborhoods in Denver.

 

43:43

I don't even North Carolina neighborhoods in South Charlotte anymore. He's looking at neighborhoods every single day. I'm like, where's that? I used to know everything when it was in.

 

Kevin Carney 43:50

But So Dean, I guess I'm saying is do you need to hire local boots on the ground that can drive that?

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 43:55

Yeah. And I think this also comes down to, you know, be a student, one of our core principles is like, we're very fortunate, we're not the first hyperlocal marketplace that has to launch city by city. And so we've really studied and networked with folks that were early at companies like Uber and DoorDash. And you know, next door and have learned a lot about the market launch playbook and and how those market by market expansion, you know, tactics work and what they would have done differently and everything like that. And we've, you know, obviously, nothing's apples to apples, and nothing's a direct, you know, translation. But we can learn a ton and have learned a ton about what made it work in those markets. And you know, what we're doing is, is drafting our best attempt at taking the lessons from all these amazing businesses that solve really hard problems around this and saying, I'm really glad they solved it. That thing seemed like it worked really well. Let's do that. And just adapting that for us.

 

44:54

But we will have boots on the ground. Gotcha. We just got to decide where that is first and then go higher. At launch,

 

Kevin Carney 45:00

are you gonna like throw a dart? Or is there a strategy behind that? We're looking for we

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 45:06

got some dark No.

 

45:08

I probably started with some idea. We're looking for a suburb heavy cities. And I think our proxy to that is like try to find city similar to Charlotte. I may say Charlotte has grown like crazy. But you know, looking at total population looking at growth rate over the last 10 years, just trying to kind of figure out, you know, what looks feels smells like Charlotte, because we know this one worked, but but maybe not in the same way.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 45:30

Looking at the climate, you know, is what? Like, is there seasonality? Yes, no. And how do we

 

Kevin Carney 45:37

literally climate not like business climate, suddenly,

 

45:39

like huge spring and fall pops in Charlotte? Like, bonkers. Which is great for us from like, a mass activation of our user event, right. Which is, yeah, we're gonna go, like 100 degrees out here. I don't know. Maybe that would be fine. Maybe it wouldn't.

 

Kevin Carney 45:58

Or Syracuse, New York, or Buffalo, New York, where it's snowing all the time.

 

Bill Clerici 46:02

No, nobody's happy in Buffalo.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 46:04

We got a boots on the ground. So they gotta want to go there.

 

Kevin Carney 46:06

Well, in Syracuse always have boots on the ground. Yeah, so you, you mentioned next door. And that's a great way for people to connect within their neighborhood. Is that Is it an obvious channel partner exits? Strategic exit? Like, like, that has to be on your right, of course. Right.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 46:29

Yeah. And we get asked that a lot. You know, right now it is, it is one of the ways we're growing within a community. We've always said, you know, around the why now for street fair. We're very fortunate that, you know, platforms like next door, and like, neighborhood, Facebook groups are already there. Homeowners are already connected online, and organized by neighborhood, and they're already talking about home service, provide a recommendation. So next door publishes that 25% of all activity on next door is people asking and referring home maintenance providers. So that's like our immediate sign of like, well, does that make sense to happen on the social network? No, they're looking for a marketplace. But they're, that's how much weight people put on? Well, who have my neighbors used? Let me do like this call and response thing of like, does anyone have a plumber asking to the void of neighbors and like a worst? Yeah, like, that's, it's not like, you know, they, like no one's going online and saying, Does anyone have a microwave? Like they're going to Amazon and buying a microwave? And it's like, okay, well, that probably won't look like that forever. But right now, because neighborhoods are already organized together online, we don't have to organize them together online. And so we were able to grow more efficiently, because people are already talking about this on next door, and Facebook. And, you know, going back to that story of how we got started, Mike would build a little web page, and we posted in the neighborhood Facebook group. And we didn't have to, like go get all the neighbors to come to the same website at the same time. It's like, Hey, here's the link. And so you know, what that looks like in the future? You know, I'm not sure. I doubt we're on any of their radars yet, which is perfectly okay with

 

Kevin Carney 48:14

1. But after this podcast, yeah, but we know people Oh, we know, almost double digit,

 

Bill Clerici 48:21

10. Double digit.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 48:25

But, ya know, so what we'll see. I mean, for now, it's just it's, it's efficient and complementary as like, early growth channel.

 

Kevin Carney 48:31

Okay. So on the on the supplier side and the service provider side. They must have other apps that they're logging into as well, right, other market channels that they're getting leads from? You mentioned, Mike, you mentioned nap in app communication. So they're not checking their text all the time? How is Street Fair? In the portfolio of assets, I have to check every day, right of where I'm gonna get my leads? Where is that in the in that list? Like, is it is it overload? They have too many apps to check? Is it the Kundu texture that can Street for like, where does that fit in their ecosystem?

 

49:11

That's such a loaded question. There's so many different personas, right? I mean, you got like the one man show who's new who's driving their entire business off Angie's List, right? And like they're paying for every single lead along the way. And like, that's where they live out of, I think you have the opposite end, which is, you know, a much more established firm has an actual marketing team does their own direct mail. They have Google presence and drive and do SEO and all that stuff. So it's not not such a straightforward answer. So like, I think the real differentiator on street fair is a little bit about the business model and it like aligned incentives. And I think a lot of those other channels are really around pay for the lead. And we don't believe that's necessarily the right model and or is resulting in like aligned incentives across those platforms. So

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 50:00

it's a horrible fucking mom just to go one step further.

 

Kevin Carney 50:03

Right? I was. So Schrieffer they pay for the actual service, right? They pay when they get a complete rejection, right? Yeah. So

 

50:11

we always say we make money when you make money like zero risk, just come and get on street fair because if neighbors are referring you want to use you and they want to collaborate and coordinate on the service that you're gonna be in the neighborhood that great, but otherwise, like, you don't have anything to lose, these other platforms are selling a lead to you, hey, here's my curry needs, his house pressure washed and then selling the exact same lead to your four biggest competitors. And it's like sharks in the water going after a leader which is super weird as a consumer. I mean, that's how we knew that I wanted my lawn care cleaned and or my lawn mowed. And I submitted a request on Angie's List, and I got like blown up for three days aggressively by all these firms just doing whatever they could to close the business. Because to be fair, they just paid a lot of money for that lead from me. Yeah, but they also sold it to five other people. So I think that one of the biggest differentiators is around the business model.

 

Kevin Carney 51:08

Well, my wife knows my lawn so.

 

51:13

Well, I reserve judgment,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 51:17

I will say one of the just going back to kind of the initial question, where do we fit in this stack? And Mike's answer of like, it's a loaded question is, I think one of the hardest parts. On the provider side, building this product, the provider app is the range of personas that we're solving for, or the types of users. And of course, like, we've tried really hard, we're huge believers in like, you know, add constraints focus on one user first get that right, and then expand, but that's not really how street, you can't really work if you're like, Okay, we have all the companies with with marketing teams, and like, so hopefully, those are the neighborhood favorites, right? You know, it's like, well, no, like the neighborhood favorites, the neighborhood favorite. So we kind of our founding pillars like we need, whether they take payments online, whether they have a workflow management system, whether they even have an LLC, or like, whatever the business is, right, depending on the service type is, if that's who neighbors are naturally recommending to each other today. That's the supply we need on the platform. And so that was like the founding decision. And so it's like, great, we have to figure out how to walk that line of building software that's usable. For the one person lawn care business, who's workflow management is like, they write addresses on post, its and they put it on their truck dashboard. It's like, okay, just did this one, take the post it off, right. And like, we need to be able to complement that system and not force them to do something that they're not going to end equally we have teams that are super sophisticated. And they have, you know, digital marketing teams and customer experience teams and like, how do we have the same piece of software be at least compatible with our workflow? And I think that's still something we you know, it makes it really challenging to build on on the provider side. But it was just about that kind of core principle of like, we know that something we have to solve for from the beginning, because it matters so much to the to the health of the marketplace.

 

Kevin Carney 53:15

Yeah, I can see this how this challenging because I think on the on the neighborhood side and the consumer side, they're all fairly the same, right? Yeah. The personas are pretty

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 53:23

end like if if it's not for you, it's not for you. I mean, we don't need 100% of homes in a neighborhood like prefer Street Fair.

 

53:30

For Hill wants to clean his own gutter and seeing please, I don't want

 

Kevin Carney 53:34

to go get a guy he's the

 

Bill Clerici 53:36

only reason I do it is I'm so tired of seeing water just coming all over the place. This strong DIY

 

Kevin Carney 53:41

guy is not your persona. When I was I think the key differentiator for your platform is the era of density, which you mentioned earlier, right? Because you had said that Angie's List, you asked about lawn care, you know that those those Lawn Care those leads are going to be on Monday I mow Mike's lawn on Tuesday, I mow Bill's lawn which is on the other side of the city. And on Wednesday, I rotate like it's it's that's not efficient. As a kid in high school, I create a lawn mowing business. And it was great when you mowed the first one and then the lawn next to it and the lawn next to it and the lawn next to it because you just didn't have to go anywhere. Yeah, because it's when you're working as when you're getting paid. And when you're driving, you're not getting paid. And so things like Angie's List that suddenly don't have that. Right, you get that built in. So what they do is that some will come clean bills, gutters are moving. While they're knocking. I wish they were gonna clean my gutters. No, because I have a gutter guard. So they're clean Teddy's gutters. But then they're gonna leave a sign that hey, we just clean the gutters by such and such. And then someone sees that and calls next week and gets their gutters closed. Now there's a drive back, right? This that's not an efficient way of doing it. Right. But by pre loading that and saying I'm going to be there on Monday, who else wants our gutters clean? Maybe even like a proactive like send it out to people? Hey, there's gonna be a gutter cleaning in You're in your neighborhood this week, do you want to? Do you want to sign up? That is what's different for the supplier?

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 55:07

100%. And it it is about that, like, it's, it's less about, would they drive somewhere? It's like, well, sure, as long as that a day's worth of work there, right, or whatever else. And so it's, it's, it's stacking those customers near each other. And the other thing St Paul's doing differently is, when you're able to do that and get three or four people to all agree, hey, let's just do this together. While the company is here, there is a material economic advantage to both sides. And so like that's where the group deal comes from, like, we're not forcing providers to, to run lower margin businesses, or like forcing consumers to pay for cheaper, you know, or like to sacrifice on quality to get a lower price. It's like, hey, it is seriously more efficient if they do three or four. And so like you can use the group of you can have a 15% discount, as long as you just all choose the same date and like, organize a little bit and our product makes it so there's no organization. So we don't need someone going around saying, Okay, you're at four o'clock, and I'll be at 430. And like, like the product handles all that. So you can be on a group deal with seven neighbors you've never met. And I think that's part of what is really working in that we're doing differently. And where that like Win win on both sides, and the economic return comes is by coordinating that ahead of time, like they're happy to provide that discount. And consumers can save money with fewer clicks. And to get the same quality work, right?

 

56:36

I think there's a couple of things that are a differentiator one, there's a level of proactiveness to our approach, like every other solution today was much more reactive in that like, there's plenty of Route density software solutions out there, which will like take the customers that you happen to get off of Angie and tell you the best route to try to optimize that. We're trying to be more proactive and say the customers that we are going to bring you are going to naturally be in a cluster in a single neighborhood. And so you don't have to worry about your route, like sure figure out the route that that makes the most sense. But like, we're already bringing you that route density.

 

Kevin Carney 57:12

Yeah. You don't even need that software if we put all your customers for that day in the same spot. And then the

 

57:17

other aspects like we're taking a digital approach. This is not a new, this is not a new concept, like the lawn guys will tell us. They'll have one guy mow one guy below or edge and then we'll have a third guy, go hang door hangers on the 10 closest houses because they're trying to do the same thing. But they're doing it in a much different way. They're doing it in a manually non digital way. Right? And so we're trying to take both of those and say, Hey, let's just make it very visible what work is happening in the neighborhood? And by the nature of us making it visible of what's happening you're naturally scheduling more customers closer together it doesn't really you don't you didn't route density software to go for this up.

 

Kevin Carney 57:55

You know, you mentioned right density software, we have a great lawn care, like fertilizer service, natural lawn, love it. It's wonderful. Got lots of earthworms in my lawn and my lawns the best lawn in the neighborhood.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 58:07

We look forward to that recommendation if you're listening natural law

 

Kevin Carney 58:11

natural lawn No, they're great that they your your your lawns and our nuclear green looks like healthy green. It's just it's wonderful. But I can't figure out is that like our neighbor also uses natural lawn because we you know, recommended them and we get the discount. But they come to our lawn on Monday and their lawn on Tuesday like what do you do it like you surround density software, I'm like that that's all you could just literally just keep spreading like keep just go right across the driveway under their long

 

58:37

you touch on a point, which is probably one of our biggest challenges as a business, which is you're, you're selling a solution to folks who may or may not be sophisticated enough are run their operation like a true business where they're focused on the p&l, and they're focused on efficiency and they're out there doing their job and they mow and they want to mow or whatever probably like I just really wish you cared about route density like getting that, please more lawns on the same day because we're way more efficient for your operation.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 59:12

And that's actually that's not a commentary on the size or scale the business, some of our smallest companies, they totally get it they think ruthlessly like this. And you know, not all of the even bigger ones do. But it is a one of the things we screen for when we're onboarding you know, service riders is obviously it's about the quality and are they going to uphold a good consumer experience? And you know, will they will they work within the confines of how our marketplace operates. But a big one we talk about all the time is culture fit and like I still don't know how we define it but we get off you know, the setup calls are like you know, they're fairly new whatever else they came really highly recommended but unbelievable culture fit like they think like we do, they're excited to dive in and some of them are gonna go. I think they're a great tree trimming business. I just don't think we should You know, we should really lean into him on street fair, because I just don't think they're a cultural fit. Like, they just don't think in terms of this, and it's probably not going to result in great customer experiences on the other side. And so you know, it's one day we'll probably right up like the street fair culture fit. But it's really cool, because some of the companies that are most successful are just that culture fit. Like they, they they think like this and doesn't mean they have to they're amazing ly run businesses that just don't think like this. And they've made their their math work. But it's yeah, it's a big part of street fairs, like, you know, great, like, do you, do you want to do more work in the community? Do you want to build a reputation and invest in that ongoing reputation, which are product rewards, the more work you do in a neighborhood, the higher up you are, you know, as a recommended provider in that neighborhood? And so, you know, there are companies that really think like this, and they they

 

Kevin Carney 1:00:48

crush, it must be a mental switch, though, right? Because you're either looking for leads, and you want as many numbers leads, you can you're not thinking in concentration. Yeah. And so you have to, we do that a lot in Kingsmen, people are normally thinking about hours I spent on working on something versus I just want something done. Yeah. And so that we find a big mental leap of being able to switch people's mindset, it sounds like you got the same sort of thing. Well,

 

1:01:13

I think when you get started, all you can care about is leads, and you'll take any lead Sure, but after a certain point, you have enough leads, and you start to think about a lot more efficient. Yeah,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:01:24

another big thing on that is like, so we always like we, particularly with our size, now, we probably won't be your biggest source of new customers, we want to be your most effective and a big source of wasted time. So if we go back to like the NG model, or the HomeAdvisor model, where you go on and even from this is actually interesting from a design standpoint. So if you didn't, I didn't really appreciate this until we got so deep in street fair, but if you go on to any marketplace out there, they're like building for search or browse experiences, right. And like, you know, you can read different products and kind of dive in. If you go on to thumbtack, or Angie, or any of these, they hit you with a wizard, like the first time you click a button, they hit you with a wizard that's like, tell me about your job, like what size home do you have? When do you want it done? How big is your lawn? And they've done a good job of it doesn't feel that weird? Until you take a step back? And you're like, what if you went to Amazon, it was like, What are you here to buy? And you're like a microwave? Well, what color microwave Do you want? You know, what, how long do you want the cord to be? Now? Can I just look for some fucking microwaves please like, but but they do that, because they're not actually, for them and their business model because they don't have aligned incentives. It's not about helping that consumer find the best business for them, which is the purpose of most marketplaces, they want to score that lead. And I'm gonna make all right, Kevin needs a, this is a $80 lead, because it's a, you know, $700 job, they score that lead, and then they're trying to sell to every plumber they can. And they don't want you to browse for a plumber and pick like they want to score that lead and then say, you know, would you like us to help you get a few quotes and kind of sell that. But one of the huge things on efficiency that we've really been able to help business on our platform is all seven of those plumbers that just bought your lead. It's not just whether they win it or not, and that they had to pay up front, you might have five plumbers come out to your house for free drive that time assess the job, do think one, it's a pain as the consumer, but it's so much wasted time if you as a plumber winning one out of four on those platforms, because they sell them to 10 customers and you have a pretty good win rate, you know, they sell the 10 other of your competitors, and you win one out of four. That's like three unpaid consultations that don't result in a job. And so just by building our marketplace, totally different alignments that we want you to browse for the business that you should choose based on their reputation, the neighborhood or their upcoming service or the group deal. And then just pick that one. It's so much more efficient for the service providers with like, you know, almost 75% of service requests on street fair closed and turn into like a job completed. Right. And so there's none of that, like, Yeah, I do five consultations, I drive out to wherever, for the MP job, and I think a lot comes down to align incentives.

 

Kevin Carney 1:04:12

I like the fact that I go on to the street fair web app, and I see not a list of providers or a list of what service do you want. It's what's in my neighborhood, because I feel like I can just pick and say I see there's a car car detailing over here. There's a driveway. powerwash over here. There is leaf pickup over here. And I'm like, yes, yes. I don't need that now, maybe next month, like, like, I don't care who picks up my leaves. I don't care who delivers my mulch.

 

1:04:41

I don't care who cleans my gutters, right? I mean,

 

Kevin Carney 1:04:43

I mean, yes, I care to an extent that you know,

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:04:46

48 of your neighbors have used them before. Perfect, right?

 

Kevin Carney 1:04:49

It's fine. As long as no one's screaming and yelling that they're, they're a fly by night company. I mean, I even electricians and plumbers. They're certified right there. There. they have a certain licensing and they can do the job. Now maybe they're not as happy and whatever, but but there's a certain amount of commoditization to that, that I just want it done. And I don't want to have to pick. Now when I'm doing something

 

1:05:16

else, a very big project to remodel your kitchen.

 

Kevin Carney 1:05:19

Floors, right? Yeah, like I spend more time on it. But it's a lot of things. I just, I just, I just want it done.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:05:23

Yeah. And there's a huge variety of quality out in the market. And there's some unbelievable businesses. And we, we want that to rise to the top right, we don't want to commoditize you know, the home services space, we just want to make it unmistakably obvious who everyone in the neighborhood uses right. And just Okay, cool. I don't need seven quotes. Like all my neighbors, Teddy's

 

1:05:44

famous stories, I moved down from Manhattan. I bought a house I looked across the street, my neighbor's lawn looks fantastic. I just want to close my eyes and hit the easy button up like add me to that

 

Kevin Carney 1:05:54

easy to buy, easy

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:05:56

to buy. I'm not trying to do my own thing. Like he's got to figure it out.

 

Kevin Carney 1:06:00

Wait, so you live across the street from me?

 

1:06:03

Yeah, but what was the name of that company?

 

Kevin Carney 1:06:05

Joan, she she cuts the lawn. they fertilize the lawn? Alright, so one last topic here and ever probably way over time. But AI, you guys must be think about AI. And I know, Mike, I'm looking at you, Mike. So tell me what's in your head about AI?

 

1:06:22

I haven't stopped thinking about AI since this whole craze? I don't know. I mean, a lot. That's a lot on my mind about AI, I think we're, we have a unique opportunity to build this business in a more efficient way than most of our predecessors. Right. I mean, we're clearly planning city number two, and beyond. And for the lack of figuring out some automation, we continue to scale the team. Right. But I think we have an opportunity to tackle whether it's an operational burden, or whether it's a sales tactic, you know, tapping into some of the capabilities that are unfolding, real time to kind of control the slope of this business. And whether that means you know, faster growth or controlling the expense line. I think it's really exciting to see what's going on around us. Now, I this is where I kind of go back and forth in my own head. I'm like, Alright, like, what do I go solve right now? And like, what can wait six months or 12 months or whatever, but there's a lot that we can do with AI in this business. Well,

 

Kevin Carney 1:07:25

shameless Kingsmen plug here, but we have a free service, free, Teddy legs free, Allen free, no. So but we have found that I'll get in my buckets conversation a little bit later. But most of our clients that have initial conversations or thinking about AI in one frame of mind, and then we go spend two hours in a white room, white boy, boardroom conference room,

 

Bill Clerici 1:07:53

with white with whiteboards.

 

Kevin Carney 1:07:55

We, and and we, and we play off each other's ideas, and some of the things that we've seen, and we've been building infrastructure capabilities, and all of a sudden, people walk out with brand new fucking ideas that that go from operational efficiencies, which we talked about, to how can I disrupt this market and make revenue generate revenue generating opportunities? So if you're interested, you know, Reliv,

 

1:08:21

sign me up once. When's the next session? No,

 

Kevin Carney 1:08:23

whenever you want, okay,

 

1:08:24

I can't underestimate the percent of my day that's spent thinking about what I can do with this business with AI. So I'm excited.

 

Kevin Carney 1:08:33

So here's, here's I've one word, to say, Frank. For those who don't know, Frank is our CTO. And he's just like, scary, smart. Socially awkward, but scary. Smart.

 

Bill Clerici 1:08:49

I'm sure he'll really he roped into that. He

 

Kevin Carney 1:08:51

might, but in a lovingly way. Yeah. But no, here's some stuff that he's he has not only like, thought about but start implementing Yeah, is crazy. I would,

 

1:09:02

I would love to get on a whiteboard with Frank and just talk through all the things I've been racing through my mind for the last six months and say, Hey, like, what? What makes sense? What's tangible? How exactly would it work and start to prioritize the roadmap? Because I mean, I think we're, we're weeks away from starting to tap into AI to help us not not months away.

 

Kevin Carney 1:09:23

Back in January, we really started doubling down on it. And like, as I caught up in March and April, like some of the crazy ideas that I had that came up. I'm now seeing in the marketplace, like three months, four months later, right? And so all the stuff I thought was, you know, flying cars is now actually happening. Also, you have to think about what the next six months is going to be and that's going to happen in three months. It's crazy.

 

1:09:52

I mean, like little stuff or you go on the street fair and you see these businesses and like they didn't just make magically appear here like one of us had to go on and onboard each one of them and upload their logo and put in their ratings and describe their services and upload their photos like a few months from now, I want to be able to say like, here's the business name, and here's their website,

 

Bill Clerici 1:10:15

just go scrape it, just go do it. Yeah, go pull the information. I don't know,

 

Kevin Carney 1:10:18

three months ago, we did that for ourselves that we not, we said, we said, go go figure out what Kingsmen is based on here's that here's the URL, go figure it out. And it came back with a great summarization what we do, which actually summarized it better than our website,

 

Bill Clerici 1:10:32

which is why we got rid of our marketing company. Yeah,

 

1:10:34

you're gonna be like, well, what are you actually told us we do is nothing. It was

 

Kevin Carney 1:10:39

it was actually super good. It was bad. So so we had a marketing company and their pot and our blog posts and whatnot, and, and so our website, copy and whatnot, and they never quite understood what we did. And so some of the blog articles that we put together wouldn't quite have our opinion, but also wouldn't quite understand the topic as well, because marketing firms and technology from Georgia is very different. And so we started doing it through a few through some of our AI capabilities. And within seconds, it was so much better. And it was seconds. And we didn't have a rewrite cycle and whatnot. And so a couple months ago, we said, yeah, thank you, but we don't need you anymore. Yeah. And so if you're in a marketing business like that, you need to figure out either pivot to something else, or embrace AI somehow. It's amazing.

 

1:11:29

I'm excited. All right.

 

Kevin Carney 1:11:33

Well, guys, it's been a pleasure, Teddy, some thanks for joining us.

 

1:11:36

Thank you. Appreciate it.

 

Kevin Carney 1:11:37

Yeah. Congratulations on your, on your success. You're you you've grown to what 300 suppliers?

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:11:43

At least that I think it's closer to 400 100.

 

Kevin Carney 1:11:45

Great, and

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:11:47

how many neighborhoods I think we're gonna launch 100 or 110. This week? 110 100. Attend? Yeah, which we've taken a very, like, you know, we were for six months, we were in six neighborhoods by design. And then it was really not until this year 2023 that we started to say, Okay, let's let's focus on kind of growing throughout Charlotte now. Okay,

 

Kevin Carney 1:12:05

great. And be there soon. If we're not in your neighborhood now. And you had a second capital raise.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:12:12

In May we got, you know, couple years of runway, some awesome investors, well capitalized and just looking to continue to lean into the traction.

 

Kevin Carney 1:12:18

Great. If someone wants to get a hold of you or figure out how to download our app. Where are they going?

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:12:22

Street fair.com on there, you know, I think it's still my cell phone number that's on the website for customer support. So you can reach me pretty pretty directly.

 

Kevin Carney 1:12:31

100 Teddy?

 

Bill Clerici 1:12:32

Yeah. And 2am

 

1:12:34

Don't download the mobile app.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:12:37

Yet download mobile app.

 

1:12:38

That was one of our over under bet, Mike. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

 

Kevin Carney 1:12:43

I downloaded it right away.

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:12:44

It's like, literally more than 2x the quarterly goal for Abdon we're like, Guys,

 

1:12:49

do you think we can get 500 people to download the app? Whatever

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:12:54

quarter or 1100? It was the it was the best $5 I've ever lost.

 

Bill Clerici 1:12:58

I'll take that. Yeah, it'll take that loss every day. Right? Yeah.

 

Kevin Carney 1:13:04

Well, Mike say hello to Owen forests. We we know Him and love Him and miss him.

 

1:13:09

I certainly will.

 

Kevin Carney 1:13:10

Yeah. Bill. Thank you for her audio engineering.

 

Bill Clerici 1:13:15

Don't say anything until you hear it. Oh, yes.

 

1:13:17

Bill, thank you for a launch in your neighborhood next week.

 

Bill Clerici 1:13:19

Yeah, next week. Okay, let's do it

 

Teddy Fitzgibbons 1:13:21

on air confirmed. Let's do it. It should

 

Kevin Carney 1:13:23

be the neighborhood of masseur and a service provider. As long as I get inviting DJ services, the kids Berto

 

Bill Clerici 1:13:28

villas audio visual. Yeah. And I want some like,

 

Kevin Carney 1:13:32

DJ buffalo DJ bone.

 

Bill Clerici 1:13:34

I'll take that. I'll take it. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, and what do we

 

1:13:36

build? one more plug or a data engineer? He's a UB guy.

 

Bill Clerici 1:13:41

No, nice, perfect. Love it nice. goes. Blows up bowls, bowls. Yeah, you got the bowls, the Bills, Bills, Bills. They're all blue. Joe's bowls, bills, bisons. So yeah. Okay. Yeah, take it. That's all we got.

 

Kevin Carney 1:13:55

All right. Well, thanks for joining another episode of Kingston's beyond the build podcast where we showcase interesting innovators in the Charlotte area and until the next podcast, go build something awesome.