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Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

grassdx.com

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Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#11

Post by pryelluw »

goda90 wrote: post #2

> Your lawn is trying to tell you something. It's saying "I'm an unnatural, non-native monoculture that does little to support biodiversity but will gladly suck up your time and money." Sorry to speak negatively of the thing you're working on Andrew, but the subject matter is one I feel strongly about. Having a short cut lawn area has many recreational uses, but most people don't do anything except maintain most of t…

I did look into it but neither the state, the county, the city, nor the HOA allow for that to happen. It’s gotta be Bermuda and it’s gotta be green.

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#12

Post by goda90 »

Carrok wrote: post #9
goda90 wrote: post #2

> Your lawn is trying to tell you something. It's saying "I'm an unnatural, non-native monoculture that does little to support biodiversity but will gladly suck up your time and money." Sorry to speak negatively of the thing you're working on Andrew, but the subject matter is one I feel strongly about. Having a short cut lawn area has many recreational uses, but most people don't do anything except maintain most of t…

I agree, broadly, with your statement. I am removing my entire front yard to xeriscape. I compost and am otherwise environmentally active and conscious. That said, plenty of people _do_ actually use their lawns, especially those of us with children. My actual grass lawn is surrounded by native and low water use plants, but my small patch of green (around 2k sqft), will stay green until my kids move out. I think it's…

I don't disagree at all. I have a fairly large area I keep cut short for playing with my dog and having campfires. But I'm converting my front yard to native fruit bushes and flowers. And the parts I do cut short(either for recreation or just for code compliance until I get the time to convert it) never get sprayed or fertilized besides from the natural falling of leaves and the clover fixing nitrogen. It's a mix of various grasses, clover, creeping charlie, wood violets, dandelions and other plants that all survive a few mowings per month. I do manually pull out things like thistle since I like to walk barefoot sometimes, and aggressive invasives like garlic mustard.

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#13

Post by pryelluw »

Besides lead gen, how about having ready to go packages for the diy people? You can probably have it drop shipped by other online providers. Lead gen is fine and all but I already get postered by a ton of lawn care sales people who basically provide the same service.

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#14

Post by swatcoder »

What are you actually providing here? What makes this more useful for someone than just uploading a their lawn images directly to their favorite frontier chatbot?

Did you craft a rich prompt template that's untuitively helpful? If so, what did you see go wrong before you had that figured out? How did you determine it was a positive improvement? How will you make sure that your prompt's benefits hold up as your original model is retired and it needs to be run against whatever new model you're left to use instead?

Or is it just that your website acts like a kind of inspiration a la "Hey, did you ever think to ask AI about your lawn problems?"? If so, how do expect people to find this inspiration when link-delivering search is being agressively retired in favor of synthesized chatbot responses already?

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#15

Post by swingboy »

goda90 wrote: post #2

> Your lawn is trying to tell you something. It's saying "I'm an unnatural, non-native monoculture that does little to support biodiversity but will gladly suck up your time and money." Sorry to speak negatively of the thing you're working on Andrew, but the subject matter is one I feel strongly about. Having a short cut lawn area has many recreational uses, but most people don't do anything except maintain most of t…

*Advice only applies to neighborhoods without an HOA.

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#16

Post by andrewbr »

swatcoder wrote: post #14

What are you actually providing here? What makes this more useful for someone than just uploading a their lawn images directly to their favorite frontier chatbot? Did you craft a rich prompt template that's untuitively helpful? If so, what did you see go wrong before you had that figured out? How did you determine it was a positive improvement? How will you make sure that your prompt's benefits hold up as your origin…

Our differentiator is that we provide a richer results experience than the typical text-only chatbot response. Rather than a few bulleted sections, we provide a visual guide, a grass health score, 2-3 specific diagnoses with information about each, and three distinct treatment pathways to choose from. A lot of chatbot responses are somewhat wordy or generic and may be based on general internet slop rather than favoring reputable sources. But it's also true that many people never even think to ask a chatbot about their lawn. So to some degree yes, the website also exists to remind people that they in fact can use AI for this purpose. Of course we are targeting Google search for traffic, but to your point that will continue to decline. We plan to use content to drive traffic where possible, as well as good old-fashioned local marketing and direct outreach to service professionals (realtors, hardware stores, etc.).

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#18

Post by andrewbr »

pryelluw wrote: post #13

Besides lead gen, how about having ready to go packages for the diy people? You can probably have it drop shipped by other online providers. Lead gen is fine and all but I already get postered by a ton of lawn care sales people who basically provide the same service.

A lot of the lawn care lead websites don't offer ZIP code exclusivity, which we do. And the leads are already warm, because they are actively seeking a solution to a definite problem. This all hinges on a large amount of traffic, but when the leads do come, their conversion rate should be pretty high. We also rely on affiliate income to monetize. Ready-to-go packages could be offered in the future, not a bad idea.

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#19

Post by ktrnka »

I don't have a lawn, but I could use some more software around native habitat restoration for Green Seattle work parties. I end up using Claude or ChatGPT for plant identification because iNaturalist isn't as good, then getting the background on each plant - native? non-native? invasive?

When I'm planting, site selection is important but I'm really slow at it, even when using AI.

I also use AI for some plant diagnosis but that hasn't led to any meaningful action, except that I'll be more thoughtful about site selection for some plants in the future.

Most of this could just be a collection of documents in a Claude project, but hey if more people are working on it I'm all for that even if there are competing tools.

Re: Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

#20

Post by codingdave »

I've been slowly working for years on letting clover take over my lawn. I have amazing flows of white flowers in the spring, with the red clover now starting to come in as well. I mow it once the flowers pop up to force the growth back down into the root systems, and I've converted more than half of my 5 acres into clover at this point. It also is speeding up, and will probably be fully clover within a year or two.

My point being - your UX doesn't ask what people's goals are. Not everyone wants a "perfect lawn". Even people who do want grass may have different priorities for their grass - low maintenance vs. low water usage vs. really green, etc.

If you want your product to be different than what the lawn care guys will say, then you need to actually let people do different things in the app. Or, if you are dead set on making this into lead gen for lawn care guys, well... I personally find that somewhat disheartening, but clearly I'm not your audience.

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