Steve Corcoran’s business began with a friend making a career change. The friend was leaving accounting to run a lawn care company full time. Corcoran had owned a lawn business with him while they were younger; he understood enough to be interested, and soon discovered how much there was to untangle. A cut lawn was the visible result. Behind it sat the less photogenic business of finding customers, organizing work, and getting paid.
There is a certain comic efficiency in abandoning accounting only to discover how much accounting a small business requires. For Corcoran, the friend’s move opened a larger question. Could technology make this trade easier to run? LawnStarter grew from that investigation. More than a decade later, his new venture, ProBase, is circling the provider’s working day again.
A friend leaves accounting
In January 2015, Corcoran described spending the company’s first six months understanding how to help lawn care businesses. That is a substantial apprenticeship for a startup whose eventual selling proposition would be speed. Before making the homeowner’s booking easier, he wanted to understand the person who would receive it.
He recruited Ryan Farley to help examine the industry. They found limited technology infrastructure and a heavy reliance on word of mouth. A good reputation could bring customers, but the founders saw room for a more organized way to connect demand with the companies doing the work. Jonas Weigert joined them, and the three founded LawnStarter in 2013.
He chose a name intended to join an old trade to newer technology. Asked in 2015 about the challenges of building the business, Corcoran singled out assembling the team as something he was proud of. There were seven people working on the company then. Amid questions about financing and markets, his enthusiasm settled on the people turning up to build it.
The early idea changed as they learned. Software could improve an operation, yet providers also needed customers. LawnStarter became more directly focused on homeowners, connecting them with professionals and handling the administrative business around a booking. The origin helps explain the persistent attention to both parties. One person wants a cared-for yard. Another needs a viable business.
A workspace before the growing season
Corcoran studied finance at Virginia Tech. By early 2014, he and Farley were working from NuSpark, a creative space in downtown Blacksburg where fledgling ventures could develop. Their business had an unusually literal launch season: they wanted the product ready when the grass began growing.
Their collaboration already had some mileage. LawnStarter’s first pitch deck recorded an earlier video discovery project, Viirl.com, and work together as financial-sector analysts in Virginia Tech’s student-managed equity fund. Before they were matching homeowners with crews, they had tried building something together and examining businesses together. The next subject happened to grow outside.
The deck is revealing in its modest particulars. It weighed using partner contractors against organizing crews, listed the complications of integrating schedules, and asked for capital to cover customer acquisition, living costs, and operations. The ambition was large; the arithmetic still had to buy twelve months of work. Even the grandest plan must eventually account for rent.
That summer brought Techstars Austin. Corcoran and Farley took part in the accelerator, and the business settled in Austin afterward. The city became LawnStarter’s base as the founders worked beyond their early Virginia markets. Their route into technology had passed through a friend’s business and a shared workspace, with practical questions following them the whole way.
“our goal is to make lawn care companies as profitable as possible.”
Steve Corcoran, discussing route matching in 2017
The road between two lawns
A lawn care marketplace can look deceptively straightforward on a phone. Enter an address, choose a service, arrange a visit. Corcoran was already warning in 2015 that an app alone would leave the difficult operational questions unanswered. The interface might be tidy while the working day behind it remained a tangle.
Driving offered a concrete example. In 2017, LawnStarter introduced a GPS-informed matching algorithm that considered providers’ existing routes and travel history when assigning new jobs. Ratings and service days also mattered. A new customer becomes more useful when the crew can reach that property without turning the day into a tour of the county.
Corcoran said the team had worked on the algorithm for about six months. He expected an average reduction of five minutes in driving between jobs. It was an expectation, rather than a published result, but it showed how he measured opportunity: minutes that might become paid work, multiplied across a route.
Same three stops. Less distance between them leaves more of the day for work. Diagram illustrates the idea; it does not plot measured results.
This also explains the company’s impatience with the familiar “Uber of” description. Its own account says Corcoran had never used Uber when LawnStarter began. Farley objected to the comparison because a recurring lawn service does not require a crew to materialize on demand. The valuable trick is arranging a sensible schedule and keeping it. Grass has never been impressed by a pitch deck.
Growth, with an accountant’s eye
The funding announcements arrived. In January 2015, LawnStarter announced a $1 million seed round involving investors including Vayner/RSE, Rob Taylor, and Cotter Cunningham. Corcoran’s stated use for the money was specific: deepen the business in existing markets and enter others, including Austin and Orlando.
Those plans also required a balance between acquisition and delivery. More customers meant little if the providers could not serve them well. The same January announcement paired its fundraising news with Corcoran’s insistence on operations, industry knowledge, and customer experience. It is a useful snapshot of his priorities at the time: money would accelerate the business, while the service still had to earn the customer’s confidence.
June brought a $6 million Series A led by Binary Capital. The company planned to extend its geographic coverage and hire engineering and marketing staff. In 2019, Edison Partners led a $10.5 million growth investment, with partner Daniel Herscovici joining the board. LawnStarter was then serving 120 markets and planning a broader selection of outdoor services.
Those milestones describe the machinery of expansion. Corcoran’s public comments describe his preferred temperament for running it. In a later LinkedIn post, he argued for spending that produces a return, criticized lavish offices and extravagant company entertainment, and pointed to scrappiness as a company value. His idea of a business celebration evidently leaves the accountant something to enjoy.
- 2014Techstars Austin; the company makes Austin its base.
- 2019$10.5 million growth round led by Edison Partners.
- 2021LawnStarter acquires Lawn Love in a cash-and-stock deal.
In August 2021, LawnStarter acquired San Diego-based Lawn Love. The financial terms were undisclosed. The announcement kept the two brands separate under Corcoran’s leadership and retained LawnStarter’s Austin headquarters. Jeremy Yamaguchi, Lawn Love’s founder, remained with the combined business. A Techstars graduate and a Y Combinator graduate were now operating under the same roof.
Acquisitions invite talk of market position. For this one, the stated practical benefit included more jobs for outdoor service providers. That connects the transaction to Corcoran’s original interest. A national marketplace can aggregate demand, but the lawn still belongs to a particular property and the crew still has a particular route. Expansion has to arrive at someone’s gate.
Back to the provider’s screen
By 2026, Corcoran was publicly promoting ProBase, where he is founder and CEO. Its audience is the solo operator or small crew, and its offering covers customer management, scheduling, routing, quotes, and invoicing. The sales proposition is conspicuously brief: the software carries no subscription charge.
The proposed economics deserve the next sentence. ProBase says professionals will be able to choose jobs from connected marketplaces, with the business earning a percentage of that work. Accepting those jobs is optional. The tools remain free for operators who do not take marketplace work. Standard payment-processing charges still apply to card payments.
That makes ProBase a return to a familiar relationship between software and customer acquisition. At LawnStarter’s beginning, the founders learned that providers needed help bringing in work as well as managing it. ProBase offers the management tools while leaving the operator a choice about additional marketplace jobs. The commercial mechanism is part of the proposition.
Corcoran has made his case in outspoken public posts about software pricing and the pressure on small operators. His argument is that useful tools should help these businesses keep more of what they earn. ProBase gives that argument a product to answer for. The daily test will be ordinary: can a crew organize tomorrow, send the invoice, and finish the administrative work sooner?
The Saturday dividend
There is a more personal note in Corcoran’s current account of LawnStarter. He says he started the company at 21. Homeowners kept asking for a service that was fast and easy, and he spent years working on that request. Now, with a growing family and a crowded working life, he describes understanding the value of an hour returned to Saturday more clearly himself.
The detail gives his business story a human timescale. The young founder could hear what customers wanted; the older founder can recognize the need in his own calendar. Convenience becomes rather concrete when there are other people waiting for your attention. A free afternoon is a modest luxury, and an unusually useful one.
For the homeowner, the desired ending is a finished lawn and a task removed from the list. For the provider, it is a day whose jobs, travel, and paperwork fit together. Corcoran has spent his career trying to connect those outcomes. His latest work returns to the person behind the mower, still carrying the schedule. Somewhere beyond it, Saturday is waiting.