Show HN: Vet turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

Show HN: Vet turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis(grassdx.com)

34 points by andrewbr 7 hours ago | 31 comments

I know, it's kind of weird. What is a veterinarian doing creating an analysis tool for lawn problems?

Frankly, the idea was born of my own lawn care struggles. Endless lawn care company fees without any actual improvement. Googling problems and finding generic solutions without regional considerations. One time I overseeded my grass not realizing I had to actually put soil down too.

One day, I decided to run lawn pictures through AI and found some pretty helpful information. So I decided with my clinical background (the idea of treating the cause, not just the symptoms), as well as tech savvy, I would create an AI tool where homeowners can upload pictures of their lawn, enter their ZIP code, and get a diagnosis tailored to their location with actionable next steps in just 15 seconds.

Completely free. The platform is monetized with affiliate sales (if a user elects to purchase through one of our Amazon or other links) and by selling exclusive rights to individual ZIP codes to lawn care companies seeking warm leads. Users can pursue their own DIY plan, purchase a lawn care subscription service, or contact a local lawn care system.

I'd love if you'd test it out, toy with it, try to break it, and give me your feedback. Any feature requests would be super helpful.

Thanks! Excited to hear your thoughts.

Andrew

goda90 3 hours ago |

> 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 their lawn. On top of that, many people become focused on a particular aesthetic that usually requires non-native grasses and harmful pesticides. In some places, scarse water supplies are used just to maintain a certain color.

I encourage everyone to look into replacing grass lawns with native plant landscapes, and where you do want it short cut, look into a mix of plants like clover that require far less work to keep alive than most grass monocultures.

Carrok 3 hours ago | |

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 much more useful to target the endless industrial and commercial parks that have far more grass than a normal size neighborhood. Let people have some joy in their lives.

goda90 3 hours ago | | |

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.

yboris 1 hour ago | |

I have gone full "pocket forest" / Miyawaki Forest - planted 100 trees in my tiny back yard.

Technique developed by the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki: planting seedlings close together makes them compete for sunlight, thus growing tall quickly. Get a forest in under a decade!

https://www.creatingtomorrowsforests.co.uk/blog/the-miyawaki...

andrewbr 3 hours ago | |

I appreciate the sentiment, perhaps it would be wise to include some lawn alternatives or eco-friendly lawn techniques, or even drought tolerant landscaping. Though my site is not likely to change peoples' behavior around traditional lawns, perhaps we can eliminate needless application of pesticides and fertilizers by focusing on the right applications at the right time, rather than via guesswork. I also appreciate the irony of a lawn site using AI which itself uses a lot of water. Seriously though, this is helpful in that I can also be considering ways of encouraging users to seek alternatives. Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn.

customguy 1 hour ago | | |

> Maybe they don't even want the pressure of trying to keep a short cut, green lawn.

I think offering a range of options and leaving it up to people could go a long way. Especially since people could just try out all options to see what it would involved, how they might imagine (and like) the results, before committing to anything.

As in, here's the lawn, I want it to a.) keep it trim and green, b.) keep it decent looking and still human friendly, but also make it low maintenance and better for biodiversity c.) turn it into a jungle of flowers.

jdswain 1 hour ago | |

I tried clover. Eventually it just got replaced more and more with grass, now there's not much there. It was meant to be more drought tolerant than grass, but it didn't work out that way. I probably need to do more research.

pryelluw 3 hours ago | |

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.

valleyer 1 hour ago | | |

What (U.S., I assume) state do you live in that has a state law requiring green grass? I've never heard of that.

jna_sh 3 hours ago | |

Kill your lawn!

swingboy 2 hours ago | |

*Advice only applies to neighborhoods without an HOA.

joshellington 30 minutes ago |

I know you probably worked a bunch on the website, but the amount of AI slop and obvious AI design is an immediate turn off for myself. And I’d theorize more “normies” are getting “spidey senses” on these types of generic Claude-designed products. I’m seeing them pop up weekly on my small town subreddit.

I’d highly recommend telling Claude something like (untested myself): redesign the website, remove all emojis and all letter-spacing CSS, use non conventional typefaces, no italic serifs, limited cream/beige colors

Something along those lines.

Fun idea, good luck!

throwaway2037 1 hour ago |

I recommend to change the title of this submission to:

    > Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

When I first saw "vet", I assumed that an American was trying to virtue signal using their armed forces veteran status.

andrewbr 1 hour ago | |

Thank you for the suggestion, however it appears I am outside of the allowed editing window

swatcoder 2 hours ago |

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?

andrewbr 2 hours ago | |

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.).

codingdave 2 hours ago |

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.

andrewbr 2 hours ago | |

The real proposition here is diagnosing the specific problem and offering specific fixes for said problem. I think the platform provides a good opportunity to present alternatives to the user other than "just fix the problem" and says "have you thought about this instead?" But since the primary user is trying to fix the issue, I don't want to necessarily try to force alternatives my audience isn't looking for. That being said, one option would be to give an option in filling out the form to ask what their goals are, such as "I just want to fix the problem" or "I'm open to exploring new ideas for my lawn."

It's not "just" for lead gen. I'm actually trying to help people and solve a problem. I want the tool itself to be free. It monetizes by means other than making it a paid tool.

haaz 3 hours ago |

Great idea, and really good job on the website. Can't use it myself as I'm not in America but I'm sure it's great.

Please ignore most of the people on hacker ews, most of them are losers who complain about everything.

andrewbr 3 hours ago | |

Hah! Thanks. We plan to roll out in other markets. Stay tuned! I appreciate the compliment on the website.

ktrnka 2 hours ago |

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.

jmathai 1 hour ago |

I’ll definitely try this out. I have a Claude project for our home and many chat conversations about my lawn.

What I don’t know yet is if the DIY I’m doing with the help of Claude is going to materialize into a lush lawn.

It has me doing pre-emergent spray, broad leaf weed killers, and moss killer.

It’s a lot of work and I’m sure there is a much better UX than saved chats.

andrewbr 1 hour ago | |

Yes, please try it and let me know! I think you'll find the output a little nicer than a chat, which is exactly why I made this. If it sucks, let me know why so I can improve it. Thank you!

daviding 3 hours ago |

A nice idea and good luck! My lawn is dead as our local data center took all the water (I'm kidding!).

We do home property and inventory services using AI on photos as well and the key thing we've found so far is that the biggest rival to those features is just people dragging photos into chatgpt and asking away. So the key here is differentiating from that and making something better and more accurate. What we did was to basically build a better and deeper prompt and history, e.g. context is king in a vertical. So that means the other info the user has put about the property, the memory of previous things asked or seen, combining with publicly available property info we already gather - this would make the information more valuable than straight gpt usage.

So what more can you bring to the bare prompt on the photos to help? What can you build in terms of info about the zip, so you do more 'vertical stuff' before the api call.

andrewbr 3 hours ago | |

Great callout, I saw something similar on another site. Essentially instead of just entering your ZIP, you can also enter your estimated lawn size as well as various other parameters to generate a better prompt. I think that would be helpful to build in the next iteration, both to strengthen the results and also differentiate ourselves from GPT. Another thought I had was to potentially build a database of specific, authoritative lawn care information, such as industry journals, textbooks, university extensions, etc from which the GPT must draw upon and reference, rather than using context clues from the internet to try and invent some kind of analysis or treatment.

truetraveller 37 minutes ago |

Love the monetization idea. Something like this might actually be the future.

pryelluw 3 hours ago |

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.

andrewbr 2 hours ago | |

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.

jensenbox 3 hours ago |

Any chance you will support Canada?

andrewbr 2 hours ago | |

Support for Canada is in the works!

contingencies 1 hour ago | | |

icelawn.com is registered