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Show HN: Vet turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

https://grassdx.com/
26•andrewbr•5h ago
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

Comments

goda90•1h 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.

jna_sh•1h ago
Kill your lawn!
andrewbr•1h 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.
Carrok•52m 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•40m 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.
daviding•1h 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•1h 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.
haaz•1h 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•1h ago
Hah! Thanks. We plan to roll out in other markets. Stay tuned! I appreciate the compliment on the website.
jensenbox•48m ago
Any chance you will support Canada?
andrewbr•4m ago
Support for Canada is in the works!
pryelluw•39m 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•2m 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.
swatcoder•30m 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•4m 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.).
pryelluw•41m 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.
swingboy•16m ago
*Advice only applies to neighborhoods without an HOA.

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Show HN: Vet turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

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