⚡️ ⚡️ Founder Diaries Vol 1 Ch 9: Alex Ross, Founder of Greg - From $2,000 in Dead Plants to a 3 Million Plant Community
We celebrate the unfiltered BTS stories of today’s founders - from their highest highs to the lowest lows and how they powered through it all… or didn’t.
😊 Welcome to Volume 1 Chapter 9 of Founder Diaries. Now, Why Founder Diaries?
In an era where founders’ lives are glamorized and their stories are romanticized narratives of seemingly endless success, the behind-the-scenes reality of the highs and lows of being a founder often don’t come to light.
Alongside the startup with a high valuation is the string of risky decisions, maxed-out credit cards, and grueling late-night chats.
Alongside each polished story, there are real challenges, unsung heroes, and unique highs & lows that make every second of the founder's journey worth it. Or maybe not? We will let you decide.
These are the true, unfiltered short stories behind the founders of today. Enjoy :)
👋 Introducing Alex Ross, Founder of Greg: From $2,000 in Dead Plants to a 3 Million Plant Community
Greg is changing the way humans live alongside plants, starting by creating a delightful mobile app that helps people grow thriving plants. Greg believes that everyone should understand how plants work and be able to participate in solutions to the existential challenges our planet is facing, from food system insecurity to collapsing ecosystems.
I started Greg after racking up around $2,000 in dead plants from not knowing how to properly care for them. As someone who had been pretty frugal, that amount of money wasted was a serious wake-up call.
I realized it was purely an information problem - if I had just had the proper guides and knowledge about each plant's specific needs like light, water, soil nutrients, heat, humidity etc., I could have kept them all thriving. It was a lightbulb moment that there was a huge opportunity to help people by specializing in collecting and curating the right plant care data.
So that's what we set out to do with Greg, incorporating as a public benefit corporation with the big hairy audacious goal of eventually becoming a centralized source for the most advanced biological data on living organisms and solving issues like the future of our planet's food supply chain.
But we knew we had to start smaller and more focused, so we honed in on the houseplant vertical as a relatively contained environment to model plant care basics that could then be expanded out.
The early days were an endless grind of bootstrapping and hustling.
For the first 18 months, I self-funded operations entirely by draining $700,000 of my life savings from a previous startup exit.
I hired several friends and paid them enough to work on building out Greg's initial minimum viable product and content library. It was a struggle, but I tried to create a mini-utopia of keeping everyone fed and paid enough to work free of money pressures.
We had our first big break and growth spurt in spring 2021 when the pandemic drove demand for our houseplant resources. Seemingly overnight, people picked up houseplants as one of their major hobbies. We saw our guides and care tips shoot up quickly in demand through Google and social media - with our keywords ranked highly. With this rocket ship growth, we had the validation and data to raise $5.4 million in seed funding from top VC firms like Index Ventures and First Round Capital.
I was able to bring in some of my closest friends from previous companies I worked at to help streamline operations and turbocharge product development. We used the funding to build out a much more robust engineering and data science team to create interactive tools and features to complement our burgeoning content library. It felt like we were well on our way to becoming the go-to knowledge base for everyone with a houseplant.
But then our growth came crashing down literally overnight when Apple made changes to mobile ad privacy protocols, decimating our user acquisition via Facebook and Instagram ads.
Our cost per user spiked exponentially while quality plummeted, gutting our primary growth engine right when we were scaling spending. It was absolutely brutal.
With our cash burn realities shifting, I had to make the agonizing decision to lay off around 13 incredible colleagues who quit stable jobs to join my team. It was my biggest failure as a founder, having to break up that core group after just months due to missed growth projections.
I remember waking up wishing I was still asleep - a telltale depression sign with no clear path forward. The stress and anxiety were immense.
This went on for months until the depression finally lifted through sheer perseverance, the support of my then-girlfriend (now fiancée), and realizing I needed to occasionally step away from the all-consuming startup life.
Our team was back to the original two cofounders and a few part time employees. Luckily, our new nimble team eventually found product-market fit by making our plant content free while charging for personalized mobile app subscriptions.
That strategic shift powered incredible growth, with the app seeing 10% week-over-week increases for two months straight. The feeling of relief and joy at those green shoots after so many bumps is indescribable.
This journey crystallized my belief that consumer startups must laser-focus on optimizing their free activation engine and monetization model from day one, or they'll struggle.
It took us years of painful pivots to discover this simple truth. But now we finally have a sustainable model we can continue scaling efficiently with our small team and smart AI assistance.
There's nothing crazier than the emotional journey of starting a company. You go from broke with $200 in your account, to raising millions and hiring friends feeling like you'll take over the world - only to have it all come crashing down, dismantling everything. Then you claw back up and the cycle keeps repeating, the highs getting higher and lows lower each time. It's an unmatched emotional rollercoaster.
An acquisition or exit is likely the craziest part, as that liquidity hitting upends your entire reality instantly in a way you can never go back from. My previous startup Enplug's exit to Spectrio was incredibly disorienting when that money hit my bank account. To put things into perspective: when I was at Enplug, I lived in a house with my 3 other cofounders and 10 other coworkers and finally left to work at Tinder when my savings had completely depleted. The money from the exit didn’t hit until long after I had left Enplug.
I really wish someone drilled into me earlier that at the end of the day, the only thing that truly matters is cash flow - not users, downloads, funding, talent, press.
Cash flow is the lifeblood that allows you to keep operating and building. If you don't have a path to sustaining positive cash flow, you're just on borrowed time. That's a brutal lesson I've had to learn the hard way through the trials of getting Greg off the ground.
This whole experience has been a constant grind, but those small validating moments make it worth it. Any time I catch someone I know using the Greg app in real life, it gives me an unmatched sense of pride and validation.
Every startup founder dreams of creating something truly differentiated that solves authentic problems people care about. Even now, I still use Greg daily. Staring at the same screens thousands of times is exhausting, but if I'm authentically using and relying on what we've built, that's the strongest signal we're headed in the right direction.
-Alex Ross
Disclaimer: This article is written in the voice of Alex Ross but it is a representation based on an interview conducted by Christine Lu Hong. The quotes and experiences shared here reflect the interviewer's interpretation and may not be verbatim quotes from Alex.
Learn more about Alex Ross and Greg below:
If you know someone with a unique founder story who would like to share their BTS journey of founder life - the highest highs and the lowest lows - please feel free to refer them at diariesfounder@gmail.com.
— Michelle Kwok & Christine Lu Hong (The Founder Diaries Team)