Modern Dirt Farmer Wisdom
by Madeline Brumberg “Home Outside, the app, was born from Home Outside, the book. I wrote the book in an effort to explain in the simplest of terms, how to landscape your own property. Once I had written it, I realized it would make a great app:” Julie Moir Messervy, founder of Home Outside
Julie Moir Messervy is perhaps an unlikely tech entrepreneur. She lives near Bellows Falls, Vermont. She’s a woman and the founder and principal of an award-winning landscape design studio. She studied in Japan and at MIT, collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, and has written multiple books. Messervy is both a successful landscape designer and a tech entrepreneur whose app, Home Outside, has over 500,000 downloads.
The app helps design your outdoor space with the 800 pre-drawn elements from the house to the driveway, patio to plantings, all the way down to the compost pile. It comes in both a desktop and a mobile version. The inspiration for Home Outside was an overlooked market: many potential clients are priced out of landscape design because hiring a designer can come with a hefty price tag.
Originally, the app lived within JMMDS, Messervy’s landscape architecture and design firm, but following promising conversations with a number of national companies, Messervy spun Home Outside into its own independent company and started leveraging the resources available to Vermont entrepreneurs. She participated in one of the first cohorts of the Small Business Administration’s Emerging Leaders course in 2015 before giving her first ever investor pitch in the Bellows Falls Train Station in 2016 for Road Pitch, an annual event hosted by Fresh Tracks Capital.
She didn’t win that first year but refined her pitch, came back for the same event in 2017 and made it to the finals.
In 2017, she piloted an in-store partnership with Orchard Supply Hardware and was ready to roll out across all of the stores when Lowe’s, the parent company, closed all 144 stores in 2018. This set back did not deter Messervy; instead she took the time to hone her company’s scaling strategy and set a course for future development with her mentors at LaunchVT.
Messervy saw interior design apps moving towards 3D imaging and the role that artificial intelligence could play and ultimately decided Home Outside needed to move in that direction. She knew that her experience in these areas was limited, so she did what smart entrepreneurs do - she looked to outside help. Messervy found further mentoring at MIT’s VMS program and also applied to Mass Challenge, an accelerator in Boston, to find the necessary skills and develop her next steps.
Home Outside was one of 100 companies (out of 1300 who applied) picked to participate in the cohort last summer.
When asked about being a Vermont company participating in Mass Challenge, Messervy explained that being a rural company wasn’t a roadblock; in fact it may have made her stand out from the pack. In her time there, Messervy focused on two things: making meaningful connections and creating the next steps for Home Outside. Messervy came away with a connection to The Capital Network, an organization that supports entrepreneurs through the fundraising process and a new Director of Development & Strategy.
With their new director, Messervy and her team are looking forward to the roll out of the AI-enabled version of the app, which will be able to create customizable outdoor designs. Excitingly, they are in the midst of completing proof of concept pilots with three large companies, which they can’t talk about quite yet.
Throughout her entrepreneurial journey, Messervy stresses the importance of mentorship and is grateful for the doors opened by her connections in Boston and Vermont. “I’ve had so many only-in-Vermont moments. It’s amazing the doors that people will open for you here.” Messervy explains.
As Home Outside continues to pivot and grow in the coming years, Messervy will look to her mentors and team while always keeping an eye out for the growth opportunities that Vermont provides. Messervy is a study in leveraging resources and maintaining momentum. She has done a great job of taking a good product to the right people and bringing it to the next level. As we’ve written before, timing is everything. Messervy has proved to be an entrepreneur who knows how to take advantage of that.
The Home Outside team is going to be busy in 2020 and are looking forward to it. “We think 2020 will be our year. We are excited to grow and scale, right here in Southern Vermont.” Messervy says.
* Note from the author: We got such a great reception from our End of the Decade wrap up article that we’ve decided to continue to celebrate local entrepreneurs moving ahead. This month we are featuring Julie Moir Messervy, founder of Home Outside.
Madeline Brumberg is currently the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Vermont Innovation Commons. She is graduate of the Sustainable Innovation MBA program at UVM who is passionate about doing business better and triple bottom line impacts. She is passionate about Vermont entrepreneurs and creating opportunities for them to scale, grow, and thrive in Vermont.