By the time most teenagers are thinking about their first job, Edvin Andersson was already running a company with dozens of employees.
The Swedish founder started his first business at age 11. At 13, he launched a U.S. startup despite barely speaking English. Today, at 17, he’s building his second company, Miami-based Lemon, with ambitions that stretch far beyond South Florida.
His goal? Creating the default place people use to find, compare, book, and manage every service in their lives.
“We see Lemon as being something that every single human on Earth uses,” Andersson told Refresh Miami. “If you need services, you need Lemon.”
Before Lemon, Andersson built Local Builder, a marketplace connecting homeowners with contractors for remodeling projects. He launched it at just 13 years old, growing the company into a profitable business operating across 20 states.
The early days were anything but glamorous.
“I would run Duolingo on my screen and try to figure out how to speak the language while calling them,” he said. “They’d hang up. ‘Who’s this 15-year-old boy that’s calling?’”
Persistence paid off. Local Builder eventually helped more than 50,000 homeowners find contractors. Today, the company continues to operate under a Miami-based general manager while its profits fund Lemon.
The new startup, which Andersson founded alongside Adaku Ogbonna, tackles a problem Andersson believes everyone faces: finding trustworthy local services. Whether it’s a barber, contractor, personal trainer, or restaurant, people still jump between Google, review sites, social media, and friends’ recommendations because no single platform has solved the problem.
“There is no one unified way,” he said. “When nobody owns a market and nobody has truly solved it, every person feels confused.”
Lemon aims to bring nearly every local service into one app. Users can search conversationally for everything from a contractor to a date-night recommendation, while personalized results are powered by AI. The company is also replacing traditional five-star reviews with a simple one-tap happy, neutral, or unhappy rating.
The app launched about two months ago after an invite-only beta. It has around 1,000 users, a team of four, and has done almost no paid marketing. Even so, Andersson said every user so far has arrived through word of mouth.
Miami, he said, was always the obvious place to start.
“If the U.S. is the country for opportunities, Miami is the city for it.”
He believes the city’s openness to new ideas makes it the ideal launch market before expanding across Florida and eventually the rest of the country.
Although he’s only 17, Andersson is already looking well beyond Lemon. He said he hopes to spend decades building the company before eventually turning his attention to education, inspired by his own decision to drop out of high school.
“I want to build an education system where the kids are begging their parents to go to school earlier,” he said. “Cars don’t look the same now that they did a hundred years ago, but the school classroom looks exactly the same.”
For now, though, he’s focused on making it easier to find local services.
“We’re not loyal to the solution,” Andersson said. “We’re loyal to the problem.”
Pictured above: Lemon co-founders Edvinn Andersson and Adaku Ogbonna.
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