Fail early in AgTech, and you could be failing for good...
This week I stole my daughters peddle powered tractor, wrapped it in fake lawn, and with a tablet strapped on, heading to the AFI conference in Sydney to demonstrate that Platfarm 'can make any tractor smarter'.
Platfarm recently joined the highly recommended SproutX AgTech Accelerator programme, which is exactly the kick we needed to get out there, and get on with it. The mantra of the start-up world is all about minimum viable products, shipping early, and failing fast. In my previous world of social games that all makes total sense, when the end user has very little to lose, and costs a dollar or so to acquire.
The AFI conference really highlighted the different level of tolerance around MVP's with farmers being the end-users, and a number of growers in the audience pleaded with start-ups not to to ship their products before they're genuinely ready, and cautioned that whilst farmers can be fantastically loyal customers, they also tend to quickly dismiss technology if it doesn't work first time, and rarely give it a second chance.
We've experienced this challenge first hand, when we pushed to show as much rapid progress on the app development side as we could, but when we went out to do one of our early trials the app kept crashing on us after 30 minutes or so. The vineyard had hired equipment in especially for the trial, and Platfarm had the responsibility to direct putting out of thousands of dollars of inputs. We were fortunate on this occasion that the grower understood how hard we'd been working to meet the target date, and appreciated that we'd come up personally to ensure everything ran smoothly, and they gave us the weekend to fix the bug, and thankfully everything then ran totally smoothly when we came back up the next week.
The stakes are higher in AgTech, and this reality is definitely an added challenge based on the fact that start-ups have the pressure of showing weekly progress, and proving early commercial traction, but with farming, if you fail early, you may well be failing for good...
Managing Partner at Amathaon Capital | Growing A New Breed of Game-Changers in Ag
6 年This is indeed a misconception in AgTech. Though I agree with the post from J. Matthew Pryor in general. The wide spread error of thought with MVPs in my opinion is that MVPs are seen to be a product themselves. An MVP, however, is much more than a product. It’s a process taken and amended from lean product development to get to a high product market fit in fast iteration cycles. I see Oli Madgett important point here to be more that fact that testing “half-baked” products early (even if they work fine in principle) as done in other industries trying to develop with early adopters does not generally work in agriculture. Taking Eric Ries’ position on shipping the first product when it’s still in am embarrassing state to get early feedback could be detrimental to the startup as well as the wider eco system in AgTech. The product has to be “more ready” and user friendly already as opposed to say “games development” where early users are encouraged to help find the bugs. A farmer hasn’t got the time and resources to do this given the short/mid term opportunity costs that are considered.
Captain Australian Army, Director of multiple CleanTech companies and Engineer at the UoA - Commercialising Defence Research.
6 年Well said mate!
General Manager | Director | AgTech | Agrifood
6 年Couldn't agree more Oli!? This is very familiar for me. :)?
CEO GOTERRA
6 年Interesting takeaway Oli. Thanks for sharing.
Deep Tech Leadership | Data Science & ML Engineering | Data Strategy | Cloud Data Transformation
6 年Totally agree! Never release an MVP you're not proud of and convinced it's a well polished, single function product.