Building the Future of Agriculture: Focus on Customer Needs, Not Just Tech
The Power of Embracing Problem-Centric Innovation
I hear a lot that agtech companies are too caught up in some distant future. I think that’s wrong.
I think that the bigger problem for startups in agriculture and farming today is that they‘ve never come close to living in anything resembling the future that their customers might experience.
They don’t know what to build because they aren’t "living in the future and looking around to see what’s missing," as Mike Maples, Jr. says.
When we anchor our stories to technical capability, we tend to lose and say something like this:
- "Nobody wants this technology."
- "We have terrible UI."
- "The market isn’t ready for us."
But companies that can anchor their story to something that is missing in the future lives of their customers have a much better chance at winning.
Our job as marketers and leaders is to make it time for the technology we’re selling, not for the sake of some arbitrary technical march forward across the pages of history, but for the sake of our customers and the lives we can enable them to lead.
It’s not about you, it’s not about your tech, it’s about what you and the tech can do for your customer.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.