Agriculture doesn't need more minimally viable products, we need more companies to start serving minimally viable markets.
This is what legendary investor Mike Maples, Jr calls “being an alligator in a puddle” instead of just a big fish in a small pond.
In other words, your approach to your target customer needs to be hyper-specific so that you can monopolize the mindshare of your true believers to drive exponential organic growth.
Too many agtech companies target enormous, amorphous markets.
Their decks say:
“We serve farmers, retailers, co-ops, independent agronomists, food companies, beverage companies, fuel companies, and textile manufacturers.”
Then we all sit around and wonder why agtech hasn't created the value we expected…
Some people say this is because we have the wrong financial instruments - maybe the VC model doesn't work in ag. Some people say this is because farmers are slow to adopt technology - maybe they're even a little backward for the modern world.
I believe that the value creation problem in agtech is due to the fact that we are creating products for everyone in general and no one in particular.
We serve segments instead of supporters. We generalized to personas instead of focusing on people.
When you build for the mass market, you miss serving the people who help you get there. When you serve specific customers, you have the opportunity to grow to be massive.
We need to remember that the target is not the market. The target is our initial toe-hold - the group of people who will evangelize your solution to the rest of the world.
Tim Ferriss wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek” for two friends and it sold more than 4 million copies.
PayPal’s focus on online transactions began with one email from an eBay user. Last year, they generated more than $27B.
The Airbnb founders took pictures of their early customers homes. Now the company is worth $79B.
We need to get real about who we actually serve. We need to do things that don’t scale.
You want to create a product for a certain type of customer? Write their names on a sheet, go out and visit their businesses.
You want to create a message that resonates? Go try it out on a prospect and see if their eyes light up.
Get past the board decks, the VC pitches, spreadsheets and models - those are all things that represent real.
Be different, get real.