Segways in AgTech
The success of your business will entirely depend on what your customer believes about the problem you solve.
Today, AgTech is full of Segways.
Products that are so cool, reporters can’t help but fawn over them and VCs can’t help but give them money.
“This is the future!”
We all “know” it.
Then sales fall woefully short. Why?
It turns out we’ve seen this movie before.
Around the turn of the century, some of the smartest people in the world believed that the Segway was the future of transportation.
This included people like John Doerr, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs.
These are individuals who are beyond thought leaders…I think we’re required to genuflect whenever they speak.
But they got this one wrong in a big way.
When the Segway hit the market in December of 2001, the company forecasted sales of 100k units in the first 13 months.
But in 2020, Fast Company reported that only around 140k Segways were EVER sold. That’s over almost 20 years!
What Segway missed, and what we often forget in #agtech is that our ability to define our customer’s problem is directly proportional to the demand we’re able to create for our solution.
Segway’s demise is multifaceted, as most failures are, but the company’s primary struggle was best articulated by Judy Cai, Segway’s former President, “With what you pay for a scooter versus a Segway PT to accomplish what you want to do, you see the huge difference right there.”
Segway never identified the problem that it solved better than anyone else.
You want to cruise around at 10 MPH instead of walking? Take a scooter or an e-bike…there’s no reason to buy a Segway.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what business guru’s say about your product. Winning is not defined by your ability to woo venture capital. The success of your business will entirely depend on what your customer believes about the problem you solve.
Agtech is full of Segway-like products today because agriculture already has well-defined scooters and e-bike equivalents in this space and walking (or the status quo) is firmly entrenched.
The technologies that succeed in #agtech will be those who can say with confidence:
“Our customers believe that this technology is the key to fulfilling a core desire they have and is only attainable through using our system or working with us.”
Anything less than that is comparative gymnastics and will have you selling your business for spare parts in the near future.
Stop selling on features and functions; start selling on beliefs.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.