Building the Right Team for a Consumer Indoor Farming Company

Reflections on what the right team for growing in the consumer indoor farming category looks like, and how to build it.

I believe the four most important factors in Team DNA for the consumer indoor farming product category are:

1. team composition & hardiness — The multi-disciplinary nature of building products for consumer indoor growing means these types of companies are not for the wary. You need the right expertise, and you need long-term commitment from team members. After all, these companies are building complicated (from sensors to WiFi to data to mobile apps), large (difficult to distribute) consumer (read: low-ish price points and margins per customer) connected devices with the added uncertainty of constant 3+ month-long biological, ecological, and plant growth testing cycles.
2. focus on customer learning — Nobody has ever built this type of experience with the technologies we have today. The customer experience of living with and interacting with a plant-growing device is new, and it takes a real passion for and focus on customer learning to know how to keep on iterating over time to make your product/experience more and more attractive to wider markets.
3. intentional, strategic iteration — Rigorous multi-step planning expertise is required from CEOs and leaders of these companies because the tech, consumer demands, and possibilities are evolving fast enough that it’s not possible to build the one ‘perfect unit’ to start. Each year will bring new possibilities to integrate more automation, more fine-tuned control, new seed/produce/medicinal varieties, etc… Therefore intentional iteration must be based on a nuanced understanding of one’s own products, customers, and services, but also the landscape of ‘competitors’, capital sources, and evolving consumer pain points and wants. Even more so than other industries, we must plan for several companies in the category to overpromise and under deliver, creating some ripples of consumer (and investor) distrust.
4. capital stewardship and efficiency — we discussed this already in the context of understanding valuation and company pressures, but it’s also a discussion about team DNA and habits. We are talking about complicated, consumer IoT/hardware companies here, and they’re not inherently super cheap to build. It’s critical that management teams are able to manage their spending to iterate efficiently before and even as product/market fit begins to materialize. To build something meaningful in this category, we’re talking about 5–10+ year companies, not quick flips. You have to be looking to build something for the long term, which means keeping costs down and efficiency way up.