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Comment by davehcker | Hacker News Reader

We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup.

We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.

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> they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves.

I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)

> I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ?

My guess from the context would rather be that they think (rightly or not) that they can do it cheaper themselves or by paying someone else a fixed cost rather than giving out a profit share like the pricing model in the FAQ says:

> Our pricing model is based on the principle that we take certain percentage of the total profit our SaaS lets you drive home.

A lot of it is also that the tech/VC way of things is to try to build everything yourself, and to assume the mechanics of the problem is easy and doesn't require a lot of domain knowledge. Whereas the software required to orchestrate all of these systems and provide insight is complex and needs a lot of software. I think it's a classic case of misunderstanding how complicated everything is and assuming that because you have been given a bunch of VC money that it's somehow a mandate to build everything yourself. It's what happens most of the time when a "tech" company interacts with the physical world. Like how my Nest thermostat always learns to do the opposite of what I want at any point in time.

We need to update the FAQ. Now we offer a fixed subscription pricing model.

They've told their investors that everybody else does it wrong, to deliberately divorce their own valuation from reality. They don't want to be valued like a regular greenhouse company, they want to be valued as a cutting edge company with huge unbounded potential. Turning around and using COTS solutions undermines that narrative.

This sounds like an interesting intro, but tell us more!

What exactly do you offer / sell / solve?

How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?

It’s unclear from your message.

> What exactly do you offer / sell / solve?

It's a SaaS + IoT + Plant Biology knowledge baked into one package. We are figuring things out on the fly as well (here's a link to one of the products https://www.hexafarms.com/main/hexaos). The aim is that the entire operations should be reduced to manual labor of handling the plants (and our software will inform you about that as well). Vertical indoor farming has been always close to my heart but at this point we address the wider space of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) in general.

> How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”?

Yikes! We are also going to be VC-backed soon. Went through Techstars recently. Hopefully, I'd have the humility to accept and not makes claims that go against the fundamental principles of physics, biology, and economics. Sorry but this is the best answer I could give.

This is super interesting to me! Super cool balance between sustainability, biology, and tech.

Not to Shill, but are you planning on hiring anytime soon?

Thanks. My email address is in my HN bio.

Literally just got fired from a company that was just like that. Had a great idea, but wanted to build everything themselves vs just pieces of system that could differentiate us. Add onto that a weak business plan plus trying to compete with others in the greens space and it didn’t go very far. A lot of fun to work on though!

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