Ask HN: help/advice with marketing a physical product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: help/advice with marketing a physical product?

7 pointsph0rque19 comments

I and my co-founders are working on a side project called AutoMicroFarm [0]. AutoMicroFarm is solar panels for your food: an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software. We have a pretty good idea about how to develop and iterate our prototypes (we are following WikiSpeed’s/OSE’s Extreme Manufacture model [1]), and we know with a strong degree of certainty about what we want.

However, I keep reading entrepreneurship advice to begin marketing before starting to build the product, to make what (presumably many) people want, etc. We are following the “running lean” book [2] to clarify the top three problems our product is solving, and we have a list of interested people who gave us their emails/twitters to interview, as well as some other thought leaders in this space whom we would like to interview.

My problem is that I don’t feel I have a firm grasp on asking these people the right questions. The questions I really want answered are:

* Are you interested in producing the vast majority (up to 90%) of your own food if it was convenient?

* If so, are you willing to spend a few hours a week doing it? (I assume that if the person is a gardener, he is already putting in at least a few hours a week into the garden).

* Are you willing to pay one to two years’ worth of groceries for it (since that is how long it takes to pay for itself)? This would come out to $1600-$3200 per adult.

* Is the open-source aspect of the product appealing to you? Will you be tinkering with and modifying the system to your advantage, or just using it according to instructions?

Somehow, I don’t think just asking those questions to the people I’m interviewing point-blank will yield honest answers we’re looking for. How to best approach this customer need discovery/affirmation? If the problem interview is not a good customer discovery/marketing tool for physical products, what is a better process to find out if we AutoMicroFarmers are building something many people want, and not just us?

[0] http://automicrofarm.com

[1] http://www.wikispeed.com/the-process

[2] http://www.runningleanhq.com

>> * Are you willing to pay one to two years’ worth of groceries for it (since that is how long it takes to pay for itself)? This would come out to $1600-$3200 per adult.

This is a poor positioning for something which does not check the "Calories" box on your prospects mental inventories but rather something which checks the "Moral obligation" box. (My feelings on the wisdom of that to the contrary, people do not garden to save money on food, they garden to demonstrate that they are better than people who save money on food.)

Patrick, I believe you're right that the vast majority of gardeners in US don't garden for food... I'm hoping to find the homesteaders/homesteader wannabe's in that group who are trying to be self-sufficient, food-wise.

Can you explain what you mean by checking the "Calories" box?

I'm not patio11, but since I had much the same thought: People's motivation for buying this isn't "I want food." It's going to be something more like "I want to be able to say that I make my own food."

Think about how Harley-Davidson position their bikes. They don't say, "Hey, here's a way to get around" — instead, their positioning is more along the lines of "ZOMG it's a Harley! How COOL would you look driving this thing, huh?" They're primarily checking off the "Feel like James Dean" box on their customers' wishlists, not the "transportation" box.

Similarly, an easy-home-gardening product is checking the "Feel good about yourself" box, not the "nutrition" box. The nutrition is just a nice gimme. So in that way it doesn't make sense to position it against grocery stores. Most grocery stores are not selling "Feel good about yourself." (A few are, like Whole Foods, but they're also way more expensive than the normal ones, and they also don't make a big deal about the price comparison, because those other guys aren't selling moral superiority at all.)

Ah, I get it. Would you (or anyone else) have any suggestions as to what questions would trigger the "feel-good" lever?

Actively remove all references to the concept of saving money on staple foods. In the USA, conspicuously trying to save money on staple foods is a signifier of poverty. Almost nobody is proud of it. Many people try to actively hide the fact that they're doing it.

Promote the ability to grow some kind of food that's unusual enough to tell your friends about. If, for example, I were able to harvest fresh heirloom tomatoes in Maine in January and feed them to my dinner guests, that would be both good for my ego and good for your marketing. A more realistic example, perhaps, is the fad for backyard chickens: Raising chickens is fun because, every time you serve someone an omelet or a quiche, you get to start a conversation about the chickens. And the eggs make great gifts. Play up the odd and potentially fashionable.

Is there something particularly tasty that your system is uniquely good at growing? Is there something particularly hard to grow that your system makes easier?

Are the plants fun to look at? Would you show the garden to your friends?

Can kids run it? Perhaps it's an educational experience. Pitch it to school groups, community centers, local parks, science museums, children's museums, et cetera.

Can one start small and grow into a full system? "Feed your whole family on a 20-by-20-foot lot" is actually not such a great sales pitch. You ask for too much commitment. I've tried hobbies before. Most of them don't last and I end up selling the starter kit on Craigslist three years later. Worse, if you convince me that replacing 100% of my grocery bill is the victory condition, when I only manage to replace 37% of my grocery bill I will feel like a failure, which is just perverse. What you want, instead, is for me to successfully grow four plants, swell with pride, and tell all my friends that gardening is awesome.

So a better pitch IMHO would be "try this thing on a small garden and enjoy the nice fresh [insert delicious thing here]; then, if you like it, you can expand it bit by bit, until you wake up one year and find that your 20-by-20 foot garden is producing more food than your family of four can eat in a year, with almost no effort and at a cost of pennies a day."

Congratulations on being smart and realistic enough to try and find your market before you invest any more time or money. Good luck!

EDIT: Ooh, here's a fun one: Take a hint from the local county fair and gamify this. Build a social network. Turn it into a competition to see who can grow the most pounds of food in a given area, or something. It's like Farmville with real farms.

Awesome reply! We're actually considering building a small product that can fit into the typical kitchen (2+' x 1+'), where you can grow all your fresh herbs: the Living Spice Rack, code name AutoNanoFarm. That can be retailed for $250-500, I believe.

I like the exotic angle. One suggestion from an aquaponics guy that I came across (the AutoMicroFarm products would be aquaponics systems) is to grow some kind of an exotic fish that can be sold to asian communities for thousands of dollars. As far as plants, perhaps something lesser-known tropical that would do well in a controlled environment?

"In the USA, conspicuously trying to save money on staple foods is a signifier of poverty. Almost nobody is proud of it."

We're totally not typical in that we garden to save money and have good foo, and we aren't shy about saving money (couponing, etc.).

But, let me point out that--in addition to the motivation being possibly misguided, there's the other elephant in the room: customers worried about saving money on staple foods often have way less money than those who have other motivations.

Perhaps you can try an angle that's not vanity, and not frugality, but more taste and convenience. Yeah, you wouldn't think of a garden as convenient, but it's actually really cool to just step outside and grab some lettuce for the salad, or some fruit, etc. Also, I can't overstate how much better (usually) our homegrown food tastes. And of course, there's probably some psychology in there that helps convince me since I grew it myself. Use that to your advantage. Don't forget how evocative taste and smell is; how easily these senses can be linked to feelings and memories.

Yup, it seems the convenience angle is probably our best foot to put forward, so to speak.

Have a look at "Locavore" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locavores ) idea, it's the idea that people should eat food produced locally, rather than eat food that was grown on the other side of the planet and then shipped here. Look at locavore sites/magazines. What language do they use? There is overlap with the green/environmental/eco-friendly movement here (No C0₂ emissions transporting your dinner! No wasted packaging in your dinner. etc.)

"they garden to demonstrate that they are better than people who save money on food"

I think you'll find many more people who garden as a hobby or as a social exercise than people who do it for the smug value.

Drop the part about open-source. Now. For a non-technical market, this word has no meaning and it will only add to confusion.

I agree with Patrick completely. I don't have a large sample size but my friends who actually care about growing their vegetables are definitely not doing it to save money. They are highly paid people and the monetary value of their time investment in gardening dwarfs the cost of equipment they use. Heck, they can easily afford to have food from Whole Foods delivered to them every morning. For them, it's more of a lifestyle statement. You will do well as long as price is not crazy (3000$ is cheap if it saves them even 2 hours a week) and you make it easier for them to grow their food.

I think your pitch should include a part where you suggest that your product will cut down their gardening time by say 50%. Your target audience will be able to relate to that.

Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback! I actually don't have the phrase "open-source" in my questions. Instead, I ask: "Would you likely be tinkering with and modifying the system to your advantage? If so, would you be willing to share your improvements with others online?"

I think the angle I can pitch is the reduction/elimination of the unpleasant gardening tasks such as weeding and watering. A 50% gardening time reduction is definitely feasible; although I find myself spending more time than I need to examining various plants and observing the fish.

I wonder if you could pitch it as "Stop big corporations from controlling your food supply" angle? That's sort an advantage of open source and/or open hardware.

My SO is a active with Eagle Street Farm http://rooftopfarms.org/ and works with their partner CSA as well.

Perceived value is in fact an important part of CSA participation. As is the community aspect.

I'd recommend you speak with people active in the local food movement to see what gets them excited about your product. They may think of uses/benefits you're not anticipating, especially when it comes to community/shared gardening.

Annie at Eagle Street would be an awesome person to talk to.

I'd love to talk to Annie. Would you mind emailing me at andrew at automicrofarm dot com so I can establish a connection to her through you?

Talk to Mormons, Mennonites and new urbanists. They are likely your market.

Different perspective:

I am an environmental studies major and I have serious health issues. I willingly pay a premium for food to keep me out of the ER. I am hardly the only one. I met one guy online who grew a garden to have control over food quality for his wife, going so far as to test the soil and amend the soil to get the nutrient content he wanted. It did make a difference with her health issue.

You could market this as environmentally sustainable for people concerned about that issue. You could also market it as something that lets you grow your own organic health foods.

As for the small spice thing, that is a great place to start. Organic spices are quite expensive. You can briefly note it will pay for itself over time but frame that as a "bonus". The appeal for people willing to buy organic is that this the freshest possible spice, picked from the vine mere seconds before adding it to your recipe. Having it in your kitchen means it is fresher than anything you coukd bring in from the back yard.

I have known people who grew their own cilantro to use it as an alternative treatment. These are the type of people who would buy something like this. You would be in the business of making it easier to be a control freak defending themselves from living in a toxic world and also in the business of making the world less toxic by letting people grow their own locally, eliminating transport pollution, eliminating chemical fertilizer, etc.

Thanks for the vote for the Living Spice Rack! I didn't even think about the medicinal angle.

Having it in your kitchen means it is fresher than anything you coukd bring in from the back yard.

That's a great idea. I can just imagine the picture of a kitchen with one of these things, and a boiling pot with someone reaching over to pick a herb about to put it in the pot, with a tag line of "Can't get any fresher"

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