

Ask HN: help/advice with marketing a physical product? - ph0rque

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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>* Are you interested in producing the vast majority (up to 90%) of your own food if it was convenient?<p>* 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).<p>* 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.<p>* 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?<p>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?<p>[0] http://automicrofarm.com<p>[1] http://www.wikispeed.com/the-process<p>[2] http://www.runningleanhq.com
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patio11
>> * 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.)

~~~
ph0rque
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?

~~~
chc
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.)

~~~
ph0rque
Ah, I get it. Would you (or anyone else) have any suggestions as to what
questions would trigger the "feel-good" lever?

~~~
mechanical_fish
_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_.

~~~
Poiesis
"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.

~~~
ph0rque
Yup, it seems the convenience angle is probably our best foot to put forward,
so to speak.

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solutionyogi
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.

~~~
ph0rque
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.

~~~
rmc
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.

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subpixel
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.

~~~
ph0rque
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?

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

------
Mz
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.

~~~
rmc
_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"

