Product Market Fit - Kyle Cobb Advanced Farm Technologies

Feb 05, 2020, 11:00 PM

How do you know that your clients will pay for the product you’re developing?

Entrepreneurs are some of the most ambitious people on the planet. When we have an idea that we think will change the world, or solve a problem for a niche market, it can be easy to press full speed ahead and build what WE think the market needs. But, how do we know that the market will actually pay for what we are building?

Too many times I see entrepreneurs building what they believe is the “perfect” product that will “fly” off the shelves without ever talking to their customers. The only way to truly know what your customers want and more importantly, what they will pay for, is to ask them. There is no better time to do this than when you are developing your product. 

Kyle Cobb, CFO of Advanced Farm Technologies and his team are a fantastic example of how to do this the right way.  As a result, they are the first company to bring a robotic strawberry picker to the market. 

Kyle and his team have spent countless hours building relationships with their customers – farmers – spending time in the trenches to truly understand their biggest pain points and concerns with robots picking strawberries. 

Before they even thought about building a robot that rolled down the fields, they had to solve the farmer’s biggest concern, a gripper that wouldn’t ruin the strawberries. They went through 50 iterations of a gripper before they developed one that picked strawberries as well, if not better, than humans. 

After solving one problem at a time, getting feedback from their customers the whole way, they are on the verge of deploying the first ever commercial fleet of robotic strawberry pickers.

Listen to our conversation to learn how Kyle and his team made sure they had the right product market fit, how they made strategic partnerships to help them develop their product, and how they properly used the capital they raised. 

So, before you fully develop the “perfect” product that will solve all your customers problems, get in the trenches with them.

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