Upstream Ag Professional - December 23rd to January 7th

Product-Market Fit in Highly Concentrated Industry Structure Systems

Companies introducing innovative new solutions in longstanding, highly concentrated industries like food &agriculture, oceans and energy, face extended adoption cycles, often resulting in costly and complex go-to-market strategies. Unlike the software industry - where technology companies are creating solutions that were not there before and can often find product-market fit with an iterative test-and-learn approach where they deploy a minimum viable product to a small audience and optimize the solution as they scale to a wider audience - these sectors face significant barriers to scaling virally.

Companies working to change existing oligopolist industries are faced with trying to change systems that have been around for hundreds of years, and they can’t test and learn in the same way on large-scale electron or molecule solutions or in a grocery retail environment. Customer discovery is critical and can be hard to obtain from a customer that needs scale, when you won’t have the scale they need for years. Whether it's new agricultural technologies or renewable energy systems, these solutions can require technical validation or the development of fit-for-purpose commercial models that can unlock value in long-standing markets. The time to market, therefore, is often longer than in technology venture sectors, and companies need to find ways to accelerate adoption while lowering the cost of goods to compete with incumbent solutions.

“2025 will be the first just-in-time market through the value chain, placing the focus on two-way communication,” he says. “We need to understand expectations on the herbicide demand front as we focus on delivering fall and spring burndown products with the right amount of inventory.”

We face three main challenges.

One is the same challenge that any new technology faces – it doesn’t exist as a line item in the budget – yet.

Two, we’re asking users who are used to operate a certain way to think differently: ‘I’m used to thinking about my planting day based on the seven day forecast; now you’re telling me to look three months ahead and change my planting date based on the whole season. That’s a change in behavior. We encourage customers to start with the low risk, high ROI, low hanging fruit types of decisions, use that to build confidence and go from there.

Three, we’re trying to get folks to see us as not purely a sustainability offer, but really about driving strategically important decisions around the bottom line.

In the past, the reason we’ve towed implements is because of the economics of the tractor. It was a platform that could be used across implements throughout the year to do different jobs. It made sense from a scalability perspective and it’s hard to justify creating a self-propelled implement, as there are economic limitations.

When you remove the operator from the equation, all the math changes. You start talking about precision technology and how that happens. And now you start to look at a world where maybe the equipment’s not getting bigger anymore. Maybe it’s getting smaller.