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During the brainstorming session necessary to come up with an idea of a startup, all of us realized that, especially on the consumer side, there is a great demand of farmers products in the ranks of people living in the town without access to them.

Firstly, consumers might say that they can get these products at the supermarket or the local farmer market, but these products usually come at a really high price and their origin cannot be validated, thus providing a psychological barrier to the consumer.

Secondly, on the farmers side, there were some cases where producer interest was validated:

- Local producers in the countryside having a great orchard, and producing more than they could ever eat, but not having a space to sell their harvest in order to maximize profits.
- Producers who do not have an open market and are forced to sell their products to middle men in order to make some money.
- Farmers who do not have enough visibility and think they will never be successful.

Thus, by taking into account these memos obtained from real cases during our brainstorming we found the problem we want to solve.

How you identified the problem + What you thought is a solution for the problem?

Customer discovery

Our plan of customer discovery was to identify where we could find the persons that fit into one of the two parties: consumers or producers.

- For consumers we planned to ask friends, work colleagues, parents, friends.
- For producers we planned to use the chat functionality of the OLX site, where a lot of local farmers can be found.

After this generalized customer segment has been identified, by mining the interviews responses, we could get a sense into the more granular customer segments.

Detailed process

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The customer discovery process was divided into two parts.

Consumer Discovery

Potential consumers were identified among friends, work colleagues, parents, parents' friends, by tailoring their interests in buying quality goods at a proper price. We performed face to face interviews by asking a number of 4 questions and the most relevant part of the response was taken into consideration. Some of these interviews were also recorded to provide authenticity, while some of them were held in a spontaneous manner when we met these persons, writing down their answers in a file.

Consumers questions:


1. Cum ai ales alimentele pe care le cumperi? Ce factori sunt cei mai importanți pentru tine, precum prețul, proveniența sau metoda de cultivare?
2. Cât de des ai cumpărat produse bio și de unde le-ai achiziționat? Care au fost ultimele produse bio pe care le-ai cumpărat și ce te-a făcut să le alegi?
3. Ai avut vreodată dificultăți în a găsi produse bio la calitatea sau în cantitatea dorită? Cum ai gestionat aceste situații?
4. Cum ar fi pentru tine experiența ideală de a cumpăra produse bio? Ai prefera să mergi la fermieri locali sau să ai posibilitatea de a le primi direct acasă?



Producer Discovery
The interviews were held by contacting producers on the OLX platform. A low number of individuals responded, thus prompting us to do some recorded interviews as well.

Producers questions:


1. Cum vinzi produsele tale în acest moment? Care sunt principalele canale prin care reușești să ajungi la clienți?
2. Care sunt provocările cu care te confrunți atunci când încerci să vinzi direct către consumatori?
3. Ai încercat ceva până acum pentru a atrage mai mulți clienți sau pentru a simplifica procesul de vânzare? Cum a funcționat?
4. Cum crezi că ar putea o platformă online să te ajute în procesul de vânzare? Ce ar trebui să facă pentru a-ți fi cu adevărat utilă?



Main Key Results and Conclusions:


Consumers


What matters the most when buying goods? It seems that the key factors in buying goods are a good price and the quality of the ingredients. This is the goal of Agro as most quality products have a high price in the supermarket or marketplaces and by connecting the consumers with the producers, we find a way to get a lower price for more quality.

Where do you buy your natural goods, if you are buying bio goods? Most of the people that buy bio goods reported that they usually buy from the marketplace or the supermarket, with a low number reporting that they know a local producer. This yields an opportunity for Agro to fill the gap and attract more customers to buy from local producers and know them better.

How often did you buy bio goods in the last period? Here the results are quite mixed between often and rarely, proving that there are factors which stop people from buying bio goods more often, as seen in the other insights, probably the price.

Did you encounter difficulties when buying bio goods? How did you mitigate? Here the results are again mixed, with the people that encountered difficulties saying that they usually tried harder to find them and searched specialized stores and local producers. Agro could become a source for people with these difficulties.

Where do you want your goods to be delivered? Most of the people said that they want a combination of visiting the farmer and receiving goods at home. This is what Agro will be tailored to do.

Producers:


Producers usually sell through known people and the OLX platform (normal considering it is the platform we asked the questions through). Agro needs to offer better services than OLX in order to attract these producers.
The biggest difficulty producers encountered is that they found people who were not really keeping their word, as there is no optimized mechanism of processing the transactions and receiving the goods. Agro aims to solve that.
Most of them increase their number of clients through recommendations. Through Agro they will get greater visibility, as it will foster a big number of clients. Regarding an application that might solve their problem, the producers underlined the need for it to be really simple. Only in that case it would be useful, considering that farmers are usually older people. We need to keep in mind that as we are moving forward with the application.

Check Interviews Proof

Agro was not significantly affected by these results but there are some things that need to be kept in mind when developing the startup:

- The interface needs to be really simple. No complex processes. This is crucial.
- It does not need to be a “money grab”, providing good prices, also for the consumers and the producers as well.
- Sources need to be verified and only quality products that went through ANPC standards approved to be listed on the platform.
- A good acquisition system needs to be put in place. We will offer a connection between the consumers and producers, but that needs to be regulated.
- There is a need to find a way to promote the app's visibility drastically as it will be dependent on a high user base in order to gain trust from both parties.

Describe how these insights have affected your product (if in any way).

Do you consider that you are ready to move to the Customer Validation stage (to test selling)? Provide arguments.

In our opinion, as no drastic changes are necessary in the application's idea, just some guidelines that we need to strictly follow, we think that we are ready to move to the next stage. There is clearly a vacuum in the market, without a lot of competitors in this niche. After our idea is validated we need to make sure that there are customers willing to use it.