It's fascinating how the world appears from different perspectives when tackling the same issue. For 14 years, I had the honor of leading CropTrak, a groundbreaking SaaS for Food company.
We ventured into Agtech before the iPad was released, launching one of the first soil and field boundary apps in the Apple App Store in early 2009. Our focus was always on the customers' challenges, not just the tech we used to solve them, be it ledgers, Xamarin UIs, clouds, mobile phones, or machine learning.
It gave me a chance to grow up in the age of Digital AgTech and see it all but in real-time. Working with farmers, coops, retailers, dealers, chem/seed, and food companies in many parts of the world, growing everything you find at a grocery store. When you do this, you see the gaps in AgTech. These gaps are not just technological, but also in understanding the needs of the end-users. When making technology, these are the market opportunities and, most likely, customer failure points. These points are where the technology fails to meet the customer's needs, and understanding them is crucial for a successful AgTech venture.
After exiting CropTrak in 2024, some friends suggested we should help Ag companies understand the AgTech market. We could apply the same insights about the market and its gaps to help customers discover, combine, and adopt AgTech in the form of solutions instead of individual technologies. Our goal is to focus on solving holistic problems that cross departments and functions with multiple ROIs versus just one. This means we aim to provide solutions that not only address a single issue but also positively impact various aspects of the business, leading to multiple returns on investment.
From that conversation, Lighthouse Ag was born. Our mission is to be a company that, after listening to the customer, helps them choose, integrate, and adopt technologies we don't make to solve business-wide problems with better data for decisions that return revenue sooner than later.
My journey began by listening to customers to build products, and now I'm listening to customers to integrate third-party tools for them. The early lesson I learned is that it's not about the technology (how), but about the customer (who) and the value you create for them, regardless of your role as a developer, integrator, or distributor of AgTech.
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