Going down to Southern California and seeing all of these people…it blew my mind. “My uncle’s farm is 6,000 acres and six people run the whole thing. Lee, who grew up in a family of large-scale corn and soybean farmers, put it like this: Jorge and Lee took a trip down to a big organic carrot farm and watched the weeding process, themselves. Suddenly, as an almost-random byproduct of customer development, the two men had uncovered an expensive, painful problem. They get on their hands and knees and crawl through the field and dig them up, weed by weed.” “The exec said, ‘We’re spending up to a thousand dollars on every single acre for this army of people to go through and clear weeds. “But,” the he said, “I do have this huge problem with weeds.” Pivot #1: From autonomous lawnmower to robot weed-whacker. If your autonomous tractor screws up and sends my machine into a ditch…let’s just say I have very little use for your autonomous tractor.”īut this same exec was happy to talk about his business problems, and he happened to manage automation for a multi-billion dollar agriculture business. “One exec said to us: ‘My tractor costs about $100K, and together with all the other stuff that goes with it, it’s $200–300,000. Like everyone else they talked to about autonomous lawnmowers, this group was universally unimpressed with the idea. If you ask the right questions to these people and listen carefully, you might learn something you didn’t already know.Īs part of their customer development process, Jorge and Lee crossed paths with some big farmers and agribusiness execs. One positive side effect of doing customer development is that it puts you in front of a lot of different, well-placed people. The second major benefit of lean development was just around the corner. The first major benefit of lean startup development had just demonstrated itself: Jorge and Lee discovered that their autonomous lawnmower idea was a bad one before diving headfirst into product development and crashing hard into a market that didn’t exist. This is not a good business.’ It was a resounding no.”
Almost everyone immediately said ‘we do not want this product. They learned pretty fast.Īs Lee says, “We went through and interviewed customers in each one of our target segments. This means talking to potential customers in depth to uncover their most urgent business problems and whether or not they like your proposed solution.īlue River’s team was cautiously excited and optimistic when they reached out to their network and went out into the world with their autonomous lawnmower idea.įortunately, Lee and Jorge are smart guys. They came up with golf courses, football stadiums, parks and recreation departments, and consumers.Īfter building out your Business Model Canvas, the next step is customer development. On their original canvas, Jorge, Lee, and the rest of team defined a handful of potential market segments that might be interested in a lawnmower that drives itself. What are you going to be selling? To whom, exactly? What is your value proposition for them? Why would they buy it? Who would be the key partners? What about vendors and suppliers? The early stage of this process involves building a “ Business Model Canvas,” on which you draw a large grid and list out every single core assumption you’re making about your product and the market you’re going to sell it to: Get that MVP into customers’ hands as quickly as possible.Take what they learn and pivot their concept until it resembles something the market wants, keeping lines of communication with customers going at all times.Go into the market to test those assumptions by talking to potential customers, suppliers, vendors, and technologists.List out all of their core assumptions about the market for it.Over 10 weeks, Blank’s class - which Blank teaches at both Stanford and Berkeley - walks its students through a practical implementation of his famous lean methodology. Thankfully, learning that your initial idea is terrible was in many ways the point. “We knew that no one was going to spend tens-of-thousands of dollars to automate one person’s job,” Blank says, “It was a bad idea, but we couldn’t tell them that.
When co-founders Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden first pitched this idea in front of Steve Blank’s Launchpad class at Stanford, Blank was sitting in the back, quietly laughing to himself. Before Blue River brought its market-leading agricultural robot to market, its founders planned to build an autonomous lawnmower.