PAT:
Welcome to this episode of Like a Glove, the start-up podcast about product-market fit. I’m your host, Pat East, and we’re recording here in the podcast studio from The Mill in Bloomington, Indiana. The Mill is 19,000 square feet of coworking and incubator space, where our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. Today’s guest is Ellie Symes, the co-founder and CEO of the Bee Corp. Welcome.
ELLIE:
Thanks for having me, Pat. Happy to be here.
PAT:
Thanks for being here. So, let’s start off with a couple of easy questions. What does the Bee Corp do?
ELLIE:
Yeah. So, the Bee Corp is a data analysis company that helps growers that have to rent beehives to pollinate their crops. We allow these growers to measure their pollination contract value and ensure the results–help them ensure they have effective yields. Since pollination is used in over 90 crops in the US, it’s a extremely essential input, and these growers have to make sure the bees that show up can do the job.
PAT:
And so, bees are responsible for a third of the world’s food population, and so making sure that they can pollinate these crops in a productive way is essential to your mission.
ELLIE:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think folks have heard about the decline in bee health and issues there, and because of those health issues, it’s getting harder to rent strong bees that will effectively pollinate crops. So, as those issues have arisen, growers have been working to find ways that they can verify how the hives that show up are going to result in good pollination. You basically can’t get pollination wrong; you can’t correct it if it goes wrong.
PAT:
Gotcha. And so what is your main product do?
ELLIE:
Yeah, so Verifli, we use infrared cameras that attach to the back of any smartphone. We capture images of the hives with those cameras. There’s an app that does this capturing so growers can walk around their orchards with their own phones. Once those images are captured, we actually analyze them and predict the colony size inside the hive. And all of that is reported back to growers in a report that really allows them to drill down into the information they need to make decisions from. So, it’s truly a data analysis software tool for predicting this important crop input.
PAT:
And so before Verifli, what did your customers do? How did they measure the health of their hives?
ELLIE:
We replaced the status quo manual inspection method, where inspectors actually have to open up the beehives and count how many frames of bees are covered. It’s a very subjective process, and it is really slow and expensive. So, I think a lot of what we’ll be talking about today is what we’ve learned. We first just dove into that system before coming up with Verifli.
PAT:
And so, part of the reason it’s subjective, like counting itself is subjective, but part of the reason the manual process is because you literally don’t count all the hives, you just count a certain percentage of them and just extrapolate and hope that gives you the combined aggregate health. Is that right?
ELLIE:
Right. Exactly.
PAT:
Gotcha. All right, so let’s dive into product-market fit. So, what’s Ellie’s definition of product-market fit?
ELLIE:
Well, first of all, I think it was a couple of years before I truly understood the definition of product-market fit and saw it at a trade show and had a product where you really see this connection with growers. To me, product-market fit is what you are offering to them: the exact solution to a problem that’s extremely important to them. And so, for me, you don’t get product-market fit without starting with really understanding the problems–understanding not just, “Is it a problem?” but, “Is it a problem they are focused on solving today?”
PAT:
That they even care, right? Not every problem is worth solving.
ELLIE:
Right, right, exactly. So, I think it’s truly, we call it product-market fit, but it really should be problem-product fit.
PAT:
Oh yeah, I got that.
ELLIE:
Because that’s where it all starts. And to me, that’s the key part of it, and everything else comes after.
PAT:
Problem-product fit. You may have coined a new start-up term.
ELLIE:
There we go, train market.
PAT:
And so, one thing you mentioned is something that keeps coming up over and over in our interviews, which is everybody has a slightly different definition of product-market fit. One of the reasons we’re doing the podcast is to try to demystify this nebulous thing that is so important to everybody and so important to all start-ups, but is very difficult to actually measure and have a really good solid definition around, that 100% of the folks agree with. But one thing that’s becoming very common, and I’m seeing as a theme, is that the pain has to be a big pain, has to be very compelling, has to be, in your words, something they actually want to solve. And so, maybe let’s talk a little bit about that first product that you had. Queen’s Guard, we talked about that earlier, and also just full disclosure, I’m a three-time investor in the Bee Corp.
ELLIE:
Yeah. Three. And an advisor board member.
PAT:
And an advisor board member. And so yeah, take us all the way back to Queen’s Guard and why you thought that was the right product at that particular time?
ELLIE:
Yeah. So, Queen’s Guard we developed from our own experience as beekeepers, and high level what we did wrong there is we assumed our experience as hobbyist beekeepers was the same as commercial beekeepers’ experience. We learned later on it’s very different.
PAT:
That it’s not, yeah.
ELLIE:
So, it wasn’t a bad thing that we took our experience, our passion, and solved a problem we had experienced. Tons of companies today, tons of start-up pitches I hear are–let’s say, photographers are trying to solve a problem they’ve seen for their years in the industry, that’s always a good formula. But I do think it blinded us to not right away trying to understand the customer and beekeepers, especially because, especially in ag, they’re just so diverse. So, Queen’s Guard was for hobbyist beekeepers, and I say that now because that’s what the product-market fit was for.
PAT:
Yeah. Absolutely.
ELLIE:
And I know that now. For hobbyist beekeepers, it allowed them to measure the strength of the queen bee inside their hive using thermal sensors. So, they would get an alert when they had an issue. And I could go down this rabbit hole of why queen health was important to hobbyist beekeepers, but that was the problem we were solving.
PAT:
Generally speaking, if the queen is healthy, the hive is healthy, right? And if the queen is unhealthy or dying or dead, then the hive—
ELLIE:
Your hive will die.
PAT:
And so that’s the reason why it was important. And so, for you, as you were going through IU and you started and led the Beekeeping Club and featured in things like the New York Times, having this opinion of, okay, the health of the queen—I mean it wasn’t an uninformed opinion, it was just, based upon the market who would ultimately pay you, it was not the right product for them.
ELLIE:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s one of the essential tenants of things you need in the beehive, especially, I mean, for commercial beekeepers too, queen health is extremely important. What we didn’t factor in was how much more labor becomes an issue when you scale up to 500 to a thousand hives per person as a full-time job versus as hobbyist beekeepers, they’re typically doing under 10. So, I mean, it’s no-brainer now that hobbyist beekeepers can afford to spend a lot more time in their hives. They’re much more meticulous, and they can actually afford to solve queen health problems.
PAT:
Oh, okay. Gotcha.
ELLIE:
Commercial beekeepers can’t even spend the labor time to do that.
PAT:
You can’t scale up to 500 to 700, it’s not that hobbyists don’t care if the queen isn’t healthy, it’s that they’re going to figure out how to make that queen healthy on their own.
ELLIE:
Yeah. Commercial beekeepers, yeah. They just don’t have the time, it’s more expensive to fix a queen health issue than it is just to let the hive die and replace it with a new one later.
PAT:
Oh, wow. And so, that’s built into their business model. And so, trying to figure out how to fix a problem that is built into their business model is just kind of like climbing uphill. Yeah, it’s an uphill battle.
ELLIE:
Yeah. I mean, that information we’re giving them, it’s literally more expensive for them to react to that information than to do nothing. So, once we learned that, I mean we knew that the Queen’s Guard and that style of product will scale in the hobbyist beekeeping space and is important for that market, but would not work fundamentally in a commercial beekeeping market. And we decided as a company, we wanted the commercial side of the industry as customers to scale at the rate we wanted to.
PAT:
Let’s put a pin in that, and we’ll talk about the commercial side here in a moment, but let’s actually take a step back a little bit and go back to the very beginning of the Bee Corp and even before then. And so, I mentioned that you had started the Beekeeping Club at IU, you had led it, you were featured in the New York Times, so you were getting a lot of press and a lot of momentum. There were a few hundred members, I think, at the Beekeeping Club.
ELLIE:
Yeah, we were 300 in our first semester.
PAT:
Wow, that’s amazing. And so how did the Bee Corp, how did that actually happen? Go all the way back to IU Foundation and presenting and tell that story.
ELLIE:
Yeah, it was awesome. So, oh, gosh, I think we were in the second semester of the Beekeeping Club or something, and we were invited to present to the IU Foundation board of directors group. So, the IU Foundation is Indiana University’s group that runs the endowment for the university. And the reason they have this presentation was literally just to share interesting stories to board members of cool things students had done with their grant programs. And so, the first beekeeping program that evolved into the club was started from a grant from the Hutton Honors College at the university that I received. So, I presented about the beekeeping problem and honeybee health problem, and the Beekeeping Club, and what we were doing to inspire a new generation of IU alumni that understands how bees fit in with their overall food system and how their majors fit in with food systems and bees. And we got lots of questions about the reproductive system of bees, which was really weird. I don’t know why that—
PAT:
I don’t think I’ve ever—
ELLIE:
Heard that.
PAT:
. . . wondered about that or heard anybody ask any questions ever in the hundreds of times I’ve heard you pitch, that’s a different group.
ELLIE:
They were in an interesting mood that day. But three of those board members pulled me aside and said, “We love what you did with the club, but we want you to dream bigger, and we want to help you.” So, literally they were saying, “You clearly have a passion, and we have backgrounds that could be helpful, and we don’t know if you want to start a nonprofit or a for-profit, but we think it’d be fun to help you.” So, those folks are still our board members and advisory board members today—Jane Martin, Harry Gonso, and Milt Stewart—and have been really essential to teaching us how to do it. And it was really special to be able to just come up with an idea about how to impact this larger bee health issue and structure it in a way we wanted to do.
PAT:
And so, most companies, they are started because the founder has a pain or they identify an insight into the market. And in this case it’s really, other folks said, “Hey, you’re doing some really cool stuff here, and we think you should aspire to something bigger than just the Beekeeping Club at IU. Yes, that’s great. Let’s dream bigger.” And so, that’s really kind of how the Bee Corp got started. It’s a for-profit entity now, but even then they were thinking, okay, this could be nonprofit or for-profit. Let’s just figure out how it can be bigger and more impactful.
ELLIE:
Yeah. And I think the pain that even inspired those IU Foundation board members to pull me aside was decreasing hive populations and decreasing health and increasing pollination fees. So, they saw, hey, there’s this market problem there. Here’s this young IU student that really likes bees, we probably can connect the two and help her work on that.
PAT:
Gotcha. Interesting. Interesting. So, I didn’t realize they had identified problems in the market and said, “Hey, maybe you can do something.” I literally thought they were just like, “Hey, we like you, also we want you to dream bigger.”
ELLIE:
Oh, yeah.
PAT:
Gotcha.
ELLIE:
I would like to think it was just that. But yeah, definitely.
PAT:
Just your inspiration.
ELLIE:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That was in my presentation and definitely caught the folks’ eyes, especially Jane, who had a VC background, she saw that was a really clear market failure, and that’s always a ripe opportunity for a solution.
PAT:
Gotcha. Interesting. Very, very interesting. Yeah, I knew most of the story but didn’t realize that particular part. And so Jane and Harry and Milt are still involved with the company and as you graduated and they kind of helped you build the company into the current version it is today, did you have any pivots along the way besides going from Queen’s Guard to the current product?
ELLIE:
Oh, yeah, we did. Our first business model was we were going to be the biggest, baddest beekeepers in the country using technology to help us be more efficient. That was the first business model for really only like three or four months. That’s what won us the BEST Competition though, which is hilarious to look back at. But we had a board member come on, Eddie, who has an ag tech company and he very, very quickly spotted that and said, “It’s very capital intensive to do that.” Oh no, this was even before Eddie. This was when we actually modeled out how much we’d have to spend to buy beehives.
PAT:
Oh, gotcha. So, there are multiple pivots. Yeah, yeah.
ELLIE:
Yeah. So, we did that and realized, okay, no, we need to be a solution and a tool for beekeepers, still thinking we needed to build hardware. And Eddie actually came on and said, “Oh my gosh, don’t build hardware.”
PAT:
Right, right. Hardware as a commodity decreases in price all the time. Sure, sure.
ELLIE:
I mean, those two things happened in, definitely in the first four months. So much changed from the idea napkin pitch that won the BEST Competition to when we actually started working on it. And those were actually really core changes in our strategy and what we were going to spend the capital on and definitely were changes for the better, but weren’t easy at all, at the time to do.
PAT:
And so, a couple of things I heard in there that kind of helped you pivot along the way and helped guide you to the current market. One was the BEST Competition and that’s IU’s undergraduate startup competition, a hundred thousand dollar prize that at the time was the largest undergraduate prize in the nation. So, there was kind of a structure there to help give you capital and work with attorneys and help you start the company along the way.
And then the other big thing I heard was mentors, right? Having people help you along the way who’ve done this before. And so it’s not just you figuring stuff out, it’s other folks helping you with their expertise, them helping you identify blind spots. And so, maybe talk a little bit about mentors. How important were they, not just for those pivots but in general?
ELLIE:
Well, I have no business education, formal business education, at all. Very little nonprofit education, even nonprofit management. I mean, I had to learn everything, and most of what I learned was from mentors, you being one of them. Any time I addressed a problem or even something I hadn’t done before, I would have coffee with a few mentors and figure out how to do it. I found that mentors, for me, were a much easier way to learn and get advice. Of course, I definitely read blogs and researched online problems, but I don’t think you can really get everything you need from a blog or online, especially because all of our businesses have weird, unique twists in them, and everyone has a different perspective from their experience. So, I mean it’s been everything, and I still today rely on them when I’m coming to a problem I don’t really know how to solve or that is tricky. So, gosh, it’s everything.
PAT:
Yeah. The thing I find about mentors, and I still rely on people quite a bit, I even go to you as . . . I mean, the mentor-protege relationship, it goes both ways, because the thing about blind spots is you can’t see them, but other people can. So, yeah, I go to mentors all the time, because the thing about blogs and tweets is that there’s so much context that you just don’t understand or you don’t have, right?
ELLIE:
Right.
PAT:
And there’s so much nuance that somebody one on one can help explain to you, and if you start understanding incorrectly, they can course-correct you. So, I can definitely see where those mentors helped you along the way, Eddie in particular, to help pivot the company where it needed to go.
ELLIE:
Yeah, and I think it’s ingrained in our culture now because I have learned that I’m a consensus-based leader. I like to, when we can, have consensus, get everybody’s ideas on board. That’s probably why I always gravitated towards talking to mentors about things that our founding team just at times didn’t have the education to solve, and still do. But I would say as the company’s matured, we still have regular board meetings and advisory board meetings where we’re getting advice on strategy. But we also do it regularly, like weekly at a team level now, where pretty much every strategic decision that’s made at the company is done on a team level, where we’re all offering input, we’re all offering our insights. And I have seen that side really grow in the past year as we’ve all become experts on infrared image analysis—
PAT:
And modeling, yeah, yeah.
ELLIE:
. . . especially related to bee hives. So, that has been really neat, watching that blossom in our culture, because especially from the early days we were relying on mentors. Now we’re—and I say this because I think other teams can use this too—we don’t just use outside folks. We even internally get advice. So, modeling folks get advice from people who focus on sales in our company. You don’t have to be the subject-matter expert to give some really good insights.
PAT:
And when you say leading by consensus, I want to dive into that a little bit because it’s not a democracy, right? It’s not like everybody has an equal vote and you just happen to have the CEO title. It’s, you’re still leading, you’re just gathering opinions from everybody to inform, ultimately, what’s going to be your decision. Is that fair?
ELLIE:
Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, usually if you do it that way, you don’t even have to make many decisions as a CEO. Because usually, most things—after you discuss it and weigh pros and cons and everyone offers an opinion—you can come up with, I always like to call it a win, win, win solution where the entire team has presented three problems of a strategy we’re trying to work around, and only together do we usually come up with that middle road solution. So, weirdly, it’s usually the case that it just is obvious after discussing it with different viewpoints and talking through solutions that I don’t really even need to choose through a couple different options.
PAT:
Gotcha. It kind of becomes apparent during the discussion, “Okay, this won’t work.” And also, when you’re discussing it with the people, they realize it won’t work. So yeah, I can kind of see how it just leads you to the right conclusion.
ELLIE:
Right.
PAT:
Awesome. All right. Let’s dive into your current market. How did you determine your beachhead market, that first market that you went after?
ELLIE:
Yeah, for Verifli, we selected, so we’re in the almond market in California, we selected that market for a few reasons. One of them just being the intensity of the problem that they’re facing. So, they rent 75% of the nation’s beehives and have the highest pollination prices today. So, I mean, you can use data points definitely to help identify target markets. But there were some other factors, consolidation, geography, things like that we looked at. So, we don’t just look at market size, we look at several factors where we think we can be successful, the nature of the product at the time, what’s going to make the most sense, the timing. So, it was a lot of reasons, but I’m very glad we’re in the almond industry, because as far as agriculture it’s extremely innovative industry with really high profit margins. They have high profit margins because they’re innovative, and they’re able to take those high profit margins and reinvest.
PAT:
So, it’s a circular reinforcement, is that? I don’t know.
ELLIE:
Yeah. It’s like a virtuous cycle.
PAT:
Virtuous cycle, thank you. I knew I was close. Gotcha. And so, when you’re looking at the market size, I mean, you said, “Hey, a lot things inform it.” So, it’s not just total market size, right? It’s not just, “Hey, let’s go after the biggest market.” Talk to me about how you explain that to investors, that you’re not necessarily going to go after a market only based upon market size. It’s got to be multiple factors, right? Because investors want to see the highest return on their money. And so, “Why wouldn’t you go after a high market or large market?” is what some folks are going to say. Talk to me about how you message that to investors.
ELLIE:
Yeah. So, maybe our product’s a little unique because by nature it’s so segmented, because you have different crops. So, the first thing we do—actually, I think it’s like the second and third slide—my current version of the pitch is, first we let them know the total market is big.
PAT:
Sure.
ELLIE:
It is. But every single market’s extremely segmented. I mean, it’s ignorant to say that there’s a billion dollar market and the SAM is, the serviceable addressable market, is half of that or a third of that. Most markets are segmented by geography, by how they purchase, all kinds of different ways you can segment a market. I think by nature it’s really intuitive for investors to understand crops are segments of the market. So, that is helpful. I would say when we’re getting into our go-to market strategy, we typically go through why the almond market is a winner to start in on some of the reasons I’ve mentioned.
And then we lay out, “Hey, here’s the markets we’re going to go into and why.” I also have found myself in investor meetings laying out why we’re taking a target-based approach at markets and why that has been successful for us in the almonds and the strategy behind that. So, I would say, my advice and upon reflection would be, you don’t just segment a market and go after segments just because—
PAT:
Just because, right, yep.
ELLIE:
. . . there needs to be a strategy and there needs to be a reason that it makes sense. And usually the reason is centered around, being laser-focused on a customer base and their needs really helps because feature creep and requirements change.
PAT:
Sure. And so, part of what I heard was that you weren’t necessarily going after a smaller market, you didn’t say, “I wanted to go after a smaller market.” It just happened to be a segment of the bigger market. And yeah, this is segment one, segment two, three, four, and so on down the line. So, it’s really just, here’s the first domino, and I just happened to be choosing this one for these other reasons besides size. A billion dollars is still a lot. Right? So, it’s not a small market, so it just happens to be, here’s the first domino.
ELLIE:
Right. Exactly. And I honestly think most companies, probably, it would work that way, too. I mean, I just listened to a podcast where the company who pitched was actually discouraged by investors to go after the largest market first. They were like, “No, that’s silly. You should go after this market that’s close to home that you know really well.” So,the strategy for Bee ,Corp and what market we’re going to go after might be different than the strategy for another company because you have to consider your own company’s strategic advantages in different markets, too.
PAT:
Sure, yeah. Yeah. All this advice is not just one size fits all, you have to really figure out how it applies to your company, if it applies at all.
ELLIE:
Right, exactly.
PAT:
You mentioned a couple of terms in there before, TAM and SAM, total addressable markets, serviceable addressable market. What’s the differences between the two?
ELLIE:
Yeah. Again, this is another one where you’ll get a bunch of different answers when you Google it.
PAT:
For sure, yeah, that’s why we’re doing this.
ELLIE:
Yeah. So, the way I see TAM is that is the complete opportunity from your product as is. So, we calculate TAM as the current version of the product. I make the careful distinction on that because all of our products have innovations and additional R&D you could do to open up new opportunities. I mean, we see that as, that’s a new evolution of the product and a new market or to get into a new market. So, right now our TAM is, hey, Verifli as it is and the potential it can reach. The SAM for us is, well, where are we planning to be active? Where can we actually serve?
Meaning, do we have the sales abilities and marketing dollars to spend and grow in those spaces. So, for us, TAM is like, here’s the product and what it could do in the market and then SAM is, okay, based on that, here’s what we can actually afford to go after.
PAT:
Right. With how the company is currently resourced with whatever grants or investor money or folks on staff, here’s what percentage of that market we think we can actually capture.
ELLIE:
Yeah.
PAT:
Gotcha. We’re close to wrapping up here, so a couple more questions. I’m an investor. I know the accuracy of that initial product was good, but not exactly where you wanted it to be. How did you make up that gap with those initial customers? They were expecting one thing in terms of accuracy or product, and it turned out to be something else. It was still good, but still not exactly where you wanted it to be. So how did you make up that gap, and how did you know customers would be okay with that?
ELLIE:
Well, I mean, I think it, again, comes down to that product-market fit and that we know quarterly what Verifli’s trying to do. Verifli is trying to, at its core, the value prop is to literally help these growers figure out one, did they get what they paid for? And two, do they have enough bees to pollinate crops? So, those are the key problems we have to solve. Everything else is, that’s more of our value proposition and our competitive advantage over the status quo manual inspection. So, we looked at that core problem, and you can’t do either of those two things, the core problem we have to solve, if you don’t have an accurate model. So, it was so fundamental to our product and what we needed do that we said, “Okay, well, how can we ensure no matter what, our growers get accurate results so that they can one, make sure they got what they pay for?”
So, we decided to do that by, okay, let’s, this year, actually open up those hives and layer back in that status quo manual inspection system that they’re used to. We do it every month for data collection, we know how to do it, let’s layer that in. No matter what, growers are getting that problem solved. And then after that we actually saw that there was more value props that were opened up with that unique structure, as well as, we still were able to hit almost every single one of our value props and competitive advantages over the status quo manual inspections, except for actually opening the hives, so we have a value prop of you don’t have to open the hives.
PAT:
You don’t have to open the hives. Sure.
ELLIE:
Yeah. I mean, we just focused on the problem and then secondarily looked at, okay, what value props can we still hit? How is this still better? And our customers saw that and were quite excited and the value prop that opened up was they actually were able to much more easily migrate to this because they could put all their eggs in that basket. They knew it was going to be accurate. And for a lot of our customers this year we were their inspector, so the year before that some of them still hired manual inspections because they needed to make sure they were bouncing that risk of trying this new product with making sure they got those inspections. So, we allowed them to actually spend less, overall, on inspections by just going with us completely.
PAT:
And so, one big thing I heard in there was you had such a laser focus on what problems you were solving, you had two very clear identifiable problems, that even if your product wasn’t actually able to solve them exactly, you said, “Well, we know how to do this manually.” And so, that’s ultimately what the customer’s buying, right? Whether or not you do it via technology or some innovative way or you’re doing it by hand, and so you’re able to still solve their problem, but you also gain more trust with them in the process because you’ve uncovered another value proposition.
ELLIE:
That, and we, before there was a problem, before any grower got bad results, we said, “Hey, we’re going to need to do these manual inspections, and we’re letting you guys know.” And I actually got asked by several growers, “Are you reacting to something that went wrong, or is this more internal?”
PAT:
Preemptive. Yeah, yeah.
ELLIE:
And it was internal, and that really gained a lot of trust.
PAT:
That really helped.
ELLIE:
Because they saw that as, “Hey, this is a mature company, and they get it.” I mean, “They’re—
PAT:
“They’re trying to take care of us,” right? Yep.
ELLIE:
Yeah. And growing things is not easy. Things don’t work out. You have to apply a lot of science to growing crops. So, they get that innovation’s challenging. What they don’t get is that some companies are just not transparent about those challenges. Yeah.
PAT:
Gotcha. Gotcha. All right, last question for today. What’s the single biggest things folks can do to get better product-market fit?
ELLIE:
Customer discovery. Steve Blank has a really good series of videos that are free and available, and it literally helps you fill out the business model canvas. I mean, we’ve talked about some key points on there. Solve your problem, then do your value prompts and your competitive advantage. Those are squares on that canvas. You need to go interview at least 30 of your end users. Literally do not bring up your product at all, at all, in those interviews. Tell them you’re doing a research project because it’s not a sales call, it’s not a sales pitch. And what we did in almonds and the commercial beekeeping space was we first just started with, “What’s the really high-level problem you’re solving?” So, for high level, for us, it was, “How does pollination go for you? Do you like it? Are you upset?” We didn’t even ask them, “Hey, are increasing costs of pollination a problem for you?” We just started at the top and allowed them—
PAT:
You started with a blank canvas and had them tell you, “Here’s the direction you should go into.”
ELLIE:
Right. Exactly. And that allowed us to validate, oh, these increasing costs are on their minds, that is a problem. This decreasing health of hives is on their mind–because those were the answers we were getting. So, even starting there, you find out what the problems are that they’re trying to solve, and then you ask them about how they’re currently solving it—and that’s what’s key. You’re going to be much more successful with a product where they’re currently spending money or time or any resource to solve that problem. If their answer to what the problem is, is, “I don’t know.”
PAT:
“I don’t know.” Yeah. “It’s not that important.”
ELLIE:
“I don’t really do anything.” Then it’s not a big problem. So, that’s how the structure of the calls go. And then we would do those every week. You don’t get to 30 in the first week. You’re a rockstar if you can. And review those answers, and actually you can recraft your questions based on your answers. So, we spent a long time doing this, we ended up doing over a hundred.
PAT:
Oh, wow.
ELLIE:
So, 30 is the minimum, most bootcamps and things like that recommend a hundred.
PAT:
And so, if you are also approaching it from a research perspective, that lends itself well to getting grants to help fund that. And so, you can actually get SBIRs, STTRs from NSF, all different federal agencies. And it doesn’t have to be a pure academic research project. It can be, you’re literally doing research—
ELLIE:
It’s market research.
PAT:
. . . on your market, on your customers and the government will literally pay you money to do that, because ultimately it’s going to help solve a problem.
ELLIE:
Yeah. I mean, we did this through, our NSF grant required us to do this customer discovery, and thank goodness it did, because we at first were like, “Gosh, this is a waste of time.” But, oh my, how it changed and helped our company. So, I mean, doing customer discovery, it helps you get product-market fit, but it’s the single most important thing for any company to be doing.
PAT:
And the other thing I heard you talk about earlier today, actually before the podcast we were talking, you just got done a big stint in California where you’re working really closely with customers, and you do this about once a year, right? During the growing season and you said it’s amazing how clear, how much clarity you have this time of year, and is that because you spend so much time with customers and you’re going through this process?
ELLIE:
Yeah. I mean, we have this, well, it’s that, but it’s also we have this huge goal we’re working towards. We’re heads down working and then after we finish it, yeah, I mean we have just seen all the reactions from customers, but we’ve also completed a big task, and we can look up and go, “How did that all go?” We actually are going to be switching how we do planning and be retrospective all year, because we have so much insight that has come out. We just got back a week, yeah—
PAT:
A week or so ago?
Ellie:
. . . last week was our first week back. In a week and four days, we’ve had more ideas and solutions to problems than all last year.
PAT:
Awesome.
ELLIE:
So, actually I think we’d like to be retrospective more throughout the year and we will be, but part of the clarity just comes with, you’ve just accomplished a big milestone—now what? Now how are we going to get to the next one? And yeah, definitely there is a motivator in finally, after a year of being back out in front of customers, making people happy, solving problems. That helps a ton. But I feel very fortunate that the nature of our beachhead market and our strategy is that we have this annual cycle, because we’re not putting out fires every month, every day.
We’re really working towards a season. But I still think even in that I’ve really learned, in the last week here, that even if you are a company that you have to deliver your product year-round, you’re putting out fires year-round, it’s still extremely important to stick your head up, look back at how the last month went.
PAT:
You have to reflect on things, right?
ELLIE:
Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, I don’t know how you gain that clarity in the thick of it. And if you ask me in Q4 this year, maybe I’ll have some better strategies.
PAT:
Great. Well, maybe we’ll have you back and we can talk about that, specifically, and how it helps inform product-market fit in the future. Right? Because once you have it now, hopefully you’ll keep it for a while, right? That’s the idea. But the world’s changing all around us, and so if you don’t change along with it, eventually at some point you won’t have product-market fit. So, yeah, maybe we’ll have you back in the future and we can talk about that process.
ELLIE:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, to be honest, I will just say lastly we redo our product-market fit or business model canvas, how we measure it and map it, we redo it all the time.
PAT:
Awesome.
ELLIE:
And that’s important to do.
PAT:
Very cool. All right.
ELLIE:
Cool.
PAT:
Really great insights, Ellie, thank you for coming on today. I appreciate it.
ELLIE:
Thanks for having me.
PAT:
If folks want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way they can do that?
ELLIE:
Thebeecorp.com.
PAT:
Awesome. Thanks, Ellie.
ELLIE:
And it’s “bee” as in the animal.
PAT:
T-H-E-B-E-E-C-O-R-P.com.
ELLIE:
Yeah, thanks.
PAT:
And also, you’re a benefit corporation, also a B Corp.
ELLIE:
Yep. We are a B Corp.
PAT:
A B Corp is—
ELLIE:
The Bee Corp. Yep.
PAT:
That’s confusing. All right. That’s not a great note to end on, but that’s where we’ll end on it today. Thanks again, Ellie, appreciate it.
ELLIE:
Cool, thanks.
Like a Glove is a production of The Mill, a coworking and business incubator space in Bloomington, Indiana. Our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies, and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. You can learn more about The Mill at dimensionmill.org. Thanks for listening, and be sure to check back every other Monday for new episodes.