A 2019 report entitled “Unlocking the Digital Potential of Rural America” noted that “If rural small businesses better adopt online tools and technology, their gross sales could increase by an additional 20.8 percent during the next three years, the equivalent of $84.5 billion per year.”
Minnesota entrepreneur Janie Hanson knows this potential and is out to solve the problem. Having grown up in rural Minnesota with entrepreneurial parents, her passion has always been farmer-centric. With vision, perseverance, and an understanding of her community she is out to focus on the markets so her customers can focus on farming.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name of Company: Croptomize
Website: www.croptomize.com
Twitter: @croptomize
Business Start Date: May 31, 2019
Number of Employees: 4
Number of Customers: 700
ENTREPRENEUR PROFILE
Name: Janie Hanson
City of Birth: Blue Earth, Minn.
City you live in: Blue Earth
High school attended: Blue Earth
College attended: Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter (BA Environmental Studies); Columbia Business School, New York (MBA, Finance)
Q&A
A. What led you to this point?
Q. I grew up on a farm with entrepreneurial parents, so talking business around the dinner table was a regular occurrence in our household. After my MBA program, I worked in business development for John Deere and General Electric on large scale renewable energy projects. When I returned home to help manage my own family farm, I noticed the lack of tools to help farmers with the financial side of the business. Plenty of products exist on the precision ag and agronomy side of the business, but very few that really address grain marketing, capital management, and succession planning in a practical way for farmers.
Q. What is your business?
A. We build farmer-centric software applications to revolutionize the financial practices of the family farm. We have a free app, Croptomize, available in the Apple App Store, that provides easy access to local grain prices and market intelligence. Our Pro subscription service, launching this spring, offers access to the full suite of Croptomize Intelligence tools, including artificial intelligence-driven, statistically-backed tools for helping farmers more profitably market their grain.
Q. What is the origin of the business?
A. My cofounder, Deanna Lahre, and I met at the Executive Women in Agriculture conference in Chicago a few years ago. I was running my own company, Connect the Grey, which was founded to bring creativity to the business world; she’s a retired trader (one of the biggest wheat traders in the ‘80s and ‘90s), mathematician and data scientist, and had already built the model behind Croptomize. We bonded over our shared language of finance and farm kid roots, and eventually we decided to join forces. She relocated to Blue Earth as a founding business leader in the Rural Renaissance Project, to help bring tech jobs to rural areas.
Q. What problem does your business solve?
A. We focus on the markets so our customers can focus on farming. According to the USDA, 80 percent of farmers do not hedge their crops (i.e. using futures and options at the Chicago Board of Trade to lock in pricing ahead of time), meaning that family farms are one of the few participants in the food supply chain fully exposed to the unpredictability in the commodity markets. Knowing when to market your grain is stressful; Croptomize helps take the emotion out of the equation.
Q. What personal strengths or skill sets do you bring to the business?
A. I am visionary, resilient, and an integrative (or systems) thinker. Having personally experienced the pain points we’re addressing for our customers doesn’t hurt either.
Q. What are you most proud of?
A. The day the App launched in the Apple Store. Our vision is now a reality.
Q. Where do you go for help when you need it?
A. I have found a group of other women founders in Minneapolis. We meet monthly to share ideas, discuss challenges we face, problem solve and offer resources to keep us all moving forward.
Q. What obstacles must you overcome to be wildly successful?
A. Grain markets are stressful, confusing, with a lot of misinformation out there … and farmers don’t like being told what to do. Part of our challenge is communicating to customers with vastly different experiences with markets, from very savvy traders to people who don’t even want to think about it, so we’ve spent a lot of time on the design of the app and testing ways to convey complex information in a visually clean, succinct, and easy to understand manner.
Another practical challenge is broadband internet access in rural areas. Farms may be sitting on terabytes of data coming off precision ag sensors and satellite imagery, yet their internet connection is only a couple megabytes. There’s been some great progress in rural broadband initiatives but still more work to be done on this front.
Q. How are you funding your business?
A. We’ve primarily been self-funded; all of our investors and employees have ties to farming and are actively involved in the development of our products. We are currently seeking seed money to continue product development and grow the organization.
Q. What would be success for your business in the next 2-3 years?
A. We are a success in our business if 10 percent of farmers are using our products and increasing their profitability on their farms.
Q. In your opinion, what does it take to be a great entrepreneur?
A. Vision, perseverance, and an understanding of what it takes to implement your ideas. Also to really get anything going, you’ve got to be able to easily shift zoom levels, from the big picture to the small detail, while wearing far too many “hats” (marketing, accounting, project management, etc.), which can be very tiring. So having a solid team and making sure you have ways to re-energize and stay motivated is critical for riding out the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.
Q. What programs or support organizations have influenced you in your business development?
A. The Minneapolis/Mankato start-up ecosystem has a lot of energetic people working to develop the resources to support local innovation, which is exciting to see. We have pitched at 1 Million Cups and Founders Live (which we won in January). I also was accepted to the MESA (Minnesota Emerging Software Advisory) mentoring program for tech CEOs.
Lily Shaw is director of customer experience for Startup Space, community lead for 1 Million Cups St. Paul and co-facilitator for CO.STARTER MN. You can hear from startups like the ones featured in Startup Showcase every other Wednesday, 9-10 a.m. at 1 Million Cups St. Paul, located in the Glen Nelson Center in Osborn 370 (Wabasha Street, St Paul). To keep updated on what startup is presenting next OR to apply to present, visit https://ift.tt/2F6RtX7.
"Startup" - Google News
February 24, 2020 at 03:59AM
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Startup Showcase: A new tool on the farm: real-time grain market data - St. Paul Pioneer Press
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