An Organic Farm Startup Onboarding Strategy

I recently led a workshop for an organic tech farm startup that wanted to set its foot online for selling organic food to B2B customers. I have some takeaways and learnings to share that I covered as a coach for their onboarding strategy. The most important takeaway is that like many other startup founders, Startup V (named changed) too had a clear technology vision for the tech-driven farming concept but had missing strategies, goals & measures spanning across managing the partner ecosystem, offerings, services, branding, content, and outcomes aligned to shorter timeframes to respond to changes quickly. Let me walk through the entire workshop in the phases with its results.

Problem:

We clearly defined the problem that co-founders were facing in order to set up the online and digital experience.

“ Create B2B onboarding strategy for a premium organic products for <Startup V> catering to niche user segment focused on wellness, health & lifestyle”

Why was it needed to define the problem for onboarding strategy?

In the first meeting, I was assured that clarity on goal, strategy, the partnership was missing. To give a little background on startup V (not the actual name), the founder is a successful entrepreneur and has 20 years track record in running a successful heavy industry manufacturing business of about INR100 crores ($17m) annual turnover. Having sharp business acumen and interest in technology-driven framing has allowed him to envision the concept of growing premium organic foods on his 100-acre farmland and create a niche market for some of the premium organic grains across India and overseas. For example, one of the products is ancient and extremely expensive, Kala Namak rice which has recently gained popularity among therapists, premium wellness centres, & premium users due to its peculiar properties & health benefits. As a coach, my main intention was to allow founders and their partners to focus mainly on formalizing the strategies for all 8 dimensions before setting steps online and digital space since this is required to grow and scale up quickly and visualizing the initial risks. On the other hand, the strategy across the dimension should be flexible enough to respond to any changes.

What are those 8 dimensions for startup onboarding strategy?

I have defined the below dimensions as a cohesive framework. Defining strategy for each of these dimensions and applying them offer a less riskiest platform to launch the online business. Further, measuring the impact of the strategies is a feather on the cap. It can easily be backed up with the lean concept of building strategies, measuring impacts, and learning to improve.

1-Element of whole offer

2- GAPS in the whole offer (Competitors)

3- Managing partnership ecosystem

4- Product strategy & success measures

5- Branding/content strategy

6- Social media strategy

7- Revisit the vision, outcomes and measures

8- Define at least 2 years strategic roadmap

Pro tips: Avoid anti-pattern while defining strategies for each dimension. I will mention these patterns separately unders each dimensions. It is noted that some of the dimensions take time to define so invest the right amount of time to define the strategy. These 8 dimensions will be pillars of driving the vision and business outcomes right after the launch. There is always a chance to fail however the strategies across these dimensions support pivoting quickly.

Element of Whole offer

First of all, we started understanding the reason for creating a “whole offer” for customers that delivers a total customer experience. Only selling the products is not the idea, but we preferred to combine the overall experience for the buyers.

GAPS in the whole offer

GAPS in the “whole offer” allows improving the whole offer by evaluating the experience gap. Since the experience gap cannot be fixed solely by the org as associated cost can be high or overall there can be missing core competencies to build that gap. Precisely, gaps in the whole offer also direct about the build, buy, partner strategy. E.g it is the same as a car manufacture ally with software startup working on AI tech to develop autonomous eclectic car AI-based apps.
I have given a high-level snapshot of the elements of the “whole offer” + “Gaps in the whole offer” we arrived at during the workshop.

Managing partnership ecosystem

It is the most important strategy for penetrating the market, especially for startups into farming, building electric vehicles etc. Unlike tech apps, commodities & machinery don’t require building strategy around product usages rather look for tactical goals associated with the overall business objectives for go to market and product-market fit by simply choosing the options- “build”, “buy” and “ally”. Refer image 2.

Pro tips: In the above image, one can notice I have ensured the “buy” option has only one attribute. Risk, time and money matter most for any startup, especially during the initial phase when they look for growth, opportunity and sustainability. Hence, it is good to opt for “ally” or “make”. However, only choose “make” if it is possible through moderate technology investment, but if it is capital intensive then it is good to go with the “ally”. This brings sustainability when strategies or decisions need to be pivoted to respond to the market changes.

Product strategy & success measures

In summary, I covered important aspects of product-market fit, problem-solution fit and scalability. The frameworks (image 1 &2) highlight the approach to take the product into the market. Traditionally, the approach was to rely on the go-to-market strategy as an outbound process of taking products into the market, however, these two onboarding frameworks bring lots of clarity on risk, market, service offering, partnering and channels etc from the beginning and hence eliminate the sheer amount of scratch works and surprises appear during the go to market.

Protips: Invest good time in the first two frameworks (image 1 & 2) and that should be sufficient to roll the sleeves up and keep the strategy ready to bring your product into the market with a good customer experience. Remember you are not building & selling a hi-tech product but think big, take small steps and scale do work for non-tech startups too. Ensure to keep revisiting the framework from time to time and iterate it based on your learnings and measures. I endorse lean startups and surprisingly found the scope of this concept widely applicable in all types of startups.

Branding/content strategy

Branding strategy for a startup is equally important like other stacks such as product, innovation, engineering, growth, finance, ops but that is the area where co-founders generally do not have enough experience. They always ask do they need to do everything themselves or only something for the brand creation. The thumb rule is to keep the branding strategy targeted to the right audiences through compelling stories, contents, tone, logo, graphics, online presence at the beginning. In the case of startup V, the products were targeted to niche premium segments so a branding strategy was made to influence the purchase decision for paying a premium. The important point is before jumping to create the strategy, I suggested spending a good time on a small exercise of understanding the Buyer persona to understand the buyer thinking, business goals, channels, influencers, approach etc. This allows founders to get clarity that “why” and “how” they should focus on the branding strategy within the budget and defined time. I have given a high-level snapshot of a branding strategy developed during the engagement. (refer image3)

Pro tips: I endorse lean startup and eventually found that the “build”, “measure” and “learn” approach works for branding strategy as well. Next, don’t ask your team to invest too much time in brainstorming for creating compelling stories for content but achieve perfection through the content iterative life cycle (refer to image 3, the 1st point under the “strategy” column). Branding is the first impression especially for premium products hence don’t overdo it but keep clear, concise, and presentable content during online/offline presence.

Social media strategy

The approach was to target the B2B customers hence we found the detailed approach to accelerate the social media strategy. A high-level snapshot is shown below -

Pro tips: There is a myth that branding strategy should also cover the social media strategy. It can be but nowadays when social media is the gigantic platform for business networks and marketing, so don’t overlook this medium. Keep social media strategy separately from overall branding strategy. There can be an overlap of some goals between branding and social media. Both dimensions separately unlock specific social media strategies required for networking, business and partnership that can not be fully covered under branding. (refer to image 4).

Revisit the vision, outcomes and measures

Finally, after all these exercises, it was time to revisit the vision and goal for the startup and if that really present the impact founders expects. I have extensively cover vision, outcomes and measures in my other blog. I would like to overemphasise that both tech and non-tech startups need an equal amount of time and clarity to build the strategic roadmap that clearly defines the outcomes expected by the business.

Define at least 2 years strategic roadmap

Finally, all strategies, outcomes, measures are plotted in the form of a strategic roadmap. It is good to have 2 years worth of roadmap where the level of certainty goes down with time. In a startup, one must revisit the roadmap quarterly. A high-level sample is shared (refer to image 5) of how we defined a cohesive medium to keep all 8-dimensional strategies, and measures together to build the startup V strategic roadmap. This is not the actual roadmap but just a mock. Further the cadence now, next future can be changed by month, quarter and year as prefered.

Pro tips: While plotting the strategies and measures in the roadmap, remove the occurance of the duplicates. You are ready to take a leap, action, evolve, and grow.

Hope you like the onboarding tips and tactics of startup V. In case you have any questions and looking for a coach to onboard your startup reach out to me on LinkedIn.