Wow! I love it. Vertical farming by itself is scary - but it's awesome to take an outdated business model and innovate on it, starting to make the money on the fly. Thanks for the video.
Jesuz wow...the drive is crazy. I want to grow at scale here in Western Washington. I am VERY nervous about the continuing and worsening Drought crisis in the Desert SW. Our stores here in Western Washington import from California and Mexico. Last year, Calfronia experience 1.5 billion dollars in damage and looses from the drought. I want to do exactly what you are doing BUT the mechanical model might be a little different. Send me a message I look at the Bell icon upper right corner of my screen. BTW I did a small test hydroponic system many years ago it worked well.
Great quote, that's sheer determination! Not only that, they say only 2 in 5 startups are profitable, 1 in 3 will just break even, and 1 in 3 will continue to lose money. The financial aspect is the most common reason startups fail. It's tough out there, but nothing is impossible!
Not ... really. Serial entrepreneurs are common. And 10 companies at a 9/10 failure rate only gives him a 65% chance that one or more of the companies will succeed.
Love how they "accidentally" became farmers. 🌞 While so many companies sprint towards that original product goal, hoping their seed or investment capital can get them there in time, often there are opportunities missed along the way. Yet they found a way to essentially sell all their testing "waste" (and serve the community local to them, which is rare these days)! Extremely clever to do while working towards that B2B, scaled goal.
It's always interesting to hear stories like this. There's always going to be survivorship bias, but it would be neat to see what percentage of companies ended up doing something outside their original vision in response to an opportunity.
I'm happy this dude is in the tech sector, and not in the military industrial complex. Imagine him using his data skills there, calculating K/D ratios and cost per body.
I agree. Just cuz he got extremely lucky after having been forced to build his chute on the way down doesn't mean it's a good idea! Now if he emphasized adaptation to sudden & potentially catastrophic changes, okay then.
This is very interesting.. I love the video. However, I would like to see his variable cost model.. as he grows he will have a lot more overhead in staff costs alone.. he says he would like to be at 1500 subs.. that's roughly 850k a year in revenue.. I would expect his staff to be at least 20-25 people for both operations.. I'm not sure how her could even begin to turn a profit with those numbers.. He is looking at roughly 800k in staff payroll alone unless I'm severely under estimating how many people he needs to run this operation. But wow, I am intrigued I would love to run something like that.
He says he profits $11/wk, not charges $11/wk. I suspect he charges about $25/wk to make the $11. If you redo the math with $25/wk as the revenue, it starts to look interesting.
I would imagine like most businesses that his "variable cost model" could easily decrease in significance, particularly related to labor which can easily be replace with automation and everything else like energy, water, fertilizer and seed would probably remain consistent with volume. The development of automation though would depend heavily on how quickly this company would want to explore scaling up, which would involve new expertise in the area of financials... This video already gives hints that this business was operating primarily as a small business by describing how its perceived market is mostly local subscriberships acquired by door stickers so this business has not yet developed the skills to do large scale farming that would compete with large farms producing maybe 100x more than current. It'd be a whole different world to be trying to market to the entire nation and maybe even do exports and might require such things as selling futures to reduce risk and "using other people's money" using sophisticated financial methods and not depending so heavily on generated revenue to pay the bills.
Once they have the routine of managing the automation and replanting of crops and equipment maintenance down, aka not evolving it anymore, I could see 2-3 guys managing the entire grow operation/location and then outsourcing delivery.
holy. I just looked up how much it is 8$ for 4 cups of arugula. 4 cups of arugula is roughly 20-30grams. The market value of 100g is around 1-2$ These guys are making a killing
@@anonymous134y Only in america where people are not taught how to shop and thieves profit on the backs of stupidity. this would NEVER work in any other country. selling by volume is a dirty tactic
i like how what they describe here as "data-driven business", is the exact same thing as "business" as understood by anyone for the last 5000 years. the numbers should also tell them that their labor costs are ridiculous and so the only way to climb out of the hole is automation. (profitable) Vertical farms do not create jobs but will no doubt create a lot of product if designed properly
Also tired of buzzwords..' data driven, scale', surprised I didn't hear 'algorithm ' in there somewhere. Bloomberg reporters and lawyers love to pepper sentences with ' algorithms '. As if anybody's impressed
they stopped delivering milk 25 years ago for a reason - reasons this guy is ignoring.... the fact that everyone shops at grocery stores and passes perfectly good lettuce while they are there. why introduce another car on the road???? just send one truck to the local grocery and you win if you become a better/cheaper brand.
"I think jumping out of the airplane and building the parachute on the way down is the best approach." calling this a bad advice is an insult to bad advice
Yeah, the best part is the prices... Is hilarious. At 10$ the pound of lettuce, they may as well buy It from the supermarket and resell lol they are not a farming company, they are a delivery company 😂
@@blutch222 holy. I just looked up how much it is 8$ for 4 cups of arugula. 4 cups of arugula is roughly 20-30grams. The market value of 100g is around 1-2$ These guys are making a killing
0:38 It's hilarious how he attributes his success by the reasoning if 9/10 companies fail he just needs to start 10 companies, when he is actually modernising the family business, farming...
Fr that’s a bad understanding of math/stats too. You can build 100 businesses and they could all fail and then the one guy who made one good business successfully would upset the numbers. There’s no 10% chance of success for any individual business, just a 10% chance across every business combined.
This guy was fooled by randomness, but he lucked out in the end. The fact that 90% of start ups fail comes from the macro scale of creating 1000 companies and 900 of them failing, that said he probably succeed because he was more passionate about this one.
This is something that I have been looking into doing for the past year. I want to start a hydroponics facility and have been looking at what it takes to make this happen. It's awesome to see a business, that I love, thrive.
@Freedom Family It really depends on the type of vegetation you are looking to grow. But the PVC route really is a simple and very effective way of growing most produce.
Amazing business model and a great entrepreneur behind it! Vertical farming definitely has its place in future food production and I am so glad to see these pioneering success stories that hopefully will serve as an entry point on the adoption curve for these technologies. With the current worldwide issues and the deterioriating climate we must begin to expand to alternative food sources and what could be better than growing efficient, local, pesticide-free food 365 days a year? Brilliant
It’s so cool to see Clayton as a friend I met playing Magic the Gathering to where he is now! He came down to Ottumwa Iowa this past Friday to draft the new Dominia set at Spuds game store. He is a super nice guy and very intelligent!
A very interesting story about how a business took control of its vertical (marketing, sales direct to customer, distribution, delivery). Those were/are skills that weren't core to the original business model of selling to local restaurants. Not many businesses would have been able to make that pivot, and was probably possible because vertical farming was probably itself not built on the core skillset of its founders... Understanding that any kind of farming isn't going to be built solely on an understanding of numbers. It's probably at least as interesting that this is a company that is doing vertical farming (an indoor incarnation) in the midst of Iowa, in the midst of eternal open farmland. I've known for awhile the positives of farming in a controlled environment, particularly with the invention of LED grow lights which massively decreased the energy cost of artificial lighting and wondered how competitive it would be with traditional open land farming under the natural sun. Apparently this company is making it happen which is a historic and monumental achievement with global potential, especially for all places which suffer from backwards farming techniques and limited natural resources like arable land, water and temperate climate. The World Development Bank should come knocking on this company's door asking what it would take to cookie cutter this business elsewhere.
No doubt one of the best video on the channel indeed , the video is really Amazing and also very motivational especially for the people who have beautiful ideals percolating inside their mind 👍👍👍
He’s not good at poker. In the poker world he’s known as a “donkey” (they mindlessly run from one end of the farm to the other, kinda like he runs from one game to another), which means that he only plays the odds and only wins by playing enough games against enough incompetent players. He would get smoked in a tourney. If he was better he could win a few high stakes games a year instead of grinding on 80 games a day every day to make the same money (which is why he quit lol, it’s not sustainable).
@@yoeyyoey8937 Very, very loose use of the word "prodigy", it's just used to hype up the story they wrote. From the stats I've seen he's not even top 50,000 in the US. It's kinda ridiculous if you'd look at it from another competitive game perspective, imagine a chess player being called a prodigy and he's basically an average adult player.
@@Crono2077 yeah tbh after watching this thing and thinking about it, it seems to me to be a carefully crafted marketing ploy. I imagine he’s really just trying to sell the business and/or proprietary technology associated with it
SkyGreen Singapore's version of a vertical farm is more efficient since it doesn't use any artificial light. Their system and use of data is the main takeaway of this video though
Actually, since the invention of the LED grow light a few years ago, the energy cost of lighting has gone 'way down. There is still the initial cost of installation and setup but consider the benefits of artificial light when the ongoing cost to run the artificial lighting is nearly zero in both maintenance electricity. You can control the intensity of the lighting and exposure how may hours in a day regardless of weather and location, all the way up to 24hrs/day (although I doubt that would be advisable since most plants are diurnal.
@@tonysu8860 i am sorry but the cost of running lights isn't zero... it's a huge burden in most countries especially right now with the energy costs going higher... The cost of sunlight is zero... and in some places is more reliable than the grid ... just in some places....
@@monad_tcp yes sure but that drives up the land consumption because you need 5x the land you're growing on to be covered by solar pannel... just to give you solar energy
Looks overthought out to me. A huge amount of warehouse space and infrastructure to set up. The cost to get a new subscriber does not include all the set up, maintenance, wage and delivery costs. It's glossing over the reality of running a business
1 pound a week for a year = 48 pound 1 year for 468$... So lettuce at 9.78$/pound... They may as well buy It from the supermarket and forget the indor farm lol what a joke! And thats the cheap offer! 😂 Yeah, genius poker player with the best bluff
Not knowing what he doesn't know is sometimes great because if it works it's fine and he will learn in the process. Sometimes people who don't know are not able to do the stuff because knowing too much and seeing all issues is overwhelming. So best of luck but it's better to be cautious. ✌✌✌
For someone who's number driven, there's surprising lack of number to back up the long term viability of the business. An online subscription based vertical farm that does local delivery with 300 subs and $100 per new subscriber cost?! That $11/wk per sub has to be gross right? What's the overhead? With the end of pandemic and normal shopping habits returning, how is this not burning money?
In my area of Texas, a head of lettuce is about a lb give or take a tad, and it is about 2$ give or take. To pay 10$ per lb of lettuce sounds downright asinine to me. In places like California a head of lettuce costing 10$ might be more acceptable but still crazily expensive. This guy needs to bring down the cost of his product A LOT over time as his business scales.
people r paying for the specialty i bet. getting some lab grown lettuce delivered to u is worth 10 bucks i gues... not really but hey, some companies are meant for customers who have $$$$
It’s cool and all, but at the end of the day you need to ask yourself “when is he successful” and in this case, it’s when he sells more lettuce. Smacking the word “data” on something and making a subscription model doesn’t make it a tech company, a very expensive lesson learned by the supporters of WeWork. He is running a vertical farm that happens to collect data, and is therefore a farmer. If, however, he pivots to using that data for automation or robotics to handle manual labor automaticity that is a different story. He cannot scale infinitely, and can only handle a tiny area for each “grow house” before the customer is too far away. The cost for each customer will be high, and is more comparable to grocery stores online, which operates at tiny profits even being supported by massive companies with years of logistical experience. That being said, I wish him all the success in life!
If the goal is to stick to lettuce, sure. If they look into something like growing generally region-locked foods in uncommon places or foods with predictably high costs on long-range transport, they could gain the edge through cost-savings.
@@DrSlobGoblin So basically Amazon for food? If long-range transport is an option, why spend triple the cost on producing it in warehouses, and not just use Italy for tomatoes, Spain for peppers and rice from China as today? Fundamentally it doesn't change the fact that he is a farm, and not a tech company on-top of a farm as he says. That is my main point, people use this strategy to overvalue their stock as a tech, once investors realize its actually just a farm with a subscription service, it will drop. WeWork all over my friend
I disagree with everything in this comment except that the ideas should be considered. Most small farmers I'm aware of don't focus so heavily on selling their product, they farm and deliver their product to middle man markets or distributors and focus only on growing. This approach to farming largely removes all the unknowns from farming by doing it in a controlled environment so once the process of actually growing the product is standardized and is free from destruction by insects, lack of rainfall or poor sunlight, the business is focusing on what makes a small business successful and in this case is primarily data driven. Most small businesses I know of are not data driven and make moment by moment decisions base on "Does this cost me more than I might profit?" which means always lurching from one near sighted decision to another to survive. Robotics and automation might be a future step, but is not essential for a data driven company. For a data driven company, everything depends on the quality of the data and in this case is produces longer term and superior decisions compared to typical small businesses. And, I do not agree about scaling. As a business scales, it becomes even more important to be data driven to understand the effects of growth and make appropriate changes. This is exactly why businesses often fail when they grow, because the small business practices that made them successful when smaller don't work when the business is larger. But, data can tell an owner what is going wrong and gives the owner the chance to make a different decision.
Are those big green bags re-used by the company or they are single used and stay at the customer's place? I think if the business is so local customers focused (after all you don't produce enough to worth to transport far), then why bother with the data aspect and selling your software? If you try to sell premium product, then you will never grow that much. Do it at scale.
holy. I just looked up how much it is 8$ for 4 cups of arugula. 4 cups of arugula is roughly 20-30grams. The market value of 100g is around 1-2$ These guys are making a killing
Could probably cut back on costs buy removing many of those lights and utilizing angular mirrors instead as diffusion of energy is wastage so long as concentrating the beams falls short of harming the plants. however 1:25 appears to be a reflective greenhouse, so I might just be unfamiliar with their setup.
I dont know much about mirrors but for optimal growth, the light has to be at a specific temperature, my guess is that mirrors change that (unless they are stupid expensive). Also, LED are relatively cheap when you are at production scale.
@@0MVR_0 I tied to grow indoor greens, plants need to rest between 6-8hours a day, so no need to light them up at night ;-). Also, I think it would be too complicated to build a system of mirrors when you can use LEDs, which cost about 15$ per linear feet. Obviously, things may change in regions with high power cost. I saw a video about a vertical farm is Asia (HK, Taïwan?) where the beds were stacked something like 20m high and they were rotating to get even sunlight.
3:30 As far as I see it simple looking websites are the best ones. Simple but easy to navigate is all I want and need. All those colours, animations, pictures... are just unwanted distractions and I hate them.
This is a very very very tough business. I have no doubt that the data has kept this alive but the profit margins in this are tight as hell and the software solution is risky af
Anyone who knows anything about agriculture, floriculture, or hydroponics knows that “General Hyrdoponics” brand is absolutely garbage even if they’re only using it to buffer PH @ 1:54 It’s still garbage in the growing world
love the idea and trying new things, but i don't think this scales too well. the input costs are high and the output produced isn't that much. avacados are expensive. maybe this would work for growing those?
Greens are a great cash crop, so long as you can turn them quickly and get them to the customer fast before going bad. Upside is the growth cycle is REALLY fast and a single plant can get 6-8 harvests. Micro-greens are an excellent side of it, use half the crop as micro and let the other half grow full size.
@@c1ph3rpunk Nope tried it, doesn't work. These companies all turn into "educational" entities eventually. Aquaponics is even worse, electricity costs will have you running at a loss first three years regardless of scale. One power outage will kill your crop.
Avocados wouldn't work well with hydroponics. The greens are a cash cow. While a single avocado is expensive, you churn out way more greens in the same time. The only thing is they use growlights rather than sunlight and supplementing with growlights.
It would have been interesting to find out something about the nutritional value of this type of farming. Compared to traditional farming methods I can clearly see the benefit of farming without pesticides however there is competition out there so nutritional values would be key for me..thanks for sharing....
Nutritional value would not be any different than any other farming method. Whether plants are grown indoors or outdoors, they need fertilizer and the grower can choose what and how fertilizing is done. And, this crop is lettuce which hardly contains any nutritional content other than fiber/roughage and is almost completely H20. As for lack of pesticides, that may be obvious but I'm curious what they're doing for pollination, or just ignoring that altogether (and buying new seed for every crop).
Replacing the produce aisle is systemically inefficient and not scalable. The reason why the produce aisle works is that it is a centralized location for multiple products. You can't have separate lines of subscription and delivery for each and every single one of those products (one for lettuce, one for apples, one for oranges, one for pears, one for peaches, one for avocados, etc, etc). That ends up overloading both infrastructure as well as the limited time that people have to take delivery of goods. It also produces way more waste.
Reasonable question. They have a number of different vegetables now, including tomatoes and sprouts. There's probably a balance between wanting the economies of scale and simplicity of not having too many products with the opportunity to be able to provide more products to your customers. Understanding your customer and looking at the numbers are undoubtedly important here.
If that's their vision and I hate to say it but big box stores will eventually buy you out. Because there's no telling how much revenue they make off their produce isle
How successful is your vertical garden? I live in the artic and it's a real challenge for our local farmers. We can't grow enough feed and end up shipping feed for livestock. I'm brain storming right now but Instead of lettuce you grew pasture. Pasture for chickens. One square meter or 36 square inches for one chicken during the 8 month winter. What would it take?
There are other YT videos on vertical farming, but mostly about growing sprouts which can be reharvested every few days. Apparently that has proven itself for a long time now as competitive and potentially profitable.
This story doesn't focus at all on the fact that he made money in a system that intentionally creates losers, and hires experts to professionally abuse mental weakness and illness to ensure they maintain a steady supply of losers. You won the dystopia-games! Well done! Now give other winners and aspiring gamblers advice while the losers kill themselves either by gun or alcoholism or just fade away into depression. What a great story.
So many buzz words for a vertical hydroponic farm... A crop of lettuce sells for 25 cent, if you push 1000 crops a week and a crop of lettuce develops from see to crop in four weeks...everyone can do this "data driven" math.
I love the idea of indoor farming, but.... $11/wk for a subscription? Just for lettuce?? I get a bag of lettuce at the local store for like $0.89. And, I walk there. Am I just not hipster enough to understand this?
What a fascinating video--especially the part about the efficacy of door-stickers. I have a stupid question--what is a door-sticker? Please describe what they look like, and how they work. Thanks!
Good for you I tried starting 3 business already, they all failed I’m 32.. but I caught the bug for sure, because I’m already on to the next one lol 🤞🏼
This is not a vertical farm. It's a horizontal farm stacked vertically. There's a distinct difference. Nevertheless, indoor farming is the future -- no seasons, no pesticides and 90% less water. Anything to fight the horror of "the average head of lettuce travels over 1,000 miles farm to table." Try growing strawberries as well as lettuce.
I know its ridiculous ...imagine the carbon foot print for a head of lettuce when Earth is getting roasted with 36 billion tons of co2 being released into the atmphere!!
4:03 as a customer, I like to look how ugly a website is. That tells me where the focus is. I just hate beautiful sites with horrible backends, which is the entire business behind. That's what matter, who cares about beautiful websites... Of course things change and it depends on the size of the business. A bigger business can probably afford stupid frontends.
teach this to agribiz in USA southwest.. lessen the appalling irrigation losses threatening way of life depending on the Colorado and some other waterways
I thought this guy was a genius till he said something about he likes to jump out of plane and build the parachute on the way down it's the best way.. no no the best way is to put a parachute on get in the plane get up there then jump out with a working parachute...
Im down. Its dry af out here in NM. We could use a facility nearby! Im not working, hook me up, ill operate a unit here and stay ten feet off the ground!
What do you think of this business model?
Wow! I love it. Vertical farming by itself is scary - but it's awesome to take an outdated business model and innovate on it, starting to make the money on the fly. Thanks for the video.
great! Vertical farming is the future especially in my country Singapore as our land is extremely scarce .
Ground breaking! Love the guy!
reliable in the long term
Jesuz wow...the drive is crazy. I want to grow at scale here in Western Washington. I am VERY nervous about the continuing and worsening Drought crisis in the Desert SW. Our stores here in Western Washington import from California and Mexico. Last year, Calfronia experience 1.5 billion dollars in damage and looses from the drought. I want to do exactly what you are doing BUT the mechanical model might be a little different. Send me a message I look at the Bell icon upper right corner of my screen. BTW I did a small test hydroponic system many years ago it worked well.
“They say only one out of ten companies make it, so I thought ‘let’s just make ten companies.’” This guy is on the next level
Great quote, that's sheer determination! Not only that, they say only 2 in 5 startups are profitable, 1 in 3 will just break even, and 1 in 3 will continue to lose money. The financial aspect is the most common reason startups fail. It's tough out there, but nothing is impossible!
@@StartupSavantTRUiC brutal 😵
Sigma Grindset.
@@StartupSavantTRUiC That is more than 1 metaphorical company (1/3+1/3+2/5=1.06 it should equal 1)
Not ... really. Serial entrepreneurs are common. And 10 companies at a 9/10 failure rate only gives him a 65% chance that one or more of the companies will succeed.
Love how they "accidentally" became farmers. 🌞 While so many companies sprint towards that original product goal, hoping their seed or investment capital can get them there in time, often there are opportunities missed along the way. Yet they found a way to essentially sell all their testing "waste" (and serve the community local to them, which is rare these days)! Extremely clever to do while working towards that B2B, scaled goal.
No pun intended, but he literally went back to his roots.
Badum tish.
It's always interesting to hear stories like this. There's always going to be survivorship bias, but it would be neat to see what percentage of companies ended up doing something outside their original vision in response to an opportunity.
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
I am so excited and kinda proud of this entrepreneur. He's farming with a 2022 model! Massive respect.
I'm happy this dude is in the tech sector, and not in the military industrial complex. Imagine him using his data skills there, calculating K/D ratios and cost per body.
They’ve had that since Vietnam.
"I think jumping out of the airplane and building the parachute on the way down is the best approach."
I've never heard such bad advice. Just insane.
It works if you like scamming investors out of their money and underdeliver if not totally fail 9 out of 10 times.
I agree. Just cuz he got extremely lucky after having been forced to build his chute on the way down doesn't mean it's a good idea! Now if he emphasized adaptation to sudden & potentially catastrophic changes, okay then.
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
@@727Phoenix Lucky? With those prices they may as well buy lettuce and resell lol what they are is a marketing company
it works because the best way to do something is to start doing something, better then bitching around being scared and ovethinking
This is very interesting.. I love the video. However, I would like to see his variable cost model.. as he grows he will have a lot more overhead in staff costs alone.. he says he would like to be at 1500 subs.. that's roughly 850k a year in revenue.. I would expect his staff to be at least 20-25 people for both operations.. I'm not sure how her could even begin to turn a profit with those numbers.. He is looking at roughly 800k in staff payroll alone unless I'm severely under estimating how many people he needs to run this operation. But wow, I am intrigued I would love to run something like that.
Outsourcing
He says he profits $11/wk, not charges $11/wk. I suspect he charges about $25/wk to make the $11. If you redo the math with $25/wk as the revenue, it starts to look interesting.
I would imagine like most businesses that his "variable cost model" could easily decrease in significance, particularly related to labor which can easily be replace with automation and everything else like energy, water, fertilizer and seed would probably remain consistent with volume. The development of automation though would depend heavily on how quickly this company would want to explore scaling up, which would involve new expertise in the area of financials... This video already gives hints that this business was operating primarily as a small business by describing how its perceived market is mostly local subscriberships acquired by door stickers so this business has not yet developed the skills to do large scale farming that would compete with large farms producing maybe 100x more than current. It'd be a whole different world to be trying to market to the entire nation and maybe even do exports and might require such things as selling futures to reduce risk and "using other people's money" using sophisticated financial methods and not depending so heavily on generated revenue to pay the bills.
Once they have the routine of managing the automation and replanting of crops and equipment maintenance down, aka not evolving it anymore, I could see 2-3 guys managing the entire grow operation/location and then outsourcing delivery.
This is just brilliant...thanks for compiling this segment, it makes a lot of sense, and could not have come at a better time
$468 for a year (including a discount), meaning $9 for a head of lettuce? I mean you'd have to be the guy's mother to fall for it out of pity, right?
holy. I just looked up how much it is
8$ for 4 cups of arugula. 4 cups of arugula is roughly 20-30grams. The market value of 100g is around 1-2$
These guys are making a killing
@@anonymous134y Only in america where people are not taught how to shop and thieves profit on the backs of stupidity. this would NEVER work in any other country. selling by volume is a dirty tactic
that's how retarded this idea is.
@@anonymous134y I wonder if it would be cheaper if he just delivered to the local super market instead of the subscription model.
Small businesses= overpriced items
Some people adapt & some people moan about bad scenarios, this guy is an elite adaptor. Super inspiring
1 out of 3 relationships fail.
Hence I'm in relationship with 3 girls simultaneously .
i like how what they describe here as "data-driven business", is the exact same thing as "business" as understood by anyone for the last 5000 years. the numbers should also tell them that their labor costs are ridiculous and so the only way to climb out of the hole is automation. (profitable) Vertical farms do not create jobs but will no doubt create a lot of product if designed properly
It was only the last 17 years of insanity of the cheap money and unicorns bleeding money with 0 cashflow. It had to end eventually.
And if the product is food, then that should drive down the cost of one of the main reasons people have jobs!
Also tired of buzzwords..' data driven, scale', surprised I didn't hear 'algorithm ' in there somewhere. Bloomberg reporters and lawyers love to pepper sentences with ' algorithms '. As if anybody's impressed
@@chrisr326 heres an example of algorithm :
1+2 = 3
they stopped delivering milk 25 years ago for a reason - reasons this guy is ignoring.... the fact that everyone shops at grocery stores and passes perfectly good lettuce while they are there. why introduce another car on the road???? just send one truck to the local grocery and you win if you become a better/cheaper brand.
"I think jumping out of the airplane and building the parachute on the way down is the best approach." calling this a bad advice is an insult to bad advice
Ah yes, the start-up tech guy revolutionizing the world of indoor lettuce farming. PIVOT!
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
Yeah, the best part is the prices... Is hilarious. At 10$ the pound of lettuce, they may as well buy It from the supermarket and resell lol they are not a farming company, they are a delivery company 😂
Cant think of something more environmentally unfriendly than driving small quantities of lettuce to door steps.
The current model is importing lettuce from a different country and having people drive to grab the lettuce at a supermarket and drive back home.
@@blutch222 holy. I just looked up how much it is
8$ for 4 cups of arugula. 4 cups of arugula is roughly 20-30grams. The market value of 100g is around 1-2$
These guys are making a killing
@@blutch222 Bulk deliveries tend to have a lower CO2 foot print per KG produce than microdeliveries.
0:38 It's hilarious how he attributes his success by the reasoning if 9/10 companies fail he just needs to start 10 companies, when he is actually modernising the family business, farming...
Fr that’s a bad understanding of math/stats too. You can build 100 businesses and they could all fail and then the one guy who made one good business successfully would upset the numbers. There’s no 10% chance of success for any individual business, just a 10% chance across every business combined.
This guy was fooled by randomness, but he lucked out in the end. The fact that 90% of start ups fail comes from the macro scale of creating 1000 companies and 900 of them failing, that said he probably succeed because he was more passionate about this one.
Pop quiz: if 9/10 businesses fail, how many businesses would you expect to start to have a 50% chance of success?
@@freethink 50
@@freethink Idk, 5?
This is something that I have been looking into doing for the past year. I want to start a hydroponics facility and have been looking at what it takes to make this happen. It's awesome to see a business, that I love, thrive.
Same here doing microgreens now looking at a wall of hydroponic vertical towers this fall double sided for double the production on the same space
@Freedom Family It really depends on the type of vegetation you are looking to grow. But the PVC route really is a simple and very effective way of growing most produce.
Amazing business model and a great entrepreneur behind it! Vertical farming definitely has its place in future food production and I am so glad to see these pioneering success stories that hopefully will serve as an entry point on the adoption curve for these technologies. With the current worldwide issues and the deterioriating climate we must begin to expand to alternative food sources and what could be better than growing efficient, local, pesticide-free food 365 days a year? Brilliant
where did you get that opinion downloaded from?
It’s so cool to see Clayton as a friend I met playing Magic the Gathering to where he is now! He came down to Ottumwa Iowa this past Friday to draft the new Dominia set at Spuds game store. He is a super nice guy and very intelligent!
A very interesting story about how a business took control of its vertical (marketing, sales direct to customer, distribution, delivery). Those were/are skills that weren't core to the original business model of selling to local restaurants. Not many businesses would have been able to make that pivot, and was probably possible because vertical farming was probably itself not built on the core skillset of its founders... Understanding that any kind of farming isn't going to be built solely on an understanding of numbers.
It's probably at least as interesting that this is a company that is doing vertical farming (an indoor incarnation) in the midst of Iowa, in the midst of eternal open farmland. I've known for awhile the positives of farming in a controlled environment, particularly with the invention of LED grow lights which massively decreased the energy cost of artificial lighting and wondered how competitive it would be with traditional open land farming under the natural sun. Apparently this company is making it happen which is a historic and monumental achievement with global potential, especially for all places which suffer from backwards farming techniques and limited natural resources like arable land, water and temperate climate. The World Development Bank should come knocking on this company's door asking what it would take to cookie cutter this business elsewhere.
No doubt one of the best video on the channel indeed , the video is really Amazing and also very motivational especially for the people who have beautiful ideals percolating inside their mind 👍👍👍
So glad you liked it, thanks for watching!
What's the nutrient density of this lettuce?
If it's growing fast but has low nutrient benefit then is it really a good thing to be promoting?
Lettuce is over 90% H2O which has zero nutrients.
Lettuce isnt a nutrient dense plant to begin with. Fine for a salad i guess but its more or less just decoration compared to other vegetables.
Poker "prodigy" would still be playing poker if he was really that good.
He’s not good at poker. In the poker world he’s known as a “donkey” (they mindlessly run from one end of the farm to the other, kinda like he runs from one game to another), which means that he only plays the odds and only wins by playing enough games against enough incompetent players. He would get smoked in a tourney. If he was better he could win a few high stakes games a year instead of grinding on 80 games a day every day to make the same money (which is why he quit lol, it’s not sustainable).
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
@@yoeyyoey8937 Very, very loose use of the word "prodigy", it's just used to hype up the story they wrote. From the stats I've seen he's not even top 50,000 in the US. It's kinda ridiculous if you'd look at it from another competitive game perspective, imagine a chess player being called a prodigy and he's basically an average adult player.
@@Crono2077 yeah tbh after watching this thing and thinking about it, it seems to me to be a carefully crafted marketing ploy. I imagine he’s really just trying to sell the business and/or proprietary technology associated with it
Jumping and building a parachute on the way down was Luna's plan :')
What is this from lol?
@@danielreed4050 cryptocurrency Luna
Is this like a rebranded vice?
Salad grow everywhere can you grow potatoes?
SkyGreen Singapore's version of a vertical farm is more efficient since it doesn't use any artificial light.
Their system and use of data is the main takeaway of this video though
that looks better
It depends on where they are installed. Some places on the arctic circle is just too dark to grow certain kinds of food.
Actually, since the invention of the LED grow light a few years ago, the energy cost of lighting has gone 'way down. There is still the initial cost of installation and setup but consider the benefits of artificial light when the ongoing cost to run the artificial lighting is nearly zero in both maintenance electricity. You can control the intensity of the lighting and exposure how may hours in a day regardless of weather and location, all the way up to 24hrs/day (although I doubt that would be advisable since most plants are diurnal.
@@tonysu8860 i am sorry but the cost of running lights isn't zero... it's a huge burden in most countries especially right now with the energy costs going higher...
The cost of sunlight is zero... and in some places is more reliable than the grid ... just in some places....
@@monad_tcp yes sure but that drives up the land consumption because you need 5x the land you're growing on to be covered by solar pannel... just to give you solar energy
Looks overthought out to me. A huge amount of warehouse space and infrastructure to set up. The cost to get a new subscriber does not include all the set up, maintenance, wage and delivery costs. It's glossing over the reality of running a business
1 pound a week for a year = 48 pound
1 year for 468$... So lettuce at 9.78$/pound... They may as well buy It from the supermarket and forget the indor farm lol what a joke! And thats the cheap offer! 😂 Yeah, genius poker player with the best bluff
"My mind naturally thinks in numbers" plays a card game that doesnt involve using math whatsoever. Lol oh rich kids
$8 for a head of lettuce doesn't really strike me as "innovative"
This guy is a genius. The guys who work for him all look really cool. But the lettuce BAGS?! They are awesome!
so they also failed at selling hydroponics
Not knowing what he doesn't know is sometimes great because if it works it's fine and he will learn in the process. Sometimes people who don't know are not able to do the stuff because knowing too much and seeing all issues is overwhelming. So best of luck but it's better to be cautious. ✌✌✌
For someone who's number driven, there's surprising lack of number to back up the long term viability of the business. An online subscription based vertical farm that does local delivery with 300 subs and $100 per new subscriber cost?! That $11/wk per sub has to be gross right? What's the overhead? With the end of pandemic and normal shopping habits returning, how is this not burning money?
according to his site in the video, they charged like $10 per pound of lettuce, that's crazy! is that price normal in the U.S.??!!!
No that's way more than typical supermarket cost. That might also be for 2+ pounds of lettuce.
In my area of Texas, a head of lettuce is about a lb give or take a tad, and it is about 2$ give or take.
To pay 10$ per lb of lettuce sounds downright asinine to me.
In places like California a head of lettuce costing 10$ might be more acceptable but still crazily expensive.
This guy needs to bring down the cost of his product A LOT over time as his business scales.
people r paying for the specialty i bet. getting some lab grown lettuce delivered to u is worth 10 bucks i gues... not really but hey, some companies are meant for customers who have $$$$
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
Now make the deliveries with a cheap electric CV that get's recharged via solar panels on your plant roof and you've reached it
Combine it with a heat pump then you've got zero utility bills for the grow-lights AND climate control
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
Nutra Gardens started the same thing 10 years ago........... now we also grow microgreens
Awesome! I hope they keep growing and others buy in to the model.
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
It’s cool and all, but at the end of the day you need to ask yourself “when is he successful” and in this case, it’s when he sells more lettuce. Smacking the word “data” on something and making a subscription model doesn’t make it a tech company, a very expensive lesson learned by the supporters of WeWork.
He is running a vertical farm that happens to collect data, and is therefore a farmer. If, however, he pivots to using that data for automation or robotics to handle manual labor automaticity that is a different story.
He cannot scale infinitely, and can only handle a tiny area for each “grow house” before the customer is too far away. The cost for each customer will be high, and is more comparable to grocery stores online, which operates at tiny profits even being supported by massive companies with years of logistical experience.
That being said, I wish him all the success in life!
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
If the goal is to stick to lettuce, sure. If they look into something like growing generally region-locked foods in uncommon places or foods with predictably high costs on long-range transport, they could gain the edge through cost-savings.
@@DrSlobGoblin So basically Amazon for food? If long-range transport is an option, why spend triple the cost on producing it in warehouses, and not just use Italy for tomatoes, Spain for peppers and rice from China as today? Fundamentally it doesn't change the fact that he is a farm, and not a tech company on-top of a farm as he says. That is my main point, people use this strategy to overvalue their stock as a tech, once investors realize its actually just a farm with a subscription service, it will drop. WeWork all over my friend
I disagree with everything in this comment except that the ideas should be considered.
Most small farmers I'm aware of don't focus so heavily on selling their product, they farm and deliver their product to middle man markets or distributors and focus only on growing. This approach to farming largely removes all the unknowns from farming by doing it in a controlled environment so once the process of actually growing the product is standardized and is free from destruction by insects, lack of rainfall or poor sunlight, the business is focusing on what makes a small business successful and in this case is primarily data driven. Most small businesses I know of are not data driven and make moment by moment decisions base on "Does this cost me more than I might profit?" which means always lurching from one near sighted decision to another to survive.
Robotics and automation might be a future step, but is not essential for a data driven company. For a data driven company, everything depends on the quality of the data and in this case is produces longer term and superior decisions compared to typical small businesses. And, I do not agree about scaling. As a business scales, it becomes even more important to be data driven to understand the effects of growth and make appropriate changes. This is exactly why businesses often fail when they grow, because the small business practices that made them successful when smaller don't work when the business is larger. But, data can tell an owner what is going wrong and gives the owner the chance to make a different decision.
All "new entrepreneurs" say the exact same cookie cutter things 😑
This is really cool how he got to this point at this accident
What an amazing story! Just discovered this channel.. GREAT CONTENT and keep up the great work!
Are those big green bags re-used by the company or they are single used and stay at the customer's place? I think if the business is so local customers focused (after all you don't produce enough to worth to transport far), then why bother with the data aspect and selling your software? If you try to sell premium product, then you will never grow that much. Do it at scale.
That sounds like milk man model.
Good question. They pick up the bag the next week and sanitize it for re-use. www.nebullam.com/
Who said you cannot scale a premium product?
@@freethink awesome!!!!! Good for you👍🌿
holy. I just looked up how much it is
8$ for 4 cups of arugula. 4 cups of arugula is roughly 20-30grams. The market value of 100g is around 1-2$
These guys are making a killing
Could probably cut back on costs buy removing many of those lights
and utilizing angular mirrors instead as diffusion of energy is wastage
so long as concentrating the beams falls short of harming the plants.
however 1:25 appears to be a reflective greenhouse, so I might just be unfamiliar with their setup.
I dont know much about mirrors but for optimal growth, the light has to be at a specific temperature, my guess is that mirrors change that (unless they are stupid expensive). Also, LED are relatively cheap when you are at production scale.
@@AlainPilon You mean a specific wavelength. Big brain: capture roof sunlight through a system of mirrors and use diodes exclusively during the night.
@@0MVR_0 I tied to grow indoor greens, plants need to rest between 6-8hours a day, so no need to light them up at night ;-). Also, I think it would be too complicated to build a system of mirrors when you can use LEDs, which cost about 15$ per linear feet. Obviously, things may change in regions with high power cost. I saw a video about a vertical farm is Asia (HK, Taïwan?) where the beds were stacked something like 20m high and they were rotating to get even sunlight.
He could litterly be helping the world of the future of I door farming for food!
Why?
By growing the lowest nutrient density vegetable/salad!
3:30 As far as I see it simple looking websites are the best ones. Simple but easy to navigate is all I want and need. All those colours, animations, pictures... are just unwanted distractions and I hate them.
This is a very very very tough business. I have no doubt that the data has kept this alive but the profit margins in this are tight as hell and the software solution is risky af
This was great! Very interesting episode!
Glad you liked it, thanks for watching!
This guy is lucky. Won't go far in this business.
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
That´s plain mean. You´re an awful person.
Anyone who knows anything about agriculture, floriculture, or hydroponics knows that “General Hyrdoponics” brand is absolutely garbage even if they’re only using it to buffer PH @ 1:54
It’s still garbage in the growing world
love the idea and trying new things, but i don't think this scales too well. the input costs are high and the output produced isn't that much. avacados are expensive. maybe this would work for growing those?
Greens are a great cash crop, so long as you can turn them quickly and get them to the customer fast before going bad. Upside is the growth cycle is REALLY fast and a single plant can get 6-8 harvests.
Micro-greens are an excellent side of it, use half the crop as micro and let the other half grow full size.
@@c1ph3rpunk Nope tried it, doesn't work. These companies all turn into "educational" entities eventually.
Aquaponics is even worse, electricity costs will have you running at a loss first three years regardless of scale.
One power outage will kill your crop.
Avocados wouldn't work well with hydroponics. The greens are a cash cow. While a single avocado is expensive, you churn out way more greens in the same time.
The only thing is they use growlights rather than sunlight and supplementing with growlights.
Avocado's are expensive for a reason. From seed they take 5 to 10 years to produce fruit, and they're also like whole trees so take a lot of space.
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
He is a problem solver and we need more like him. This is the way.
@@tomg53142 Watch the video.
It would have been interesting to find out something about the nutritional value of this type of farming. Compared to traditional farming methods I can clearly see the benefit of farming without pesticides however there is competition out there so nutritional values would be key for me..thanks for sharing....
Nutritional value would not be any different than any other farming method. Whether plants are grown indoors or outdoors, they need fertilizer and the grower can choose what and how fertilizing is done. And, this crop is lettuce which hardly contains any nutritional content other than fiber/roughage and is almost completely H20.
As for lack of pesticides, that may be obvious but I'm curious what they're doing for pollination, or just ignoring that altogether (and buying new seed for every crop).
@@tonysu8860 So we need to know exactly what is going into the plants. That's called transparency.
Replacing the produce aisle is systemically inefficient and not scalable. The reason why the produce aisle works is that it is a centralized location for multiple products. You can't have separate lines of subscription and delivery for each and every single one of those products (one for lettuce, one for apples, one for oranges, one for pears, one for peaches, one for avocados, etc, etc). That ends up overloading both infrastructure as well as the limited time that people have to take delivery of goods. It also produces way more waste.
That's pretty cool. What if instead of focusing on ONLY GROWTH they considered growing more variety??🤷🏾
Reasonable question. They have a number of different vegetables now, including tomatoes and sprouts. There's probably a balance between wanting the economies of scale and simplicity of not having too many products with the opportunity to be able to provide more products to your customers. Understanding your customer and looking at the numbers are undoubtedly important here.
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
What exactly is *new* about it?
The first website looks like a GTA internet shop XDD
Building a business around lettuce. Who would have ever thought.
Gas prices are really going to hit him hard with all those deliveries.
If that's their vision and I hate to say it but big box stores will eventually buy you out. Because there's no telling how much revenue they make off their produce isle
not much their profit margins are very thin
Literally fresh produce has the lowest margins because it spoils and it spoils fast.
...guy is from landed gentry and we're acting like this was hard for him.
Whats that?
Ceo : my mind is numbers
Americans : i'll pay anything for a head of your lettuce
How successful is your vertical garden?
I live in the artic and it's a real challenge for our local farmers. We can't grow enough feed and end up shipping feed for livestock.
I'm brain storming right now but
Instead of lettuce you grew pasture.
Pasture for chickens.
One square meter or 36 square inches for one chicken during the 8 month winter. What would it take?
There are other YT videos on vertical farming, but mostly about growing sprouts which can be reharvested every few days.
Apparently that has proven itself for a long time now as competitive and potentially profitable.
This story doesn't focus at all on the fact that he made money in a system that intentionally creates losers, and hires experts to professionally abuse mental weakness and illness to ensure they maintain a steady supply of losers. You won the dystopia-games! Well done!
Now give other winners and aspiring gamblers advice while the losers kill themselves either by gun or alcoholism or just fade away into depression. What a great story.
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
great channel cant believe you guys arent over 1mil yet
Wait who tf pays $11 per week for lettuce? and as a subscription model too, lol wut?
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
So many buzz words for a vertical hydroponic farm...
A crop of lettuce sells for 25 cent, if you push 1000 crops a week and a crop of lettuce develops from see to crop in four weeks...everyone can do this "data driven" math.
I don´t think they refer to something that simple when talk about data-driven calculations, mate...
@@FBPrepping yes, they are using buzz words to make their lettuce farm seem more appealing.
PVC piping on casters.
Wow you thought of the wheel..
I love the idea of indoor farming, but....
$11/wk for a subscription? Just for lettuce??
I get a bag of lettuce at the local store for like $0.89. And, I walk there.
Am I just not hipster enough to understand this?
thast delivery bussiness. Bsically ppl buy service of delivery.
Tech bro bs
I like this guy.. my family kept telling me 1 out of businesses 3 fail!!! So I started 3 businesses!
They hide this from you so they can keep you running on the hamster wheel 👉 The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥
Huh? Wouldn't you be guaranteed to fail? My man I think you got it twisted
The fly in the ointment would be sudden increases in the cost of power.
Looks like a free PR for this startup, yet another unicorn in the making because it has "data" in its business.
What a fascinating video--especially the part about the efficacy of door-stickers. I have a stupid question--what is a door-sticker? Please describe what they look like, and how they work. Thanks!
Google will show you
This dude is just clearly a rich boy, like this is ridiculous, he obviously had tons of money to start with.
Good for you
I tried starting 3 business already, they all failed
I’m 32..
but I caught the bug for sure, because I’m already on to the next one lol 🤞🏼
And the lessons learned from those businesses give you a higher chance of success.
Hey bro, we all have failures, it's part of the game. As long as you are learning from those mistakes, you are making progress.
There is no place for me in the future.
I dont think like this.
This is not a vertical farm. It's a horizontal farm stacked vertically. There's a distinct difference. Nevertheless, indoor farming is the future -- no seasons, no pesticides and 90% less water. Anything to fight the horror of "the average head of lettuce travels over 1,000 miles farm to table." Try growing strawberries as well as lettuce.
I know its ridiculous ...imagine the carbon foot print for a head of lettuce when Earth is getting roasted with 36 billion tons of co2 being released into the atmphere!!
@@LK-pc4sq The closer we get to a remedy, the more ridiculous it looks.
I don't like food that has never seen the sun
4:03 as a customer, I like to look how ugly a website is. That tells me where the focus is. I just hate beautiful sites with horrible backends, which is the entire business behind. That's what matter, who cares about beautiful websites...
Of course things change and it depends on the size of the business. A bigger business can probably afford stupid frontends.
I wonder this business model is sustainable. At some point in the future, lettuce can be grown at home too.
Why so much plastic? Its 2022... and what kind of fertilizer do they use?
Anyone have any good suggestions on resources for learning about data? Books, videos, etc.?
What is a door sticker form of marketing? Is that a Car Door Magnet or a post card or door hanger? Or something else?
understanding numbers was a thing before poker.. (and writing :O ) :P
teach this to agribiz in USA southwest.. lessen the appalling irrigation losses threatening way of life depending on the Colorado and some other waterways
That poker playing, only using bots...
Oh this channel is about the best scam artist tech entrepreneur to get hype about.
9 out of 10 business will fail, so create 10 businesses.
I thought this guy was a genius till he said something about he likes to jump out of plane and build the parachute on the way down it's the best way.. no no the best way is to put a parachute on get in the plane get up there then jump out with a working parachute...
The Video Design is i n c r e d i b l e
How do you make 11/week/customer on lettuce?
Awesome video!!! I just moved to Iowa and I want to help bring their services to my city!
Name of the video made me think this is an anime.
It's not crazy that door stickers work better than online, the internet is associated with low value and free stuff. Online isn't real.
Im down. Its dry af out here in NM. We could use a facility nearby! Im not working, hook me up, ill operate a unit here and stay ten feet off the ground!
The word can’t sustain itself on effing lettuce.
Never knew selling lettuce can get you into road to millionaire. Eat Lettuce, where are my tomatoes and onions at ?
AND THEY SAY POOR FARMERS GOT NO MONEY