Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Patrick Henry, Chief Executive Officer at GroGuru:
Q: Can you please introduce yourself?
A: I’m Patrick Henry, the CEO of GroGuru. I’m a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits including an IPO that led to a $1 billion valuation on NASDAQ.
GroGuru is all about strategic water management for commercial farmers. We help farmers make more money by increasing crop yield and more efficiently using water, and other scarce resources, in a more sustainable way.
Q: How does it work?
A: We provide hardware-enabled software as a service (SaaS), where we collect data at the root zone of the crop, pass that up to the Cloud, apply machine learning and artificial intelligence, and other information from our partners like weather forecasts and crop models and how much irrigation water is provided, and then we provide insights to farmers about when and how much to optimally irrigate their crops.
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Q: What is your product-market fit and Value Proposition Validation?
A: Typical end customer/farmer results of our solution (validated by testimonials and case studies): 10 to 20 percent increase in crop yield, and a 10 to 20 percent savings on input costs. So, what this means to farmers is that they get a less than one season payback period for the technology that we deploy, and they also get a 6 to 8X, six to eight times, Return on Investment (ROI) every single year.
Survived COVID: In 2020, our revenues were relatively flat, but we think the market was down 25 to 30 percent, so we did gain market share in a down market. A number of our competitors were sold or went out of business. Others are struggling.
Resumption of Growth: In 2021, we resumed our revenue growth, and grew revenue by over 30 percent. But more importantly, we doubled our subscriber base because we launched a SaaS-only, or software as a service only product, in addition to our traditional offering.
Market/Sales/Deployment Traction: We have over 1,000 software as a service subscribers now, which is 100,000 acres under management. Our existing customers represent 1 million deployable acres, and our existing dealer footprint is over 5 million deployable acres!
Q: Can you tell us something about your Team?
A: We have a team with the right business, technical and market domain expertise to win in this market. We have PhDs and experts in crop science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, soil sensors, and wireless technology that’s really unprecedented in this industry. We have the right contacts with farmers, strategic partners and ecosystem partners in the agri-business market.
Sold SaaS Metrics: In terms of performance, our lifetime value, or LTV, over customer acquisition cost, or CAC, is an unprecedented 8X, which is really super high in the software as a service industry.
Recommended: Q: What is your forecast?
A: We are well positioned for growth again in 2022. We are expecting to more than double our subscriber again this year as we’ve continued to expand our strategic partnerships with weather forecasts, with the as-applied data from irrigation systems, and whole farm management systems.
