This is a list of all the Ideas I’ve tried to build during the last decade, the problem I was trying to solve and the reason for failure:
Kangu.co – 2014
Problem: Consumers don’t know what to put on their shopping list to buy delicious and nutritious food. This was a try to mix together shopping lists with content generation.
Why it failed? At that point in time, content creation was hard to scale and I was not able to build a business model around it. It was a short-lived experiment
PlazaVerde – 2015
Problem: Consumers want direct access to fresh produce in Bogota. We built team to work on all the logistics to help high-value crops farmers sell direct to consumers.
Why it failed? The team disintegrated 8 months into development. I moved to the Bay Area. It was very hard to remote control operations.
Croppia – 2019
Problem: I switched the problem statement for Croppia, 1 too many times. However, the last one I give a try was to help farmers sell Subscriptions to their farm operations. My thought was that farmers can have better cash-flow and customers could enjoy of a deeper connection to their food sources. It was a mixture of Patreon/BlueBox for small farmers.
Why it failed? Distribution. Not enough attention.
PEAK – 2020
Problem: Hi-End Consumers want to call “dibs” on the best products on the market. The best strawberries, the best plums, the best small-batch artisanal cheese. PEAK was a membership-based club that would allow customers to bid for a spot to get the best of the best of fresh produce.
Why it failed? I was not too keen into doing market analysis and discovery to go and contact all food producers and negotiate terms to get high-quality produce exclusivity.
TastyID – 2020
Problem: Consumers want to find food that matches their personal food preferences and restrictions. This was a Google Chrome extension that would inspect Yelp and Restaurant Menu pages and will tell you which menu items matched or how you could modify them to make them fit your diet.
Why it failed? Fear of competition. I reached out to a guy in Reddit that had a very similar idea. He went on an raised a bunch of money and I was just afraid to compete.
REKOLIST – 2020
Problem: REKO Farmers did not have an online community besides facebook groups. This was a way to build community and also help with discoverability of REKO Farms.
Why it failed? Couldn’t convert a single farmer to use it.
tracepad – 2022
Problem: Small and Medium farmers will need to adopt traceability practices to comply with FMSA204 ruling. There are no easy tools to do it.
Why it failed? My attention about the problem faded before I could build something worth sharing. I only had a prototype.
OrderClipboard.com – 2023
Problem: Digital Channel selling is easy because customers fill in forms and follow tables to generate new orders. However, companies like farms, food distributors and other B2B food-related businesses rely on messages (SMS, Email, Social Media) to take orders from customers. This is my latest attempt to build at the top of the funnel and help Farmers and Food-related businesses streamline their operations by leveraging AI to generate orders and harvesting sheets.
Why it failed? I hasn’t! I am actively working with farmers to gather feedback and help build more around this niche.
I still have a bunch of other unreleased projects like Whendell or FreshList, which at some point would try out.
I love food, the food system and all people involved on it. If you want to talk more about it you can find me on X (aka Twitter)