YourFarm

Woman in White Dress Shirt and Blue Denim Jeans Standing Beside Black and White Cow on on on on on

YourFarm

At your fingertips

Problem Definition

Desire to raise animals, encountered by the lack of available space and resources

Difficulty finding healthy food

Lack of information regarding the provenience of our food

Our idea started from the concerns regarding the provenience and quality of the food products of animal origin in Romania. As we gathered information from research papers concerning the people of Romania, we observed that "nine out of ten Romanians have taken action in the last 12 months to have a healthier lifestyle" [1]. Not only that, but "more than eight in ten Romanians (83%) associate a healthy lifestyle with food" [1]. In view of food, paper [2] show that 53% of Romanians are eco-supporters, 11% eco-promoters whilst the others are indifferent towards this type of alimentation.

Our Solution

A virtual farm with fully auditable and transparent processes

Buy, manage and observe domestic animals and their products

The ability to traceback how end products were obtained

YourFarm is an online market where we enable users to buy farm animals that we take care of on the basis of a monthly subscription. The users will receive all the products directly from their animals. Also because most animals give more products than the user might need it enables the user to sell the extra products directly to us.

Customer Segment

Average

health-concerned consumers

Animal lovers

Butcher Shops & Markets

Restaurants & Coffee Shops

Average health-concerned consumers - After consulting our questionnaire, more than 75% of our respondents are concerned by the environment in which animals are raised, which most likely would have an impact in the product’s quality ([6]). Thus, by giving them a product which can be supervised by them, we could attract more and more customers of this type.

Butcher shops and markets - Most butcher shops would like to provide healthy food, and by having a guarantee that their products are of a properly healthy origin, they can attract more customers, thus gaining an advantage by collaborating with us.

Restaurants and Coffee shops - A study ([7]) concluded that Romanian consumers prove to be health conscious when choosing a restaurant. Taking that into consideration, restaurants and coffee shops are taking a steep shift towards the growing healthy food trends to increase their sales.

Animal lovers - Our idea may appeal to people who love farm animals and want to have the experience of watching the raising of their own animal through our platform.

Our main customer segment should be any person which is health concerned, between 23 and 50 years old ([8]), with an above average monthly income, because at that age you start getting more concerned about your food intake, and your income could cover the costs of bio food, which is naturally more expensive than the average, factory-farm produced food. After analyzing our four main customer branches, we can be sure that our product would appeal to these types of people by providing healthy products and the feeling that they are a true e-farmer.

Competition

During our research analyzing the state of the art in this area, we have found the following possible competitors with their advantages and their lacking parts that we succeed in covering within our solution.

Lăptăria cu caimac - sells various healthy dairy products from their own farm, being involved in the whole process. There are two key differences: one would be the fact that we cannot cover their variety of products, the other being the fact that we offer customers the possibility of choosing their own animal to monitor and produce for them.

VerdeFood - is a bridge between farmers and possible buyers, where you can either get specific products from farms, or as a farmer, you can sell your products to those customers. We have a similar approach, but we give the customer the feeling that he is a real farmer.

Appenzellerland - covers the same principal idea as ours: cow rentals. The main difference is the availability of their business concerning our customer segment (Romanians) as it is based in Switzerland. Apart from that, the owner of this business offers only the possibility of visiting the rented cow at specific timeframes, while we offer 24/7 online monitoring.

Vreau din România - It is more of a campaign from Kaufland where customers are encouraged to buy alleged romanian-produced products. Based on our research, given the fact that people are not that trustful in this kind of label, we can assure customers that the products that they receive from us are 100% Romanian.

Advantages Over Competition

You can easily traceback all products to the animals that produced them

You actually own farm animals

You can observe all processes of the farm

You can place the products obtained from your animals on the marketplace and receive a percentage of their sells

You can visit your animals and our farm

Key Metrics

Acquisition

Website Traffic

Number of users that entered the website
Number of users that created an account

Number of users that reached the magic moment

- clicked 'See Animals' button

- reached the list of animals

Main key metric

Activation

Active subscriptions (How many animals are bought)
Internal market growth (Marketplace traffic)

Active subscriptions

Internal market growth

Active subscriptions

Cost of

customer

aquisition

Customer

loyalty

Net Profit Margin

Monthly website traffic

Retention

Number of users that rebuy a subscription

Revenue

Net Profit Margin

Number of users that clicked the 'See animals' button (the most important metric) -> This shows us what percentage of the users are truly interested in what we offer, being the gateway to our e-farm world.

Number of users that entered the website -> We need to be sure that people are constantly checking our website.

Number of users that created an account -> By analyzing this, we can get a birds-eye view on how many users are interested in our product.

Active subscriptions ->This is a more revenue-oriented metric, but it also shows us whether we need to expand our farm or not.

Market growth -> Shows us how many users are interested in buying eco products from our online store, rather than owning an animal.

Number of users that rebuy a subscription -> We need to be careful not to burn through all of our potential customers and to retain as many of them

Cost Structure

When taking into consideration our solution, we have devided the costs it would imply in two categories:

Farm and Animal Maintenance - money put into the acquisition and mantainance prices of the farm and all that it includes (e.g. property, animals, infrastructure)
Corportate Costs - money covering the technology expenses, marketing, etc.

Farm And Animal Maintenance	Corporate Costs
Land for the farm	Office workers salaries
Animal acquisition	Marketing & Sales
Veterinary fees	Taxes
Animal nutrition	Software Licenses
Farm Infrastructure	Servers and Domain Registration
Farm workers salaries
Transport costs

Key Features - Revenue Streams

Rent a animal (ownership depends on your subscription plan)
Check your animal (you can watch anything that your animal does during your ownership time)
Get your products or sell your products (for example, given the fact that a cow gives more milk that you probably need, you will select how much of that milk you want to be sent to you and how much of it you want to be sold by us, giving you a percentage of that sell)
AnimalStats (for example, you can see how much milk your cow has produced today/this week/this month). Also, you can see what is the general health of your animal.

Subscriptions
Product selling

Remaining products in initial state (directly from animals)
Manufactured goods (for example, butter from milk)

European funds

Questionnaires

After reviewing the feedback received and reconsidering our customer segment we restructured our questionnaire in order to have only specific and relevant questions for our area of interest:

Our questionnaire has two sections, make sure to check out both of them!

You need to answer the ones from the first page in order to reach the second one.

First Round Of Interviews - Questions

What is your opinion about the eco-bio labels and how much trust do you have in them?

Find what gives trust in products - what the health-conscious customer looks for when choosing what to buy and if it is enough for such a customer to see the label (or he/she wants another validation)

What is your view on the price-quality raport of eco-bio food? Is it worth it?

Check if the price is an important factor in buying eco products and if they are considered to be worth the difference in price

Where do you buy your animal products and why? (specialised store, supermarket, market)

Find the reasons for which people buy or not from farmer markets or shops like butcheries (convenience, price)
The product provenience in which they trust the most and the seller

How many times a week do you buy animal products? How many meals a day do you eat animal products?

FInd how often the interviewee meets the problem we are trying to solve

First Round of Interviews

Second Round Of Interviews - Questions

After reviewing the feedback received and reconsidering the information we want to gather from the interviews, we have modified our most important questions.

Where do you buy your animal products and why? (specialised store, supermarket, market)

Find the reasons for which people buy or not from farmer markets or shops like butcheries (convenience, price)
The product provenience in which they trust the most and the seller

How many times a week do you buy animal products from a specialized store / farmers market?

Figure out how often does the interviewee meet the problem that we are trying to solve and when solved, if our solution matches the current standards

Which is the most important thing that you do for your health regarding your food and why?

The actions made in the past for their health in order to see if our product fits their needs and normal behaviour

Do you have any trust in buying food online (excluding Bolt Food, Glovo, Tazz) and if not, why? What would make you trust in it?

Find out their opinion on food products acquisition and what makes them hesitant to want an application like ours (doubts with transport, conditions, provenience)

Did you use to receive food packages from your family or friends from the country side?

Check how well they recognise the difference of food quality between supermarket and freerange products and how used they are to the rural area or raising animals in farms

Second Round Of Interviews

Transcript of this interview here

Transcript of this interview

and 2 others that couldn't be recorded here

Conclusions After Insights

People prefer food provided by freerange farms rather than factory farms and consider it better in many aspects (taste, health, satiety).

Andrei M. :

"I look for eco-bio food (meat, cheeze, eggs) because they are healthier."

Diana T. :

"I prefer buying animal products from markets and specialised stores (butcheries) because they are tastier, healthier and I trust the vendors more"

Octavian B. :

"Meat from a butcher's or from my own production is a big plus"

People are not that informed regarding the methods of production of ecological food and would like and need more information about them.

Victor G. :

"I buy everything of animal provenience from the butchery and markets as it is of better quality, has better taste, smell and visibility of the process behind"

Octavian G. :

"I don't buy bio food. First of all, I think it is expensive. Second of all, I think it is a scam."

Though they consider freerange farm food is better, they find it harder to obtain and afford.

Diana T. :

"I buy my food (milk, eggs, cheese) from supermarkets out of comodity once every two weeks in bigger quantities."

Daniel R. :

"I buy food from supermarkets out of comodity. I would prefer specialised stores but I don't have them around my house or my daily paths."

Andrei M. :

"I would like to buy from specialised stores but I don't have enough time and it is more convenient to buy from supermarkets."

Stefan T. :

"I am always careful of what I buy. Recently I bought an eco-bio egg formwork and all of them were with two yolks. I don't trust this label because it seems that anyone can obtain it easily."

Octavian G. :

"I have found local milk producers and I have observed that it has a more natural taste, so I try to buy more from them."

Are we ready for Customer Validation? If we are to analyze, one of the biggest issues of our possible customers is time, most of them being forced to use supermarkets due to convenience issues. So, by offering them a platform in which they can own an animal, whose products would be delivered at their doorstep, we can eliminate this time restriction. Another problem would be making them sure that what we give to them is really freerange, thus we offer them a way to monitor their animals 24/7. Both of these options also make it easier for people to obtain eco food. All things considered, we believe we are ready to pitch our idea to possible customers.

User Persona

User Stories

Customers of YourFarm Marketplace (without animal subscriptions)

As a user I want to be able to see the animals;
As a user I want to be able to buy products from the marketplace;
As a user I want to be able to buy an animal and become an eFarmer.

eFarmers (customers with animal subscriptions)

As a user that owns animals I want to be able to get the products made by my cows delivered to my door;
As a user I want to decide how much of the products are sent to me and how much is added to the online market;
As a user I want to be able to watch my animals;
As a user I want to be able to see statistics about my animal - its production and health

User Flow

Wireframes

Landing Page

Authentication

Dashboard

Farm

Selected Animal - Subscriptions

Online Store

Subscriptions

Flow

Below is a Figma "prototype" preview in which the wireframes are linked together accordingly. In order to see the flow of the pages, there are two possible actions: click (over elements like buttons and texts with hyperlink) and drag (between screens of the same page).

If you find it difficult to use this preview, you can see below a short tutorial of its usage applied on our project:

Behind the scenes, this is what it looks like:

Check out our Figma for a more detailed look on our page

Website - Landing Page

www.yourfarm.ro

Showing Our Product To The World

In order to attract many potential users before the launch, we have set up all our buttons to redirect the user to a form page in which they enter their e-mail, thus getting them subscribed to a newsletter which keeps them updated and hyped about our product.

Getting Our Metrics

We used the folllowing:

Screen Recordings : in order to track how easy it is for users to navigate through our UI.
Heatmaps : to see what gets our users' attention.
Charts : to track the number of visitors and calculate the conversion rate.

Emails registered in Formspree

Conclusions For Metrics

As we can see from our collected data, we have a small number of people at least curious in our product. Although it might seem insignificant, it gives us hope that when we have a fully developed product, we would get more traffic on our page.

From an UX perspective, we can also see that with little exceptions, our potential customers have a good intuition on our desired user flow.

Attracting Our Customers

We have started our marketing campaign by trying to reach the potential customers that are closer to our age group, by posting a sneak peek of our page using Instagram Stories.

We have created an Instagram account for our product where we would start posting updates about our product [9].

Even though we have tried the Instagram approach, we haven't ignored the opportunities of Facebook (Facebook Marketplace, Facebook groups, Facebook posts). We have also created a Facebook page for our product which will be shared, along with our website, on different farm-related and eco-food groups.