Joan Westenberg: Welcome back to the Unfunded podcast, where we tell stories of founders building impactful and independent businesses without relying on venture capital or external funding. Unfunded is part of the day one podcast network dedicated to sharing the real startup stories to inspire founders, operators, and investors.

Joan Westenberg: I'm your host, Joan Westenberg, and we're diving into the story of another epic founder, somebody who is going a little bit outside of the accepted mold and doing things their own way. With me today is Steve Shedding from Greenapolis. Steve, welcome. Thanks for having me on the, uh, on the show. Excited to chat through this, um, I've got a bit of a background in green tech.

Joan Westenberg: Um, and some of the, the brilliant startups that are coming out of Australia. I've worked with people like GoTerra before. Um, so I've got some kind of a handle on, I guess, ag tech and that whole space. But I would love for you to tell us about Green Atlas and the core problem that you're solving.

Steve Scheding: Yeah, no problem.

Steve Scheding: So, we're very much in the horticultural space, in fixed cropping. So, really think of trees when, when you think of Green Atlas. And really the problem, you know, it's like anything else. We're trying to help growers. to improve their profitability. But it turns out that for horticulture, that's a pretty challenging problem because prices that growers are paid are really largely based on the quality of their produce, as opposed to the quantity that they produce.

Steve Scheding: So it's a very different problem to broadacre where you're really trying to maximize the output. By minimizing the inputs and instead you're really trying to produce the highest quality fruit that's going to fetch the higher prices and it's very, very normal to sacrifice the number of pieces of fruit.

Steve Scheding: Uh, to get a high quality produce. So, you know, a classic example would be an apple where to fetch the highest prices, you want a certain size, it has to have a certain crunch, a certain amount of, uh, sugar content. For some varieties, you need a certain amount of blush, right, how red the, the apple, uh, turns.

Steve Scheding: And if you don't hit those targets, then the prices fall off a cliff. You might only get 50 percent for the apple versus, you know, an A grade apple where you've, you've hit all the metrics right on the head.

Joan Westenberg: And does that lead to food wastage, um, cost problems, that kind of thing? So

Steve Scheding: it, it can in the sense that, you know, again, I'll give you an example in, in apples.

Steve Scheding: What you really want to do is to have the tree produce, you know, the right number of pieces of fruit. Let's, let's say it's a hundred, 250. pieces of fruit per tree, but that tree is capable of producing maybe a thousand pieces of fruit. But if you let it produce a thousand, they'll be very, very low, low quality pieces of fruit with not much sugar, not much size.

Steve Scheding: And so you really want the tree to only produce exactly what is needed at the end of the season. And so anything that it's doing that is not that is by definition inefficient. So, growers spend enormous amounts of time and effort, um, and money to really thin down the crop in the early parts of the season.

Steve Scheding: A lot of that is done through chemicals, or it's done through manual labor, um, and really what we try to do as Green Atlas is to try to assist growers into, in doing those jobs as efficiently as they can be done. So what is the Green Atlas solution? So what we have is a whole bunch of sensors that we mount on a vehicle, and you know that vehicle usually is manually driven, but uh, we've also got systems out there.

Steve Scheding: On autonomous platforms, which is, which is pretty cool. The sensors, typically, uh, cameras will have one pointing to the left, one pointing to the right, very, very high powered, um, flash lighting so that we get very high quality images all day, every day or, or at night. We also have a LIDAR system. So a laser based.

Steve Scheding: system for measuring the 3d structure of the trees. So we can measure things like how vigorous the trees are. Are they responding to, um, you know, to fertilizer inputs? Uh, are they not right? So we can measure lots and lots of different properties of the trees, largely through either visual or structural information.

Joan Westenberg: What made you. Are you excited about tackling this problem? This is a pretty unique problem to, to approach. Did you have a background in agriculture? I

Steve Scheding: mean, the short answer for me is no, I didn't. My, my background and, and those, those are the founders of green Atlas. All of our background is in automation.

Steve Scheding: We're all engineers. Uh, we've all worked on large scale projects. Uh, so for example, in my past, I, I ran the Rio Tinto center for mine automation. You know, we automated. You know, drill rigs, you know, large pieces of equipment. So our background is very much about automation, trying to improve the efficiency of processes you typically that adult dirty or dangerous, but really the, the agricultural input was my business partner.

Steve Scheding: um, James Underwood. He'd been doing, I don't know, seven or eight years of R& D through Sydney University with a lot of the agricultural peak bodies. So groups like Apples and Pears Australia, uh, Horticulture Innovation, had funded a lot of the work that, that he had been doing. And so Green Atlas was very much the answer to the question of, you know, that, that research is cool, but when can we have it?

Steve Scheding: What can we do with it practically? Exactly, exactly. So James had always expected that given that we knew there was grower demand through the, the research projects, often growers would be sitting on the, on the funding panels. So we knew, we knew these were key industry problems and we knew that they wanted them solved.

Steve Scheding: But nobody was really stepping in to say, well, how do we commercialize this research? And so Green Atlas was really the answer to that. So James and I kicked it off now, getting close to six years ago, you know, very much to commercialize, uh, you know, what was deemed as very

Joan Westenberg: promising R& D. So your background in, in automation, your background in technology, that's a massive help when you're doing something that is, I guess, hard, deep tech, but there's still a, a great big mountain to climb and it's not as easy as software.

Joan Westenberg: Is that right? Absolutely. Hard, hardware

Steve Scheding: is, let's say, less forgiving than software and that's Hardware is hard. Yeah. Hardware is hard. And I think, It's, it's one of those things that's a double edged sword. I don't think you can do the kinds of things we're doing without investing in hardware. And we're very much of the approach that, um, you need to be down in the weeds, so to speak.

Steve Scheding: And that means for us, you know, being at ground level, looking into the trees, getting very, very high resolution data that we couldn't get from the air or we couldn't get from a satellite. And that means investing in hardware. So the downside is hardware is hard. The upside is because it's hard, you get kind of a moat for free.

Steve Scheding: So it makes the barrier to entry higher. Because dealing with the, um, you know, the hardware problems that you have every day, you know, really requires both a lot of expertise, but also a lot of experience. And that's, that's something that I found as a grain atlas kind of uniquely head. None of us were, you know, fresh out of uni.

Steve Scheding: We all had a lot of experience out in the world in a lot of different scenarios, university, uh, the corporate world, other startups. We all had that experience prior to, prior to kicking it off. And I think that was absolutely

Joan Westenberg: essential. So you had the idea, you had the notion that you were going to build this.

Joan Westenberg: You knew there was a need for it, but hardware is still expensive. What was your approach to getting this off the ground?

Steve Scheding: So that's where it gets interesting and very related to the, to the topic of this podcast. Initially we thought like most startups that you sort of have to go down the VC path and go and raise capital.

Steve Scheding: Um, and we actually spent a lot of time sitting in front of VCs and, uh, in fact, You know, we ended up going through due diligence twice for, for multi million dollar C stage raise. Um, so we got quite far along, uh, with that, but at the same time, all of that is quite time consuming. So you have to do something in the meantime.

Steve Scheding: It's a full time job doing a raise like that. It really is. And so we took kind of a multi pronged approach, which was to never assume that the raise would would be successful. So that meant we looked for other sources of funding. So we were lucky enough to get a New South Wales MVP grant, which was a scheme available at the, at the time.

Steve Scheding: Fairly small amount of money. We put our own money into the Um, into the business, but you know, not huge amounts, really just enough to build a prototype to prove that we could build something that was going to work commercially. And so we were doing all of that in parallel to going out and trying to do a race.

Steve Scheding: And the thing that was interesting, like I said, we, we got. to do due diligence with, with two different, uh, two different firms. They ended up not going ahead for two different reasons. Neither of which, um, on face value were us. So nobody kind of lost face than us. One changed strategic direction. The other one just pulled out of Australia entirely.

Steve Scheding: They just closed the office. But at that same time, uh, I'll admit we got very, very fortunate. And a very large corporate grower approached us. So just as, just as our kind of due diligence phase was, um, was winding up, uh, a company approached us and said, you know, we've got a very specific problem. We've been trying to solve it for years.

Steve Scheding: You know, we've got other companies and places like SARA telling us, yeah, it's easy. We can do that, but not really coming through with the goods. And so they approached us and said, look, we've seen that you've done a bit of work in apples, seems to do what you say it does, and you come and work, um, for us.

Steve Scheding: Uh, and in this case it was, it was almonds. And we went from, uh, essentially a pilot, um, you know, that got off the ground very quickly. I think within a month of first contact, we did a pilot on maybe 40 hectares. They were happy and then engaged us for five or 6, 000 hectares. That's huge. It was absolutely massive and it was an absolute game changer because it meant all of a sudden we knew, uh, you know, people want this.

Steve Scheding: They're willing to exchange money for something that's, uh, you know, relatively new and they're willing to take that risk. And at the same time, The scale was big enough that we went from a struggling startup to a going concern as a business almost overnight. But really, the key thing was all of that set up that we'd done in the beginning, which was not assuming that funding was, you know, guaranteed that we're able to capitalize on an opportunity like that.

Steve Scheding: And that, that's really the thing, I guess, with, with luck is, you know, luck is as much about your forward planning as it is about, you know, the things that. You know, just fall out of the sky into your lab.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah. You got to be ready for the good things that happen. Ready for those opportunities, I guess.

Joan Westenberg: Exactly. If you don't lay the groundwork, you won't be ready to meet them. Was there any like stress when, when you had that, that potential customer approach you, that's a, with a massive project way, were you stressed about whether you could make that work?

Steve Scheding: Yeah,

Joan Westenberg: absolutely.

Steve Scheding: But it wasn't, it wasn't really about the.

Steve Scheding: Technical aspects. And we, we were lucky that they were willing to go through a pilot stage. So we always say, you know, that the single biggest outcome of a pilot should be a go or no go, right? Either it works or it doesn't work. And so the stress is in the pilot is really around, you know, can you make it work in the, in the time that you have available and we were reasonably confident.

Steve Scheding: I would say that, but certainly not a hundred percent. There were things we didn't know, like. You know, what resolution of camera images did we require? Was the lighting solution going to work in that, you know, we'd worked on smaller trees that were close to the platform. Now we're working on enormous trees that are very mature.

Steve Scheding: The things we're looking for are very far away. You know, can we do that reliably all day, every day? Those were the things we weren't a hundred percent sure about, but by the end of the pilot. We were thankfully, and it was all, all very

Joan Westenberg: positive. So to commercialize this tech, did you go through things like the, um, the TRLs technology readiness levels, or was it much more, I guess, uh, run fast and break things?

Steve Scheding: It was really more the second. Yeah. Again, having been through, you know, the corporate world, we're certainly familiar with, you know, the TRL levels and we always knew where we were. So it was very much about, you know, having a good understanding of where we are on those, um, you know, on that journey and what we are capable of doing.

Steve Scheding: So, You know, to give you an example, you know, like a lot of companies, we very much did a lot of the, um, you know, let's call it the wizard of Oz, as long as the customer gets the result they want, the man behind the curtain. Yeah. It doesn't really matter what happens behind the curtain. So, you know, the first, probably the first year.

Steve Scheding: It was always the founders who were out running the platform. You know, we had one system, uh, we were testing things. I think every time that we went out, we were testing a new thing. It might be, you know, sometimes we'd have three different GPS units on there. Uh, we might have four different cameras, you know, so every, everything was an experiment.

Steve Scheding: But we were still selling it as a commercial service because. That was absolutely possible. The, you know, the customer didn't need to know it was an experiment to get value out of the, out of the results. And so for that first year, you know, we would go out, we would absolutely run fast. We absolutely broke things, but, but again, we had the experience to have contingency plans in place.

Steve Scheding: So if we broke something, we could generally fix it in an hour, right? But that's the advantage of being very lean. And having experience that we knew what every line of code did in our software, we knew, uh, we'd soldered every wire, you know, in the cables, we built the printed circuit boards ourselves and having control like that means that you, you can very rapidly respond to, you know, to anything you hadn't anticipated, whereas the more you outsource, Actually, the less control you have, and so when things don't quite go to plan, you know, you've got less recourse to do anything about it

Joan Westenberg: and with hardware.

Joan Westenberg: If things do go wrong, it's much harder to fix it in the abstract. You can't really fix it in post in the same way that you might be able to with a softer business. Exactly. Yeah, no, that's exactly true. But with that comes the fact that it's Yeah. It is still more expensive. A hardware is always going to be more expensive.

Joan Westenberg: So having, having had that first, first client project, that success being able to, uh, I guess the word would be bootstrap it to that point, where you tempted to go back and look for funding again and say, look, We've got these, these customers, we've done these thousands of hectares, we can do this. You should invest in us or were you pretty set on following the path?

Steve Scheding: So once we had gotten to that point, we were much more willing to back ourselves. Um, in the sense that, okay, well, we had a bit of luck. We were able to capitalize on it by, you know, just being the right place, the right time, good planning. And at that point, You know, when you've had a few VCs say to you, you know, come, come back to us when you've got more traction.

Steve Scheding: Well, you go out and get that traction. And why do you need the VCs, right? a sufficient amount of traction. Exactly. Yeah. But the, the other thing that became clearer, the, the further we went, you know, along this journey is that my belief is kind of more and more firmly cemented that for most of the things that you will do, on farm.

Steve Scheding: So solutions that you would deploy, you know, in reality on a farm. So whether it's IOT type sensor devices that you deploy around the place, weather stations and, and, and so on, or whether it's something like us, that's a service that you deliver to a farm. I actually think, uh, those types of businesses are not really well suited to the VC model.

Steve Scheding: Interesting. As well as, you know, kind of not needing the funding anymore, we also more and more formed a belief that, you know, the VC model is really not the right model. It's not that you can't find backers, but you would absolutely need to find, you know, the right backers who are in it, probably for more than one reason, you know, certainly more than just, you know, trying a hundred times their, their investment.

Joan Westenberg: So that, that hyper hyper growth, hyper scale model, you think that's. incompatible mostly with the agricultural sector. Is that right?

Steve Scheding: Yeah. I mean, the short answer is yes. Right. The longer answer is I can absolutely see a few niches where hyper growth does make sense. But my belief is particularly with the hardware based businesses where you're on farm, you're just not going to get hyper growth.

Steve Scheding: You are going to get growth. And we've certainly seen that for Green Atlas. Year on year we get bigger and bigger, which is great. Absolutely fantastic. But you, what you find is that, you know, you've got multi year essentially validation cycles, people want to kick the tires in the first year. And if I'm honest, they kind of still want to kick the tires in the second year.

Steve Scheding: And it's often only in year three that people are then willing to go, you know what, I'm going to scale this out to my. My whole business, you know, and I'm going to say, this is the way that we do things now. And then, you know, there's types of businesses where, you know, that kind of model is very compatible.

Steve Scheding: Um, there are others where it isn't, you know, they're very much, there are geographic business, uh, geographic issues that make things work geographies than others. Like, you know, in some places you've got a small number of very large farms that works well for a business like ours. And in other places you have a very large number of small farms.

Steve Scheding: And for services, what happens is that the proportion of your service that's just logistics, moving from place to place, goes up. And so, you know, your profitability goes down in those kinds of jurisdictions. So there's lots of little nuances that until you really start down this road, you might not think about when you're just saying, well, the total addressable market is, you know, a hundred million hectares and you get very excited about those numbers, but logistically.

Steve Scheding: You know, how those numbers are actually arranged in reality makes a very big difference between, you know, can you deploy or, or,

Joan Westenberg: or not. I often find TAM is just, it's, you can get some nice numbers talking about TAM, but it doesn't always translate into reality. And especially not when you think about the incentives that you have for.

Joan Westenberg: VCs versus founders versus customers, you know So the customer wants a really good service in the long term with a product that they can count on The the company wants to create and build something that they're proud of the vcs Well, they want an ipo or an acquisition, you know, that's pretty much the end goal Um, do you think your kind of long term plan for green atlas?

Joan Westenberg: Uh, do you think that would be incompatible with that VC goal? Like the acquisition IPO end point, is that where you guys want to go? Yeah,

Steve Scheding: absolutely. No, I think the only difference really is the, the timeframe, you know, and, and also I guess the potential, but there's potential for the multiplier. So I think most agricultural businesses.

Steve Scheding: Um, you know, we can absolutely, um, multiply the value in the business, but again, I think just realistically, the number of ag tech businesses that are going to end up as unicorns. I think we'll be relatively low and we're actually seeing that play out in the US at the moment where there were a few unicorns, but they're largely being revalued by massive discounts.

Steve Scheding: That's very much. A current thing that is happening is watching some of these ones that, uh, had massive VC backing, you know, went the Amazon model of trying to capture everything. And then now kind of in, you know, the playbook of, well, okay, well, that didn't quite work. What's, what's the next best thing?

Steve Scheding: And the valuations are being absolutely hammered.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah. I think we've seen a lot of companies who have come in with VC funding and to get that you're talking about, they want to reinvent. Agriculture, um, vertical farms, urban farms, things like that, whereas it seems like a lot of the really good work in ag tech is coming from people who are asking, how can we do what we're doing better?

Steve Scheding: Yeah, it's, it's interesting, isn't it? Right? Because. I think there are two really predominant theses around ag, and you've just hit the nail on the head, right? One is, where do I get efficiencies in the way that we produce food today? And that's very much, you know, Green Atlas fits that mold, absolutely. And then the other side of it is, you know, how do you reinvent agriculture?

Steve Scheding: And that's, that's tough. And I don't think anyone's really winning that second one yet. You know, vertical farming still has a massive energy issue that's kind of the, the elephant in the room is how do you get, you know, the, the right amount of energy to the right place in a vertical farm, right? So, you know, I'm talking about sunlight in particular, but whatever you replace it with, if you can't get enough.

Steve Scheding: You know, so there's that. There's also obviously the synthetic foods or, you know, lab grown foods, similar sort of thing that there's been a lot of money. There's a few success stories of, you know, I love the, the vow story out of, um, out of Sydney. Um, but there's also been some pretty spectacular failures that are, you know, just starting to come out in the

Joan Westenberg: last year or two.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah, I think there was, um, a rush of excitement sort of during and after COVID where people thought, hey, How do we fix supply chains? How do we fix food supplies? But I don't think there were clear theses and clear answers around that. It was more of a gold rush, but there were a lot of COVID era gold rushes, weren't there?

Joan Westenberg: That's it. Certainly were. Hand sanitizer being the, the key one. Oh, look, um, on that, I'd love to ask Yotei, you've got, you've got a, A strong background in AI, what is your take on the AI funding bubble, the AI explosion of the past, I guess, 18 months, you know, we've seen, um, some of the, some of the stats that were coming out were billions of dollars more invested just in 2023 than in some of the other years put together.

Joan Westenberg: I think it was something like 25 billion in 2023 versus 2 billion in 2022. What, what's your take on that AI funding bubble?

Steve Scheding: It's interesting, isn't it? In that a lot of that funding, um, is around. Let's, let's say building the tools or the building blocks. So my, my kind of take is, you know, that that's great in that you need tools and you need the building blocks, but I think that the, the funding has been unfocused in a sense in that, you know, you've obviously got.

Steve Scheding: Big companies like OpenAI who are doing fantastically well at building this, these tools and they're making money from it. But really, I think the next wave, you know, and is really about focusing in on how do we use these tools to solve real problems that people have. And that's what I'm, I guess, excited about and interested in seeing is how do you take these tools that are actually quite generic, But make them very, very specific to, to solve problems.

Steve Scheding: So, you know, in ag, we're seeing things like, you know, can we customize GPTs? Um, you know, all large language models, I should say into being, you know, kind of proxy agronomists. And so, you know, they're like other fields. They're, they're putting them in front of agronomic tests and saying, you know, Are you 80 percent on the exam now or 90 percent and they're actually doing, you know, remarkably well.

Steve Scheding: So the thing that's interesting, I guess, from that is, you know, are they, are they going to be able to solve, I guess, industry specific problems? Yes. But I think they're going to be at that generic level of, You know, what, what percent chemical, you know, or what chemicals should I use for this type of problem?

Steve Scheding: Uh, at what concentration? And they'll probably get very good at things like that. And what they probably won't have that'll be a lot harder to, to build in is the knowledge that growers have from having spent, in a lot of cases, generations on a piece of land. And they know things that are extremely hard to encode into a, into a computer system.

Steve Scheding: And so that's kind of what I see as the, as the, as the gap.

Joan Westenberg: So there is a wealth of data out there that farmers and farms have access to. Is that something that the Green Atlas would want to tap into, would want to start to access?

Steve Scheding: So long term, absolutely. And you know, we're building up our own, you know, large databases.

Steve Scheding: We, we are absolutely in the petabytes of data gathered on, on farms. And so there's a lot that you can learn. You know, at, at those kinds of scales that, you know, that are very difficult to learn at the small scale. But then, like, like I said, the other thing, the converse is true, where, you know, growers know things about their orchards or their blocks of land, you know, that are very difficult to learn from external sources.

Steve Scheding: Um, you know, a good example being, you know, a grower told me recently, Oh, yeah, those trees aren't growing really well because that's where we pulled out a gum tree 30 years ago. And nothing's ever grown well in that spot.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah. Wow. Okay. And, and that's not something that you can just necessarily see when you look at a chart.

Steve Scheding: Exactly. Exactly. So some of those things, yeah, even from a satellite image, uh, aren't, you know, readily visible. You might not pick them up in a soil sample because it's, it's sort of hyperlocal, whereas a lot of the soil sampling is, you know, Sparser than that. So yeah, there's lots and lots of challenging problems to get back to your question as to whether Green Atlas is, is going to look at it.

Steve Scheding: Absolutely. But at the moment, being a bootstrap company, we see that at the moment as being through partnerships largely. So we try to make our data. very accessible. Um, in the sense that if there's a partner of ours that does soil sampling or soil mapping and, you know, they want to understand, well, you know, Green Atlas says the trees are more vigorous in the northwest, right?

Steve Scheding: We try to make it very easy to overlay our data onto say something like a soil map or a satellite map. So that we can start to figure out, well, what's the root cause for the differences in vigor? Is it a difference in nitrogen levels? Is there, you know, a calcium difference in the soils there? Is it just a texture difference?

Steve Scheding: Maybe you go from clays to, you know, to more sandy soils. And so bringing those different and disparate data sources together is incredibly valuable. Um, ultimately, we probably will offer it as a single service, but at the moment, we largely do it through partnerships, either with our own partners or with our partners, and we enable their partnerships that they also have.

Steve Scheding: And so that's very much, again, kind of a bootstrapping, you know, solution to the, to the problem. How do we get there? scale, even in our data prior to having the, you know, the resources to be able to do it just by

Joan Westenberg: ourselves. So, um, on the subject of the partnerships, you have partners in, um, North America, South America, and Europe at the moment.

Joan Westenberg: Is that right?

Steve Scheding: Uh, yep. And New Zealand, uh, Turkey, France, uh, Italy,

Joan Westenberg: quite a few places. And the plan is to keep on expanding that footprint. Yeah. Absolutely. Would you set up, would you set up and start to expand Green Atlas, like expand your presence overseas as well as those partnerships?

Steve Scheding: So, I mean, yes, is the, is the short answer we will always do, you know, really the pragmatic solution, right?

Steve Scheding: So what is the best solution for, you know, a particular scenario that we see? Sometimes it will be, you know, green Atlas should establish their presence sometimes through, through a partner, I guess, just linking that to the bootstrapping story. We actually see the partnerships as being, uh, incredibly valuable.

Steve Scheding: So, you know, when we talk to VCs. There was very much a view that you had to own everything. You had to be vertically integrated. But what that ignores is that, you know, for us with partners, the partners typically already have their own established businesses. And really what they're looking for is a way of adding, you know, a new line of business to their existing business.

Steve Scheding: And so we bring them that. Right? So there's, and the, the quid pro quo is that they bring us credibility. They already have customers. They already have a market. And they're, if you like, pre qualifying Green Atlas as a solution. So, you know, the customer might say, Oh, you know, there's three or four things kind of like Green Atlas.

Steve Scheding: And our partners can go to the market and say, look, we looked at all of those things and we chose Green Atlas because we think they're the best for, you know, these types of problems or those types of solutions. And so they're pre qualifying us as a business to their customers in a new market that we've, Never physically been in, in a

Joan Westenberg: lot of cases.

Joan Westenberg: I guess that makes for a much smarter expansion strategy than anything else. And particularly if you are bootstrapped, if you are doing something like hardware, it makes so much sense.

Steve Scheding: Exactly. So the, the key thing, um, you know, like with a lot of this stuff is to then have credibility, right? Because how do you win those partnerships?

Steve Scheding: And it's, it's simply by being credible. Um, and you do that, you know, there's lots of different ways, I guess you would establish credibility, but that's certainly what we find is that that's really what sets us apart and why, why partners are willing to, you know, spend their own money in, you know, starting a new market with us.

Joan Westenberg: And they, and they trust that you'll give them. That support with what you're building, cause you believe in the product and you have the right incentives. And exactly. You're not going to blow it all up in pursuit of that 100 X multiplier. And that makes sense too.

Steve Scheding: That's right. And now, and our model that we have with partners makes it very clear that green Atlas is on the hook for, you know, keeping things operational, you know, the quality of the outputs, all of those sorts of things to give our partners that, that peace

Joan Westenberg: of mind.

Joan Westenberg: Um, what advice would you give to founders who are looking to Bootstrapper company, um, whether they're in the hardware space or not, what, what's your, your kind of guidance there?

Steve Scheding: So, you know, looking back, I think there's a couple of things, um, for, for us, you know, particularly in that first 12 months when, you know, you're really establishing yourself as a business and you don't have cashflow yet, you know, cashflow absolutely is King, you know, uh, I don't think that can be unstated.

Steve Scheding: And because of that, right. You really need. To be able to bootstrap and you've got to think about what that means, right? So I think that's really important. You know, could you leave your current job and have 12 months or 18 months? Where you're not earning any money, and you're waiting for the company to earn, there's a risk that it will never earn anything.

Steve Scheding: Are you willing to take that risk? Can you support yourself? Um, you know, can your business partners support themselves? Those are really critical questions, but, you know, I guess don't get discussed very often. They're at least as important as, Can we build a product? You know, is the technology going to work?

Steve Scheding: Um, because obviously you want to believe that and that's all about de risking. Um, but you still need to be able to get from here to there without, you know, gobs of cash coming your way. Um, so I think, I think that's probably really the biggest decision is, am I willing to take that risk and, you know, Can I

Joan Westenberg: get from here to there?

Joan Westenberg: Is there anything else you'd like to share with any unfunded listeners about the journey of green Atlas or about, um, your journey as a founder?

Steve Scheding: So I, I mean, I think I've been through really the key points, which was, you know, we, we were prepared to capitalize on, you know, a few situations that, that came our way, which was fantastic.

Steve Scheding: So preparedness is, is key. I think credibility is key trying to get, um, you know, respect from your market as quickly as you can. And in something like agriculture, that's a lot easier said than done. So thinking. Thinking through, you know, how do you get that for us? It was things like, um, partnering with research institutions where they would publish papers on.

Steve Scheding: Does our system work right? And that is an additional layer of credibility from an independent third party. So there's lots of things to think through like that, right? So how do I get into the market as quick as I can? How do I establish cashflow, um, as quickly as I can? I, I always kind of viewed it as a, like a net present value optimization problem.

Steve Scheding: We always knew there was a market there, but the question wasn't, how do I tap into, you know, the largest market possible? It was much more like, how do I bring forward as much cashflow as I can to, to the present day? Right. And so that meant saying, okay, well, there's, you know, there's 10 things we could do, but there's one thing we could do in the next three months that would be revenue generating.

Steve Scheding: Right. And so that then starts to set how you prioritize because you, you're now prioritizing about cashflow. Um, alongside of how do I open up this, you know, potentially large future market, right? You can't, I don't think you can do both of them independently if you want to bootstrap. Um, and that's probably the other key thing is how do you do the product design and implementation so that you can do a more progressive rollout?

Steve Scheding: Um, and that's something we absolutely did with Green Atlas where, you know, we're six years in, there are product features we're currently coming out with now. That we knew on day one we had to have, you know, they weren't the right first things in order to help us generate some revenue.

Joan Westenberg: That makes so much sense.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah. Um, everything you're saying, it kind of lines up with the stuff that I'm hearing from a fair few of these unfunded startups, but you are one of the few founders who has taken this approach with hardware. Um, which I think is just fantastic because hardware is hard, you know, a lot of the people at the back hardware is always hard.

Joan Westenberg: Yeah. Um, yeah. So yeah, I think what you're doing with Green Atlas is, is pretty incredible. To bootstrap something like this is, it's very cool. Um, so congratulations on that. And thank you so much for being on the show today. Um, where can our listeners find out anything more about Green Atlas and stay updated on your mission?

Steve Scheding: So really the two best places to find information about us, number one is just our website, very easy, it's just greenatlas. com. Um, and if you want more regular updates about the kinds of things that we're doing or that our partners are doing, that would typically be through our, our LinkedIn. Um, so again, just Green Atlas, uh, on, on our company page on, on LinkedIn.

Joan Westenberg: Thank you so much. I appreciate your time today and thanks for being on the Unfunded Podcast.

Steve Scheding: No problem. Thank you.