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REPRINT H00OLX
PUBLISHED ON HBR.ORG
FEBRUARY 19, 2014

ARTICLE yo
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
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What Drones and Crop
Dusters Can Teach
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About Minimum Viable

Product
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by Steve Blank
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Permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu or 617.783.7860
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP

What Drones and Crop

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Dusters Can Teach About
Minimum Viable Product
by Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 19, 2014

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Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their
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investors, and build more successful companies.

Awhile back I wrote about Ashwin, one of my ex-students who wanted to raise a seed round to build
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) with a hyper-spectral camera and fly it over farm fields
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collecting hyper-spectral images. These images, when processed with his company’s proprietary
algorithms, would be able to tell farmers how healthy their plants were, whether there were diseases
or bugs, whether there was enough fertilizer, and enough water.

(When computers, GPS and measurement meet farming, the category is called “precision
agriculture.” I see at least one or two startup teams a year in this space.)
No
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Precision agriculture in practice. Image via Steve Blank.

At the time I pointed out to Ashwin that his minimum viable product was actionable data to farmers
and not the drone. I suggested that to validate the minimum viable product it would be much
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cheaper to rent a camera and plane or helicopter, and fly over the farmers field, hand process the data
and see if that’s the information farmers would pay for. And that they could do that in a day or two,
for a tenth of the money they were looking for.

(Take a quick read of the original post here.)

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Fast forward a few months and Ashwin and I had coffee to go over what his company Ceres
Imaging had learned. I wondered if he was still in the drone business, and if not, what had become
the current minimum viable product.

It was one of those great meetings where all I could do was smile: Ashwin and the Ceres team had
learned something that was impossible to know from inside their building.
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Crop Dusters

Even though the Ceres Imaging founders initially wanted to build drones, talking to potential
customers convinced them that as I predicted, the farmers couldn’t care less how the company

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This document is authorized for educator review use only by Ken Libranza, University of Santo Tomas until Jun 2023. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
Permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu or 617.783.7860
 acquired the data. But the farmers told them something that they (nor I) had never even considered -
crop dusters (or “aerial applicators”) fly over farm fields all the time (to spray pesticides.)

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They found that there are ~2,400 of these aerial applicator businesses in the U.S. with ~5,000 planes.
Ashwin said their big “aha moment” was when they realized that they could use these crop dusting
planes to mount their hyperspectral cameras on. This is a big idea. They didn’t need drones at all.

Local crop dusters meant they could hire existing planes and simply attach their hyperspectral

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camera to any crop dusting plane. This meant that Ceres didn’t need to build an aerial infrastructure
– it already existed. All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now
became a small, variable cost. As a bonus it meant the 1,400 aerial applicator companies could be a
potential distribution channel partner.

The Ceres Imaging minimum viable product was now an imaging system on a crop-dusting plane

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generating data for high value Tree Crops. Their proprietary value proposition wasn’t the plane or
camera, but the specialized algorithms to accurately monitor water and fertilizer. Brilliant.

I asked Ashwin how they figured all this out. His reply, “You taught us that there were no facts inside
our building. So we’ve learned to live with our customers. We’re now piloting our application with
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Tree Farmers in California and working with crop specialists at U.C. Davis. We think we have a real
business.”

It was a fun coffee.

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Lessons Learned

• Build continuous customer discovery into your company DNA

• An MVP eliminates parts of your business model that create complexity
• Focus on what provides immediate value for Earlyvangelists
• Add complexity (and additional value) later
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Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, a senior fellow at Columbia University, and a lecturer at the
University of California, Berkeley. He has been either a cofounder or an early employee at eight high-tech start-ups, and
he helped start the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps and the Hacking for Defense and Hacking for
Diplomacy programs. He blogs at www.steveblank.com.
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This document is authorized for educator review use only by Ken Libranza, University of Santo Tomas until Jun 2023. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
Permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu or 617.783.7860