I come from Dutch dairy farming roots and was raised in the town my grandfather helped found in the Pacific Northwest near the Canadian border. Kids would milk cows on the way to school, and my summer jobs involved riding tractors and picking a lot of berries. Growing up there, I developed a huge affection for farmers, their incredible work ethic, values, and role within community life. I went to a university in Seattle where I got my MBA, which was fabulous because it landed me in a tech ecosystem. I very quickly got swept up in entrepreneurship and ended up working for a food tech venture fund, including consulting for a lot of food-based statewide commissions. I’ve always been intrigued by food – after ten years in Seattle’s tech ecosystem, I went back to culinary school to become a trained chef. Working as a chef gave me an insight into just how much demand there was for local farm products – everyone wanted to get local food from farmers, but the process was so clunky: email lists, cash, check, phone calls etc. This was my light bulb moment, it was crazy that farms could be failing while the demand for good, local, healthy food was so high. So I started building software for farmers to bring their food to market. I never pegged myself as an entrepreneur, but I knew that this was too big of an opportunity to pass up. Saving the future of the local food system—helping farmers be successful and making sure that people had access to real, nutritious food in their future—was an easy yes.

My first company was a two-sided marketplace rather than a vertical SaaS solution. It seemed like the obvious solution for food. As consumers, we love convenience. Even though nine out of ten people prefer local food, they won’t buy it unless it’s easy. We’re also very familiar with visiting marketplaces where all the supply options are on the same website. But I quickly found out that marketplaces are cost-prohibitive companies to run. You must acquire two types of customers—supply and demand – and manage logistics, which is all very expensive. As a result, most marketplaces take a 30% – 80% slice of suppliers’ gross revenue in return for handling all of the marketing, sales, logistics, insurance and security. For farmers, a marketplace is simply an expensive sales channel. It’s not how independent farmers actually run their businesses. The other challenge was the geographic constraints of tangible products in a local market. With a marketplace, you can’t help every farmer everywhere because you’re physically hog-tied to a region for logistics. If I really wanted to help farmers all across the country, I realized that I had to do something different than a marketplace. I looked around at other vertical SaaS companies like Toast, Mindbody, Procore and ServiceTitan, which were disrupting multiple industries with vertical SaaS, and saw that no one had done the same for farmers. This was the inspiration for Barn2Door – to create an end-to- end business solution that would power every aspect of a farmer’s business while letting them own their brand, customers and sales channels, while setting their own prices and managing their own logistics. As a result, a farmer can de-risk their business by not relying on a single aggregator or commodity markets.

The key was to show that we understood our audience – farmers. Our first differentiating feature was the ability for farmers to sell by weight— something we actually patented domestically and internationally. We’re able to tokenize an upfront deposit on an animal, then auto-calculate a final charge by final weight (after butchering) online or in person via POS. This was built specifically for farmers, which generic solutions like Square or Shopify did not offer. We have maintained that mindset ever since – focusing on building features that farmers specifically need for their unique products and operations. We want farmers to run their entire business on Barn2Door, making every transaction easy for them—wholesale, retail, in-person, and online. Once a farmer migrates their business, they’re all-in and rarely want to leave.

I think it’s mission-critical to be a domain expert. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everybody has good ideas; it’s really all about execution. Domain expertise is a huge competitive advantage because it informs our “why” and shapes what we build and how we solve problems. In my case, I started Barn2Door with a great deal of knowledge in food, farming and agriculture. I have an MBA, technology sector experience, and I am a trained chef. I worked and lived in all of these industries. I’m a product-driven CEO, so having been in all of those seats is invaluable. It’s how Barn2Door became the market leader.

Absolutely. We sought out vertical SaaS–minded investors rather than agriculture industry investors, because they’ve seen success in other verticals and offer a wealth of experience and knowledge. Building a vertical SaaS platform means a lot of domain specificity as well as patterns across industries, so it’s important to find partners with experience supporting this.

Historically, farmers have had rough avenues to market—aggregators, distributors, auctions or single contracts that have eroded profit margins, controlled prices and owned the buyer relationships. Farmers are cautious because they’ve been burned before, so Barn2Door has worked hard to earn trust by being authentic, building farm-specific solutions, and establishing our business as the domain expert. We help farmers remove the middleman and de-risk their business by selling directly. And we share data and insights from the millions of ‘local farm food’ transactions going through Barn2Door—including best practices, pricing and packaging guidance, and operational strategies (e.g. building a base of recurring subscriptions). All of Barn2Door’s domain knowledge and insights have fueled a content-marketing strategy that attracts farmers to our blogs, podcasts, ebooks, videos and classes. A persistent content- marketing strategy focused on farm success has driven inbound interest, including word of mouth, referrals, direct traffic and search, which have been ideal acquisition channels.

We’re always looking to improve Barn2Door’s platform, and there are plenty of exciting opportunities for Generative AI to help farmers with pricing and packaging, onboarding and set- up, inventory content and builds, and/or matching them with more buyers. The key thing that’s unique to vertical SaaS is the amount of proprietary data at our fingertips. Barn2Door has millions of transactions to leverage and inform Generative AI guidance in our product for the benefit of farmers. So, yes, we expect Generative AI to become a central tenet for Barn2Door’s product roadmap in the future.

Barn2Door’s goal is to become a household name synonymous with local food, and disrupt agriculture the same way Uber disrupted transportation and Airbnb disrupted hospitality. Barn2Door opens the door for farmers to make more money in a sustainable, predictable way – which is game-changing. With software, Barn2Door can serve farmers anywhere, because we’re not limited by geography or the need to handle distribution. More than a million buyers are using Barn2Door to buy directly from local farmers. Once we own sufficient supply in this industry, there’s a lot of opportunity for revenue expansion. We’re actively engaging investment partners with the experience and ambition to build a category- defining brand.