FeedX

Market position

FeedX was an early-stage agriculture marketplace and SaaS company backed by Techstars, reporting roughly $500K in trailing twelve month revenue and four employees, that did not achieve product-market fit.

FeedX positioned its offering as combining marketplace purchasing of animal feed with comparative intelligence to help farmers identify the best-value feed, described internally as Amazon-like commerce with Zillow-like decision guidance.

Go-to-market

FeedX sold directly to livestock and dairy farms, expanding to customers across nearly all US states, and used accelerator participation and agriculture media appearances for visibility. A later pivot targeted small farmers through UpMarket.

Large dairy and livestock farms in the United States; a later pivot targeted small farmers.

Geography

Headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, United States, with customers in almost all 50 US states by the time of its Techstars participation in 2020.

History

Carl Lippert began building software for farmers in 2016 while farming, motivated by dissatisfaction with existing tools encountered during an internship at Valley Ag Software. After several years of self-taught app development and early customers, he found a co-founder in 2019. The company was listed as founded November 2017 as a C-corp based in Madison, Wisconsin. By 2020 FeedX had customers in nearly all 50 US states and was accepted into the Techstars accelerator, presenting at Techstars Demo Day in December 2020. The team later concluded it had not reached product-market fit, attributing this in part to targeting too broad a customer base, and pivoted toward small farmers through UpMarket. The FeedX project is listed as ending in 2021.

Risks & controversies

The founder publicly attributed the company's failure to find product-market fit to trying to serve everyone rather than a specific customer segment, which led to a pivot and the wind-down of the FeedX project in 2021.