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Cultivate's agri-tech founders had strong science but struggled to articulate who their customers were and why those customers should care. Many were trying to sell to everyone at once - county councils and garden owners in the same pitch.
Delivered workshops, 1-2-1 consultancy sessions, and founder mentoring across two accelerator cohorts - covering Value Proposition Canvas, customer segmentation, and customer interviews. Adapted the programme each time based on what founders actually needed.
Cultivate is a business accelerator programme run by Harper Adams University and Barclays Eagle Labs, supporting agri-food and agri-tech entrepreneurs. The programme works with founders building businesses that range from soil carbon analysis to coated fertilisers and microbial biostimulants. Each cohort runs over several weeks and combines training sessions, workshops, and mentoring to help early-stage companies get to market.
Most of Cultivate's founders could explain what their technology did. The harder question was who specifically should care, and why. During previous cohort check-ins, the programme team had seen founders treating their customers as one large group - building value propositions that tried to speak to wildly different audiences at once, with no way to prioritise which buyers to go after first.
Adopter's first session in November 2022 covered the Value Proposition Canvas, customer segmentation, and customer interviews - a full day built around getting founders to work through their own businesses rather than absorb theory. One founder had built a platform using satellite data to assess tree health and had been pitching it to both garden owners and the local authorities responsible for road maintenance and preventing trees from falling on infrastructure. During the segmentation exercise, it became clear that only one of those audiences had the budget and a problem severe enough to justify significant spend.
"My one-to-one session with Matt from Adopter allowed me to identify areas of my business that, although critical, I was failing to see." - Anyela Camargo, Founder, FISCROP
When Cultivate came back for a second cohort, the brief had shifted. The first session's customer interview module had been useful, but it wasn't where founders were getting stuck. The segmentation exercises were. Founders kept defaulting to one broad customer group when they actually had three or four distinct audiences with different needs, buying processes, and willingness to pay.
The second session dedicated its full afternoon to segmentation. Instead of asking founders to define their customer, the exercises forced a harder question: of all the people who might buy this, who should you go after first? Founders mapped their segments against the Crossing the Chasm framework - evaluating not just market size but which group had the most urgent problem, the shortest sales cycle, and the fewest barriers to adoption.
"The training and the follow-up consultancy session were truly transformative for our start-up. The facilitators guided us through each step of the process, providing invaluable insights and practical examples that resonated with our specific industry and target market." - Nishanth K Sukumaran, Founder, RooTech
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The group sessions built the foundations. The 1-2-1 consultations made them specific.
Each founder came into their consultation with a Value Proposition Canvas they'd built during the workshop and a set of customer segments they'd mapped out and started validating. The questions were concrete: which segment to pursue first, how to position a computational farming tool to an audience that doesn't think in those terms, what to prioritise when you have six months of runway and no marketing budget.
One founder building an ag-tech startup used her session to pressure-test her entire business plan. Areas she'd considered secondary turned out to be critical to her go-to-market. Another, at an even earlier stage, left knowing exactly where to put her next three months of effort - and what to stop wasting time on.
"Matt's expertise, personalized approach, and strategic insights were invaluable in refining my business plan and navigating the complexities of entrepreneurship. His ability to identify blind spots and anticipate challenges inspired me to persevere and adapt." - Anitta Mathew, Founder, RooTech
"The training not only equipped us with a solid understanding of the Value Proposition Canvas but also inspired us to think critically and creatively about our customers' needs. We were able to identify unique value drivers and differentiate ourselves in the market." - Nishanth K Sukumaran, Founder, RooTech
"The insight from both the group session and the one to one was really insightful and helped me as an early stage start up to think about what we need to prioritise in terms of marketing." - Stephanie McEvoy, Founder, Farming Carbon
"I thoroughly recommend Adopter. Matt and Katherine have great expertise and knowledge, combined with being extremely professional and keen to do a valuable and good job. They designed and delivered a training day for our agri-tech start-up accelerator, covering Value Proposition Canvas and effective customer interviews. The session was suited exactly to our needs, and we hope to work with them again."
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