Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu of LANFarms.
Tell us about yourself?
My name is Uche, an entrepreneur, educationist and technologist – amongst other things. Since 16, I have been working with tech, and building businesses as I come from a family of entrepreneuers.
Before fully transitioing to tech, I was focused on teaching and helping high school students in their learning process through curriculum and objective development assessments.
I also traveled across, working with various brands and businesses specializing in arts, media and retail. I am passonite about using simple solutions to solve complex problems in the process of critial thinking.
This is whay I founded LANFarms. Being the CEO & CTO of LANFarms, my focs in on building a strong and viable business system that operaties to serve diversity in the area of agrocommerce.
For our customers and team, this means inclusion to serve underserved communities too. I am an advocate for social diversity and inclusion, and that’s why I am proud to do what I do at LANFarms with my amazing team.
I love to chill and relax; when I am not working. You can find me playing with my dogs and eating lots of delicious meals in between.
Over the years, I have continued to contribute to the tech, business, marketing and educational ecosytem.
From having my resarch works used in medicine, IEEE, and many more global institutions, you can say I am big on contributions.
While balancing alot of things in life from relationships, to intenal synergies, I do all these and more.
What do you think is the single biggest misconception people have when it comes to startups?
The startup ecosystem think having a community is equal to success, and having VC support is the backbone to being successful. Huge lie!
There are no such things as community being the pillar to a succesful product, becasue you can’t be profitable by having thousans of community memeber.
Folks try to downplay marketing and sales, thus leading to burnout. On VCs, we’ve seen even YC companies shutdown for the unimaginable resons after tons of funding.
Look, the end game isn’t to get VC funds, but to bootstrap to the point where you feel having a VC support will take your business to the next big level.
People want to raise fund from having ideas without showing work, and it kils startup faster than burn rate.
If you could go back in time to any moment from your journey, and give yourself one tip, what would it be?
Launch fast, stay lean, iterate and find product market fit more than anything. It’s important so you don’t miss on any of this. It doesn’t matter if you’re not 100% perfect.
What makes you stand out as an entrepreneur?
I would say I get things done fast! The ability to deploy design thinking, using sytems and processes to look and approach problems makees me stand out.
Coming from a sales & marketing, business, product and educational background means I am fully grounded in deploying playbooks that makes me not to just stand out as an entreprenur, but to take the business to the next level.
What are some of the best working habits you’ve gained over the past couple of years?
Learn to accept things you can’t change. Being able to launch an MVP faster is better than having long processes.
Having a healthy relationship as a founder/entrepreneur is essential. The journey is far, depressing and lonely.
Sleeping a good amonunt of time, eating healthy and learning new things are also part of the the good habits I’ve gained.
Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?
At LANFarms, our mission is to simplify agrocommerce using technology. The aim, goals and objectives remain the same from inception.
The world is struggling to meet rising demand for more food of higher quality. Access to quality food for instance in Africa is very low, unfair and expensive (256 million hungry people in Africa today) in a world bank report.
Even in Asia, and America too; we have the huge cost of getting food and wastage. These are the core insights that influences what we do at LANFarms.
Where do you see your business in five years?
In the next five years, I see LANFarms becoming a bio-tech company for research & developmen in food producition, a storge service provider for farmers, a Unicorn, having billions of users, operating on a global scale to serve customers in unsupported users, a great max team, a possible M&A from either Amazon or big retail giant, and most likely an IPO (that would be sweet).
What do you think the biggest challenge will be for you in getting there?
When we started in Nov 2020, the effects of COVID really did affect us.
From setting up, to marketing and even team formation, we have felt the impact of COVID. Raising funding to enable us scale our growth has been difficult.
This 2022 along, we’ve gotten thousands of rejection emails from grant organizations, VCs, and investors. It’s that crazy, and the current market is not favaourable to our growth right now.
This means we have to do more less, and scale down to a vey low point.
For instance, we have over 50K users across the globe who have signed up on LANFarms, but we can’t onboard them, as we don’t have the logistics and infrastruture to do so now, thus we are operating within a scope.
Talk to us about your biggest success story so far?
The biggest success story is getting to work with 10k users in our current market, geeting featured by top tier publications spolitghting what we are doing at LANFarms, and partnering with big agro brands to scale their opertaion.
In our operations this far, we have gone above and beyound in revenue with no funding and full-fledged marketing.
How do clients and customers find you? Are you much of a salesperson for yourself?
Through organic channels like SEO, and content marketing, customers have been able to find LANFarms and purchase products.
I am a Salesperson with over 15 years of exprience in leading marketing and sales for organizations. Parnering with a top-class agency like Rovamedia has given us leverage.
What one tip would you give to fellow startup founders?
Being a founder is hard, you’re doing what only a few think of doing.
For my fellow startup founders what’ll say is resilience is important than just starting, and you need to stay true to the process, as it’ll not be rossy.
This is why having a relationship, family and good friends will take you far. Keep pushing, lauch now – don’t wait till it’s perfect before you lauch, nothing is perfect.
And finally, what do you hope the future brings both you personally, and your business?
Personally I do hope in the future, I am able to learn numerous leassons from establishing this franchise.
For the business, I look forward to seeing LANFarms be a force for good in the ecosytem.
Finally, I hope founders young and old, and upcoming founders are being to learn from my experience.
