Brady and Jewel Lindsey, co-founders of Busy Bee Systems, came into the Great Plains I-Corps Hub’s Ag45 cohort as first-time founders without a background in agriculture or commercialization. The year before, they had gone through the Possibilities Fellowship at North Dakota State University, where they were first introduced to customer discovery and the I-Corps framework. Their first 20 conversations with beekeepers made them want to go deeper, so they applied for Ag45, a specialty cohort for teams building agriculture-related technologies. Teams in the program were required to complete 45 customer discovery interviews. The program ran virtually for several weeks and ended with an in-person event in Fargo, North Dakota, featuring panels, lectures, and two major agriculture events: the Big Iron Farm and Construction Show and Grand Farm’s Autonomous Nation conference.
Big Iron is the moment Brady and Jewel point to when they talk about what made the program worth it. They quickly realized the crowd was mostly farmers and not beekeepers, which, for a team building more sustainable and better insulated beehives, could have been a wasted day.
Their instructors helped them see it differently and think through how to approach the farmers who were there, including how bees may affect crop yields. “That was huge to kind of have us pivot and think about it from a different angle,” Jewel said. She doesn’t think that redirect would have happened without instructors who had been through the process themselves. “Having somebody that’s been there and done that has been a huge resource.”
What they value most about the program is harder to quantify than any single interview insight. It’s the shift in how they think about building something. “It’s not just customer discovery,” Brady said. “It’s also about partners and revenue models and ecosystems. Just kind of understanding the whole process.” For someone starting from scratch, that framework has been the foundation everything else is built on. “I don’t think we would have learned nearly as much doing it on our own.”