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- [00:01]
A
Because you screw it up, you're in the penalty box for not a few minutes. Like a hockey game, you're in the penalty box for a few years and you don't have that time.
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B
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Today our guest is Ben Allen, CEO of Bincentry. Ben, welcome to the show.
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A
Happy to be here, Brett.
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B
Let's go ahead and jump right in. So, feed management, how'd you end up in this world?
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A
Well, I grew up in agriculture in Iowa and then went and did some tech work at Advanced Micro Devices and some other tech companies and ended up putting my ag background and career together with my tech background and career. You know, one plus one equals three for me. And the ag tech was a fun place to be. You know, it's been a lot of fun.
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B
I feel like there's this almost probably ignorance of people who look at farming and think that they're, you know, not interested in technology, they don't want to adopt technology. And from speaking with a lot of agtech founders, I've learned that that could not be further from the truth. Like this kind of stereotypical like, farmer who just like, doesn't want technology, like doesn't really exist. Or at least from the conversations that I've had with other ag tech founders. Is that an accurate way to think about the space?
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A
I think for the most part, I mean, ag is a little bit lethargic as it takes new work on. It's a very big, bulky business. Their semis move in all the time, 24, 7. It's all big stuff and it's all at scale. So even a small farmer has to operate at scale or they don't survive. So that just means they don't tend to play around with technology much. They wait for it to really work and when it works, it takes off. Everybody goes and has fun and things scale very quickly. Like autosteer on tractors was a great example. That's something you could see and Touch. And there was immediate roi and it took off. If you can't show that kind of, you know, excitement and clear use case and clear your roi, well then good luck. You know, these guys are pretty pragmatic. They're not going to touch you.
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B
And if you just think about feed management as a category, you know, for those listening and myself of course, like, what does that mean exactly? I can kind of piece it together and understand it. But maybe just for an outsider's view, like, what does feed management look like? Paint a picture for us.
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A
Well, more than 90% of the planet eats meat. And that growing meat supply chain is one of the biggest on the planet. Almost 40% of the corn and soy that we grow in the United States, which is by far the biggest crops we grow, move directly into animal feed products. And then those animal feed products go directly to animals that end up on grocery store shelves. To give you some idea of the sense, just at the feed mill node of that supply chain in the US we sell more than $120 billion worth of feed a year, so about 10 billion a month. And these are very low margin feed mill business single digit Ebitdas. So they're buying almost $10 billion worth of ingredients a month. So that node at the feed mill is in the middle of $200 billion worth of transactions a year. US is only 20% of the market. So globally it's a trillion dollars worth of transactions around feed mills. That's the math that gets us some attention. But the world doesn't see it. They just don't know what's happening in that world, man.
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B
Sounds like an exciting market to be in then, given the size. When you think about feed management, what's the history of innovation? Like, how has feed management evolved over the last two decades?
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A
It's barely evolved in the last two decades. It really started evolving about five, six years ago. And we're at the forefront of that evolution. So my grandfather worked in feed mills in the 50s in Iowa, and he would recognize most of how feed mills are run today, with the exception of maybe all the spreadsheet utilization that's happening inside of the offices. But we use humans to look into bins to try and guess what's there. And then they call that order in. And then everybody's reacted to it in the supply chain trying to get things delivered a lot like grocery stores used to be run in the 50s before point of sale data. And you say, hey man, it's 2026. This shouldn't be that hard of a problem. But feed inside of feed bins creates a really complex environment. It's got different density, different moisture, so it's not like a pile of sand. A pile of sand always has a clean angle of repose. It's always the same shape. Feed can rat hole, it can flint, it can have multiple peaks. So we have to use really high end time of flight Swiss cameras to map the surface of the inventory in order to be accurate enough to be useful in a multi billion dollar supply chain. We just cracked that like six years ago. And as that accuracy has been brought to the market, you're watching this innovation wave happen right now that we're a part of and we're very excited for. But most of the world is still using manual human data collection to run this big bulky supply chain with all the money behind. It's a really big opportunity.
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B
How much change management then is involved when a customer says yes?
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A
Well, the workflow processes change, the places are getting their data changed, the speed at which they can not only get that data, but manipulate that data, the trust and the accuracy all goes up. So there's a lot of change management around day to day workflow operators, you know, the people that are working with these products and these supply chains, right away we work really hard to make it a no brainer type of experience. We're like, oh, I see where I'm supposed to go in the product and I see why I'm supposed to go there. And we've worked with a lot of customers to make sure that it's fairly obvious and these people understand all the work being done. They just have to be taught in the software where to go, you know, to find the workflow that they used to do manually or in spreadsheets. So there is change management. Thankfully, our product and engineering teams have made that fairly self evident. That journey is fairly well laid out in our product so that people can train and train and train themselves. But also training's free with us. We're like, hey, call anytime. We will help you with anything. You need to find the next layer of depth, the corner where the product does something for you that you are just getting to in your own day to day experience, whatever that may be. So there's management around change, but we try to keep it in the product as often as possible and when we can't, we come running with training.
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B
This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be Thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. And when you zoom out here and look at the go to market strategy, what does the go to market strategy look like today? And if there have been any major evolutions, maybe talk us through those evolutions.
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A
Well, agtech has been, you know, an area of technology that hasn't performed that well from an investor standpoint. We haven't had dozens and dozens of awesome exits for founder teams, and that creates its own fight, if you will. Now, a lot of ag tech is directly at farmers, and those farmers are like the S of SMB. They're small businesses. They're run like sole proprietorships. Most of the time, we don't sell the farmers, we won't touch them. Because I've done a lot of that in my past. I'm not aware of a cost of customer acquisition formula that works out going to sole proprietors that are spread out geographically, all over the place. Like, I've tried it for many years in my career and I finally just gave up on it and said, this has to be B2B. Like, we have to go to the big companies in the world. The Cargills, you know, Wayne Sanderson Farms, Aviagen, the kinds of names you see in your grocery store most of the time. That's who we work with. Now, that's a discipline challenge, quite frankly, because you get calls and somebody says, I want to do some business and you've got to go, no. Like, you're not in our category of service. That makes us money. We've got to tell you, no, we're not going to sell our technology to use. So that discipline, people talk about that kind of thing all the time. You've got to know where you're going and you got to stay really focused on it. But I think our choice, well, it makes sense on a whiteboard when I say it like that. In agriculture, you're dealing with one of the most consolidated verticals on the planet. Like, ag has been around a long time. And the Cargills of the world are really big, you know, multibillion dollar operations with global reach. And one of the challenges I believe that AgTech's had that any small company trying to get into B2B with large enterprise focus is that there's such a disconnect between what the company can do and where it wants to go and its capabilities when it's young and small and what large enterprise is looking for and what makes them feel good about writing checks and signing deals. There's just such a disconnect that in that world, you know when you're small and you're nimble and you're moving really fast, because you can make changes in all kinds of the customer experience, not just the product, but the delivery, the training, the messaging, whatever that may be that you're fine tuning and experimenting with. That's the beauty of being on those small teams. Like, that's a really fun, innovative experience. I'm sure you've had it yourself. Like, it's really exhilarating because you can learn something on Tuesday and change it Wednesday morning. But large enterprise customers don't work that way and they're not interested in working that way. Like, they're not learning something on Tuesday and changing Wednesday morning. Nor do they want to talk to you about something on Tuesday that shows up different on Wednesday morning. Like, it wobbles them a little bit. Big enterprise craves safety and security and stability because they're moving at scale and they're moving a lot of things around and there's a lot of money at play. And so they're generally more interested in the results that they're, you know, that they're seeking and stability and safety than they are innovation and R and D. Now, there's exceptions to all of that, but typically, most large enterprises, that early mismatch between we're big and we want to know it works and we want to know it's safe and well. We're small and we're doing really cool things in a really new way and it's moving really fast. Bridging that difference when you're in a B2B world is one of the key challenges of finding product market fit. Because you've got to be presenting stability and safety and knowledge, knowing that in the background you can change things in a heartbeat and need to at different times. But you're not selling innovation generally. You're not selling that speed at which you react. You're selling some corporate outcome. You forget that you get enamored. Founder teams that get enamored with that founder experience and say, look how fast we can move. Look how cool we are. Like, that's not a product. That's an environment that may be an environment that's really fun, that you really chose because you were tired of doing other things in your career, but that's not what you're selling. And if you sell it in enterprise world, you get shot down a lot. Because that just sounds like rip to an executive that's trying to, you know, evaluate their career options and who they pick with vendors to support their enterprise journey. You know, I think it's a really important realization for founder teams that may love the small environment to say, no, no. The face you put on to enterprise has to be about stability and expertise and understanding. And the fact that you work. That took me entirely too long to figure out my career, quite frankly.
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B
Anything else that's taken you too long to figure out in your career that would be interesting and useful to the founder audience, especially those in ag tech?
- [12:08]
A
Yeah, I think so. I think that it's really important, even though you're working on your product all day long, to realize that you're not selling product, especially in the enterprise world, you're selling outcomes. So I'm not looking to buy a product. I'm an enterprise executive. I'm looking to buy an improvement of some kind. You know, the HBS professor Theodore Levitt, I think is quoted with or credited with this quote. My CTO says it a lot. If people aren't looking to buy drills or looking to buy holes like they need a hole, the drill is the tool that they'll buy to get the hole that they need. And I'm sure I'm slaughtering that quote in some way. But when you're working on your product all day in a small team and trying to be super excited about it, you really forget that on a regular basis you have to be reminded, we're not building product, we're building a solution that creates an outcome and that's what people are actually purchasing and that's what they want. And that when you're heads down on your product, well, you get blinders on and you forget that you've got to document and have highly credible proof points on the outcomes that your product drives. And if you're not working on that outcome world, at least as much as you're working on your product, you're screwing it up. Because that means you're wanting to sell innovation and you're wanting to prove how good your stuff is and how smart you are. And they don't care. They want to know what the change is that you're going to impact and how they can trust that that change is going to be delivered and that there's an ROI with it. You know, it's such A dichotomy. It's why founder teams can get a big meeting. They find that, you know a company and executive teams willing to listen to them, they rally, they work on their presentation, they walk in and then they talk about themselves for like half an hour to an hour. Here's what we do, here's who we are, here's what our product does. And at the end they're like, well, we think it went okay. And they go home and they wait for the call. And the call's like, yeah, we don't know what to do with you. Because that whole presentation was about the founder team and the founder's excitement about their product. Instead of the impact you can make and the numbers behind that impact and the reasons behind that, and the way that you can show up and the way that you're going to make the people making the purchase decision look good for making that purchase decision. So that, again, is one of these twists. You've got to be really careful to understand your audience and know what they're looking for in every meeting and what they need to make a yes decision and to sign a contract. It's most likely not more information about the technical points of your product. That's not really what gets deals done. Like, those are checkpoints with different teams and validating a deal as you go along in the enterprise world. But the enterprise world, you're looking at executives that need to perform and you're trying to help them perform, and they're making decisions about tool sets that can help them perform. If your head isn't in that space when you walk into those meetings, you're dead. You just don't know it yet. You know, you walking in, being super excited about the opportunity and a little nervous and wanting to talk about how you guys are cool and the product and the team, nobody cares. Like, just stop and think about what they need in their business life to get promoted or to be rewarded, whatever it is. And if you don't understand that you're not ready for the meeting, just take a minute, reschedule and get refocused on the audience and what they need. That, again, I think sounds fairly obvious, but I watch young teams screw it up all the time, and it's painful every single time because you don't get a lot of shots with those teams. You screw up. An intro meeting or a sales meeting with an executive team at an enterprise company, like, don't call me for a couple years, is generally the response until the team changes over and forgets that you screwed up. The first one, you know, it's really hard. And in ag, that's difficult for us because it's so heavily consolidated. There are not thousands of enterprise customers in the United States to go to. You know, there just aren't. There aren't hundreds of Cargills. There aren't even dozens of them. You know, they're really big companies. You need to hit the ball, and you need to hit the ball for them, not yourself. And so, you know, we spend a lot of time coming back to that. And, you know, when you get off that message and you're talking about yourself, because you can watch the eyes blaze over in a room in about three seconds. And so that lesson just continues to be important to us.
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B
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A
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B
yeah, I think that's like, the thing that technologists forget about is like, no one really gives a shit. Like, what they care about are the outcomes. They care about the job to be done. I would guess that you've probably read that book, but I feel like Jobs to be Done is like one of the most valuable resources that I've ever read and that I think any founder, especially if you're a technologist, that's a book to read and really try to understand and make it your bible.
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A
Totally agree. I mean, fantastic book, fantastic framing of the challenge that you've got to go after. A technologist, I agree, gets enamored with the work that they're doing, but they've also been enveloped in it so long that when they say certain things about the technology, they believe that the outcome or the logic chain of the impact of what they're talking about is commonly understood by other people in the room, and it's just not. They have to walk through the logic chain of how what they're talking about in technology leads to the outcome that the buyer really cares about and they forget to do it. Like, well, obviously, if I tell you things are a lot better and we can do it a lot faster, you're going to get to the point that that's a lot better for you. No, no, no. That's not obvious. Nobody else is living your world and your technology and your product every day and breathing and sleeping with it like you are. It's not obvious. Back down. Put it on paper, test it with people, make sure they can follow your logic chain to that obvious outcome. Or just stay in technology and stay out of go to market. Because that approach of we're going to talk about how cool our tech is, that's not a go to market approach.
- [18:12]
B
When you think about just the addressable market for you, just in terms of number of companies, like what does it look like? I had an ag tech founder on the other day and he was like, I want to say it was 35, maybe a little bit more than that, like 40 would be like a little bit more. But like he said, there's not a lot of people that he could really go after. Organizations I should say that he could go after that were at the scale that they were targeting, which sounds like it perhaps is pretty similar to your market.
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A
It can be. I mean I would guess the strong suspicion that when somebody says 35, they're talking about large poultry. So I would guess that that was a poultry technology because that's about how many large poultry companies there are. And there is no S or M in SMB in poultry. It's all just full enterprise. Pork is similar, but has a lot more middle market. Grain and feed is similar, but has more middle market. And so for us, when we look at the United States, which is one of the best markets on the planet, we tend to think about it as there's somewhere between 150 and 250 customers total in the United States that we'd be interest serving. And today we serve about 95 of them. You know, so we've made really good progress. And that's a very unique go to market challenge. Hey, you know, I'll pick the middle of the range I gave you, but there's 200, go get them. Now. The cool part is that means you can do account based marketing and have one to one campaigns per account, which is complex. But when your market size is small in terms of prospect count, you have that opportunity. You know, the opposite is a consumer experience where you're going after millions and you're trying to generalize and everything is a segment or generalization of who you're going after with the customer. You know, there's pros and cons to having small prospect sets. Some investors wouldn't touch it with the ten foot pole because they don't get it. Others get really excited because the size of the tam, the dollars with that, you know, that category, they're extremely large. But you've got to be really good with the opportunities and the messaging that you get because you screw it up, you're in the penalty box for not a few minutes. Like a hockey game. You're in the penalty box for a few years and you don't have that time. So it's a fairly consolidated market and that's true globally in the markets that we go and play. So, you know, someday we hope to work with less than a thousand customers. If we do that, we will have run the table and we'll be having a lot of fun.
- [20:22]
B
And once you start to hit that, or maybe just even looking at the US it sounds like you have the majority or a big chunk of that market today. Where do the growth opportunities come from then? Is there land and expand? Like where does the growth come from given that that customer base is so small?
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A
Well, we are going to grow. There's three primary ways to grow for a company that's in our stage. One is M&A. M&A struggles in agtech because there haven't been a lot of successes. So there just aren't enough targets out there to, you know, roll up an M and A strategy in a typical private equity type of environment. So for us that'll be opportunistic. So you know, for a company our size, there's three main ways to grow to the next levels and they're fairly typical and they're well understood. You can expand product, you can expand geography, or you can grow through M. M and A is tough in agtech because there just isn't enough prospects out there. There aren't enough targets to make a typical PE strategy for M and A seem very exciting. We'll still look at it opportunistically, but it's not going to be a typical like roll up environment where you've got hundreds of targets to think about. Product, we're expanding very aggressively. We have the biggest data set in human history for animal feed consumption. You know, the use for that data set and the analytics and the insights that continue to fall out of it. And the tools that we can build on top of those insights and analytics continue to expand extremely rapidly. And we're very aggressive about the use of AI. We're a native AI company. The funds that wrote checks for us in 2020, we were their first AI investment. AI tools are right 98% of our code base and we're very excited about where that's going. So product expansion is something we are fully invested in and spending millions of dollars a month on. And then geographic expansion. To get back to the point of your question, you know that is countries that look like the US in terms of their operating structure. We like the consolidation. We want them to be big markets. We want them to be in confinement animal production, which is generally birds and pigs. And we want to go after the biggest of the big globally, Southeast Asia, Brazil, parts of the eu. Although the EU is very country specific, it's really not a block of market. You know, Germany is different than France in a lot of ways. And you know, better understand that when you're walking into Europe. And we will continue to move primarily directly as opposed to M and A ing our way into those markets. We'll primarily build direct efforts to go into those markets so we can serve these really big customers. I think there's one other point that I'll make because I know we're getting at time and I know the listeners out there have better things to do than listen to me drone on. But I think that founder teams, you and I talked about the product and man, you better be focused on the outcome and the solution. And I don't know how to say that enough, even though they hear it a lot. The other thing that I'll want to say to a young founder teams is that or old founder teams, I guess it's not an age issue, it's a spot in your career. But the company is its own product. Like when you're in an investor room, you're selling the opportunity that you can create with corporate success, your corporate success that is its own product that you are shaping through the team, through the credibility of the deals you sign, the technology and what it can do. A share in your company to an investor, that is what you're selling all the time. Don't go into an investor room and have a product conversation. You know, that's again, a technologist trap. It's a mistake. And you've got to separate that. The overlap of understanding, hey, yes, my investors are interested in the company, not the product. The product is how we build the company, but the company is how we generate the money. That chain isn't necessarily obvious to everybody and really needs to be pulled apart and thought about quite a bit. The difference is that when you're in your very early stages, you have to treat your customers as if they're investors because they know how small you are. And that represents all kinds of risk and danger. And so they've got to see outsized returns on the purchase of the product instead of the purchase of the stock, which is what early investors need to see outsized returns on. But there's this really interesting overlap that only lasts in the very early stages that you're treating customers, investors in a very similar way. Even though the product conversation you're having is different. It's two sides of the same coin. You sell the product, it creates a company that is a product. And if you don't understand that, you're just not thinking through the difference of your audiences again. And please, please fucking understand that that's
- [24:46]
B
where we're going to end. Please fucking understand it. Ben, this is so much fun. I would love to have you back on anytime. You're an awesome guest. You really brought the value. I know this is going to be a really, really popular episode. Before we wrap, where should we send people so they can follow along with you and your journey?
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A
Ben Century dot com. You know, just come check us out. Watch the logo page. Get sexier every six months.
- [25:10]
B
Amazing. Ben, thanks so much. Appreciate it.
- [25:13]
A
Thanks, Brett. Really enjoyed it.
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B
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO, where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers, and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcast as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show, and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.