Pheronym’s amazing 6 week-journey at the NSF I-Corps teams program

The challenges, up and downs, surprising discoveries, and meeting amazing people on the way to completing 100 customer discovery interviews.

Pheronym is developing pheromones from microscopic roundworms, nematodes, to control agricultural pests; nematodes, and insects. Our end users are growers, conventional and organic farmers. Our task was very simple: “Talk to 100 growers to understand their pain points with respect to difficult pests”. Traditionally, at I-corps participants get out of the building or go to conferences to meet people for in-person interviews. We could easily go to a few grower conferences and a couple of industry conferences and maybe meet 20- 25 people at each conference. How hard could it be talking to 100 growers?

Getting 100 interviews was a real challenge for a number of reasons. First, due to Coronavirus, we couldn’t “get out of the building” to meet our customers for in-person interviews at the farm or at grower conferences. So, we did the next best thing, phone calls and videoconferencing. On the bright side, virtually getting out of the building opened up the whole world. Second, we quickly learned August and September were bad months to talk to people. Farmers were out in the field, harvesting their crops. We had one grower that couldn’t talk to us for two weeks because he was…