MVA, the example of Antoine Pineau founder of Chez Vos Producteurs
The entrepreneurial story of Antoine Pineau, the founder and CEO of Chez vos Producteurs, not only teaches the importance of picking the right segment of customers to live with but also reminds us of the importance of starting with a small version of the big idea we have with what’s called in the startup ecosystem the minimum viable product, the MVP, that is different with the concept of the minimum viable audience, the MVA, that I will cover in the following paragraph using the worth to follow example of Antoine.
Antoine's big Idea is to connect French farm owners to French meat buyers so these farm owners have a better business experience than dealing with the big industrial food distribution chains which have a high power of negotiation that they often use to decrease year over year the revenues of agricultural professionals, also Antoine was willing to provide to french customers the freshest meat products shipped directly to them from the farmer’s facility.
With this Big Idea in mind, Antoine launched ericpinaeu.fr by starting with only one farm owned by his father Eric Pineau
Antoine has an engineering degree in agronomics that has nothing to do with big tech but he believed that he could exploit the knowledge about digital marketing he had to sell his father's products directly to French customers and to onboard other farmers if it works with his father like how Facebook started in Standford University and expanded to others universities and then to the whole world. For Farmers Antoine picked a minimum viable audience, his father only, and a minimum viable product, just beef meat nothing else.
MVA: His father
MVP: Just beef meat
You could see that with his startup Antoine started with The minimum of everything from farmers to work with to products to offer and now he expanded and created Chez vos Producteurs to work with other farmers and offer other agricultural products.
There is still a lesson to learn about the minimum audience with the experience of Antoine because Antoine increased the number of categories of meat products that he offers by covering exotic categories of meat like Autriche meat but if you ask Antoine if he offers Halal meat (meat that respect Islamic religious recommendation) or cacher meat (meat that respects Jewish religious recommendation)m Antoine will answer NO I offer only french traditional meat. here is another example of the application of the concept of the minimum viable audience because Antoine has decided to serve people who eat meat processed without any other considerations about how the meat should be processed that goes beyond the regulation set by French authorities about food processing and selling. One could remark that another entrepreneur like Antoine could pick the MVA of consumers caring about Jewish traditional recommendations concerning meat or Muslim traditional recommendations concerning meat.
Antoine is a very dynamic entrepreneur who away from the startup dream has built a profitable online business by using this other entrepreneurial concept that is bootstrapping because Antoine has never raised funds. He started with 100 euros and reinvested the money he got back in the business that’s what bootstrapping is about starting a business from nothing without calling for Venture capital funds. But Antoine got the support network of the biggest startup incubator in the world because Antoine is an alumnus of Station F a French incubator hosting thousands of entrepreneurs from all around the world and creating the conditions for these startups to thrive.
If I am allowed to bring my opinion on the interesting entrepreneurial story of Antoine from which I learned a lot, I hope you do too, I would say that the actual challenge of Antoine is to get out of the economic loop of online advertising to independently get organically new customers through the production of content
Drea; big but start small is what would summarize Antoine Pineau’s entrepreneurial story and this could be achieved with these two important concepts of the Minimum Viable Audience and the Minimum Viable Product. I could bring another opinion in this blog article I would say that the best person who could teach you interesting insights about these two concepts is Seth Godin and you could start reading these blog articles :
or crunch the many books by Seth Godin about entrepreneurship.
Thank you for reading this article I have had the opportunity to listen to Antoine Pineau share his entrepreneurial experience and I was willing to share what I have learned from his speech as I often do when I learn something so thank also to Antoine Pineau for sharing. if you are in France or Spain go order fresh meat from https://ericpineau.fr/ right now before it’s too late because Antoine’s other clever decision is to implement flash selling [Time bounded opportunity ] for driving conversion but ze have been already dealing with many things today let’s meet here another day for covering this entering selling strategy and conversion.
