Before you start this lesson make sure to click here and download the Business Plan Worksheet that Jonah will show you how to fill out over the next 2 lessons.
Video Transcription:
In this lesson, I’m going to show you one of my two favorite methods of conducting quick market research. By the end of these next couple lessons, you’ll be able to identify the two most important factors in your local market: who’s buying and who’s selling? Let’s jump into my computer and I’ll show you how.
In this section, we’re going to do market research using Instagram to fill out our business plan. But before we start doing that, we want to fill out the basic information on our business plan. So, we’re going to start with our name, our business name. So, if you don’t have your business name and website yet, that’s totally okay. You can fill this out as you go along through the marketing section of the course. Business name, I’ll put in my farm name and our website livingearthfarm.ca and our city is Toronto.
Now, the crops we’re going to grow are going to be pea shoots, sunflower shoots, radish and broccoli. Now, the products we’re going to grow are pea shoots, sunflower shoots, crunchy micromix and broccoli. And the service we’re providing is a direct to the consumer microgreens model. So, we’re selling direct to the consumer and that’s the model and service that we’re offering is the delivery direct to the consumer and the prices are going to range somewhere between $5 to $7. So, we’ll leave it like that for now and we can always adjust this as we go along with the research. So, on the rest of the pages you have here, this is where you’re going to find your competitors and can jot down their information here and this will help you kind of compilate what price you should sell your product at, what products your competitors are selling and to keep an eye on your competition as you go along in your microgreens journey.
So, we’re going to start by using Instagram to find some competitors. So, what I suggest searching is microgreens and then your city, town, province or state or country but the closer you are to where you actually are, the better your market research will be. If you do the search and you don’t find your city or town, look for the city or town beside you and the ones surrounding you and you will find the answers that you’re looking for. So, we’re going to search Microgreens Toronto. So, #microgreenstoronto and we’re going to see what’s coming up here. So, you can see there’s quite a few posts here and your city may not have as many. Toronto is a big city and that’s totally fine, but we’ll start doing some research here. We can see this one. This is actually a local store that’s close to me, that’s why I clicked on it. So, I can see these. This company seems to be selling their products. So, if we click on here, it’ll open up their page. We just do a quick scroll. We can see the date is quite recently so it’s April 20th here right now and it’s April 2nd. So, this is a new post. So, we know this company is still operating. We can see their products look good. So, I’m going to click on–well, actually before I do that. I’m going to start putting down the information. So, their name is Greenarium. Their website is greenarium.ca, and their handle is also greenarium.can. So, that’s easy.
Now, we’re going to go on their website and see what products they have and what their listing looks like, if they’re selling direct to consumer. Okay. So, perfect. So, this company is selling direct to consumer. They sell broccoli, sunflower, pea, red cabbage, kale. They sell quite a few products. So, we’re going to put–the first thing we see is the price so we can see the price is $5. So, their price across the board is $5. The products they sell. So, what we really care most about is what products they’re selling that we sell because that’s the direct competition. So, they’re selling broccoli, sunflower, pea and they do not have a crunchy mix. So, that’s why I recommend the crunchy mix because it creates a good competitive advantage. So, we’re just going to mark down the products they sell: broccoli, sunflower and pea.
And what I recommend with the notes here is to just search through and see what sizes they’re actually selling the product. So, let’s see if that works here. So, they’re selling–their sunflower is 85 grams, their pea is 71 grams and their broccoli if this picture will load 57 grams. 57 grams, and what we’re actually going to do here in our products is we’re going to put pea shoots. We’re going to sell at 100 grams. We’re selling sunflower at 100 grams. What is going on here? We’re selling a crunchy mix at 75 grams and our broccoli at 60 grams. So, as you can see comparing this company, they’re selling it for $5. The broccoli is on par, it’s 60 grams. Their pea shoot and sunflower is less. So, we’re potentially providing more product, so that’s something to keep in mind. So, we’re going to make a note there. Our product is larger unit sizes than this competitor. And then some other notes I marked down is delivery is free over $25. So, that’s important to know what their delivery policy is. So, five boxes is $5. So, 5X5 is 25 and they do weekly orders, it looks like. Yeah. So, that’s pretty much how you want to fill up. So, you want to go through Instagram and find other competitors and do the same thing. So, you want to see who else is growing in your area. So, you can go to these other, that’s also the same company. But here, this Crop.farm, you want to go there, see what they’re selling and kind of repeat the process. The more information you can gather here, the better able you are to create a product at the right price and you can account for the delivery fees and all that kind of stuff that other competitors are doing.
So, this is a great, great way to do market research. The first way is with Instagram. So, now we see that it still fits within our range of $5 to $7 with that first competitor and as we continue to do this, we might refine our price range based on the competition. But that’s how you do market research with Instagram. And next, we’re going to move on to doing Google search.