We recently connected with Clift Hart and have shared our conversation below.
Clift, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later
I started my business in 2011 or at least the idea behind it. After trying to grow my own food on a balcony in a small apartment I became obsessed with the idea of replicating food farming in indoor spaces. It took a very long time to get from there to where we are today. Along the way, the cannabis industry rose from a collection of small businesses into the growing behemoth it is today. That has unlocked affordable, efficient, LED lighting for pretty much any kind of food plant you want to grow indoors year-round. My only regret is not building a digital product earlier, but I’m not sure the timing would have been right until recently anyway.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started growing food for myself out of pure curiosity. My original goal was just to see how much I could grow and increase it from there. Eventually, I figured out how to grow with LED grow lights year-round indoors and the magic of indoor composting. I never imagined that it was possible to grow so much in such a small space indoors while ensuring high quality too. I’m more proud of the fact that I can help anyone get started in a few class sessions and empower them to grow all of their herbs, greens, and fruiting plants in very compact spaces without sacrificing aesthetics or a pleasant home environment. This type of food growing is truly the way of the future.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I pivoted many times during my journey with Plant3r. We built hardware prototypes and then released they were too expensive to bring to market. Something similar happened with our attempts at building a software solution to empower people to grow food indoors. But as time went on – technology changed everything. Now we have an indoor food gardening assistant called the Green Thumb Guide (GTG for short) which can replicate much of what we wanted to do with software using the latest LLM powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is truly an exciting time to be alive!
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Social media wasn’t really working for Plant3r until we started telling our own story. That helped others to know what we’re about and to entice them to join the story with us. Humans are driven by stories. All of the compelling products or companies have powerful stories that allow regular folks to feel like their part of the same movement. The other thing that helped a lot was focusing on one niche. Indoor food growing was not obvious from a market and technical perspective until just the beginning of 2023. Timing is critical when building a new company, but if you hang in there long enough you can sometimes wait until the timing is just right!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.iwantagreenthumb.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/plant3r_/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/plant3r
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/plant3r
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Plant3r1
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@plant3rgrows
- Other: GTG Link: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-Ce85BdfWw-green-thumb-guide Free Indoor Garden Grow Guide: https://tinyurl.com/Free-Indoor-Garden-Guide Free DIY Hydroponics Grow Kit Guide https://tinyurl.com/beginner-hydroponics-set Free 5 Gallon Bucket Hydroponic Guide https://tinyurl.com/5gallonbuckethdyroponicguide