We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Clifton Hartsuff. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Clifton below.

Clifton, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I was having tea late at night with my friend who was a guard at the Turkish embassy at the time and he happened to ask why so few people garden in the DC area despite the fact that the soil there was better than the best soil in Turkey. I gave him the usual answers one might have to a question like that. Most people are too busy, the process is complicated, not enough space to plant. But it didn’t satisfy me and I was haunted by the question to this day. I decided to do something about it and started working on Plant3r a few years later.

Clifton, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have a mixed work history with jobs ranging from forklift driver, intellectual property paralegal, and business development operations executive among many others. My natural curiosity has pulled me into new jobs regularly throughout my life, but curiosity is the main driver of whatever I am doing in my life at the moment. I stumbled onto food security issues after the 2008 financial crisis and that propelled me to start working on Plant3r. Our goal is to help first time gardeners grow successfully and scale up their food production over time.

Traditionally, gardening is seen as an after thought activity. Industrialization has moved human food production to an activity that only older generations focus on or enjoy. Our focus is on providing support for younger people who want an easier setup and process for growing their own food.

From the start, I have focused on reducing the barriers to growing more food for yourself in a systematic way. Growing is a simple process, but you have to be precise with timing and inputs for best results. Most people start off with a garden that is too large or complex and the result is dead plants and dashed hopes. But luckily, we now have brand new systems of growing and information technology to help us. My goal is to build the best system for taking a brand new food grower from a small garden to a large scale market farm. Simply put, Plant3r is providing the easiest system possible to start growing food for yourself no matter where you live or what you want to grow. Small scale food production is now season-less, vertical, works indoor or outdoors, and is just as productive as industrial agriculture.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My first startup failed after I invested more than $10,000 into a brand new UX/UI interface and built out a new Android/Apple app. It taught me that finding the market first, and building steadily better prototypes/minimum viable products for your customer base is the best way to start a technology business. Few people will ever lend you money for a new idea alone. If you have customers and can demonstrate that the business can scale up then it is possible to build almost any kind of business. I could have given up at any moment during this journey, but my food freedom mission was too important to let everything go.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

There are really only two ways to build a sustainable following on social media. 1) Regular high quality posts which attract your ideal customer profile (I’m still getting better at this, BTW) 2) Focusing on a niche where your customer resides in large numbers If you’re a local business then where do your customers spend time. If you don’t know, just ask them in a survey or via word of mouth in your shop. If you’re focused on a narrow niche, but it is national or international then the same principle applies, but it is much harder to query your audience. Start small and talk to as many people as possible when you’re first starting out to better refine your marketing targeting.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.plant3r.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/channel/UCRRKd_Z8x924aJgYKall2sg