Gardening for the People — Ignite OKC 13

I got obsessed with gardening

In the recording: 1:02–1:06 · 1:17–1:35.

I got obsessed with gardening.

We were having a lot of success out of our garden. We were growing a lot of food, and we were feeling so energized and so excited. I was learning all I could about gardening. I went through a master gardener course. I was learning how to build all this kind of stuff.

Let's build an app

In the recording: 1:43–2:09 · 2:15–2:37.

We started a random YouTube channel where I was just out in the garden making videos like, hey, here's my tomato, just doing random stuff. It kind of blew up on us. At that time we had a bunch of spreadsheets and stuff that we were keeping track of with our garden. A lot of people are asking, like, when do I plant this where I live? It was getting like a lot of tedious work, so we were like, let's build an app.

I worked in software, but I didn't know how to code, so I learned how to code. I got some friends to join me. We started building this app. It's called From Seed to Spoon, and it makes growing food easy. It calculates planting dates based on where you live. It gives you all the information about how to grow, companion plants, pests, everything you need to know about how to grow food. All the books we have consolidated down into one app.

Make a business out of this

In the recording: 3:04–3:37.

Let's maybe try and make a business out of this. We were very fortunate to get paired with the Oklahoma City Thunder Launch Pad, which helps launch businesses out of Oklahoma City. We got to go through a mentorship program. We needed to do a couple things. We needed to monetize our app with paid features, so we built a garden plus feature that lets you log your plants, and it tells you when stuff is going to sprout and all that kind of stuff. We launched the store. We're shipping stuff out of our store right now with our four kids. It's chaos, but that's our life.

Starting a five-acre sustainable teaching farm

In the recording: 3:45–4:00 · 4:52–5:02.

We literally packed up our garden, moved out to five acres and launched our dream of starting a five-acre sustainable teaching farm that any school in Oklahoma could come out to. That's really the goal of what we want to do with our app, is to be able to fund that.

We had no idea where it would go, and now here we are. If you have a dream or a way that you think you can make things better, go do it. Don't wait. I'm glad I didn't.