Impact of practices
In-platform demo: the user selects one or more plots and can see the impact of the selected regenerative practices.
Soil Heroes
Digital product development for impact startup
About
Soil Heroes is a startup that provides farmers with new and sustainable business models and income flows, helping them to farm with nature, rebuild soils and produce tasty and healthy crops.
Our product
We developed a groundbreaking platform to scale regenerative farming through the connection of farmers to business using impact data.
WebSecurityEmbedded
2018
2019
January
Founded
October
Partnered with Tweede golf
2020
February
MVP launch
May
First farmers on platform
2021
Scale-up
2022
2023
Main challenges for this startup
Lack of CTO
Lacking a CTO the founding team was challenged in attracting and assembling the right technical team.
Blockchain or no blockchain?
One of the principal choices to be made upfront was “do we go for a blockchain-based platform from the start, or are we going to create an MVP using standard crypto?”
Moving quickly
As with any startup, Soil Heroes had to move quickly from their 1-slide concept to a working product in order to validate the idea and satisfy investors.
Workable data models
Complex data is a big component in Soil Heroes` added value. In order to achieve their mission, they needed to translate complex data models into working software, making it usable to a not-so-tech-savvy group of users.
Jens from Soil Heroes
Product owner
Hugo
Co-owner & Business developer
Marlon
Backend developer
Marlon
Co-owner & Lead developer
Ruben
Software Engineer
Team facts
Without a CTO, Soil Heroes needed an experienced team to work with their product owner beyond the level of implementation.This project team:
- Has been working together for 10+ years on complex software
- Is highly skilled and all have an academic background in computer science
- Have the analytical capabilities needed to work with complex data
- Ended in the top 5% of Google's Hash Code 2021, an international team programming competition
Working with Tweede golf
We are a close group of engineers and developers with backgrounds in information security, mathematics and computer science. We think active collaboration is the most important condition for success. In the day-to-day operations, our self-organising team will work directly with your product owner in a way that suits both you and our developers. The result is that they feel closely involved with your ideas and allowing them to work iteratively and effectively.
Product vision to MVP
Our developers are comfortable in the consultant role, using their analytical skills to sharpen your ideas into an actionable plan. We look beyond the technology, and help you find the simplest solution possible.
In-house vs outsourced
Throughout our collaboration we aim to bridge that infamous gap of in-house vs. outsourced development. We do this by selecting small teams with all the required skills. Think of our teams as the natural extension of your product development team.
Whatever project you work on with us, large or small, you will always encounter a strong engineering mindset, the search for ever better software and tools, for elegant solutions and for secure and privacy-friendly software.
The product
A powerful digital platform to facilitate regenerative farming at scale. Since no off-the-shelf solution was available, we developed the product from scratch. We used a robust open-source tech stack.
Node.jsReact
Timestamp Zero
Visualization of measurements for "Timestamp Zero": how healthy is the soil when a farmer joins the platform?
Remote sensing data
The app computes NDVI, a measure for live green vegetation, from remote sensing data and determines the presence of cover crops in a given time frame.
Manage seed mixes
The application offers a variety of administrator features. This one manages the definition of seed mixes, for instance to add a mix for a biodiversity edge around a plot.
Wrap up
- MVP realized in 6 months
- Onboarding customers in 5 countries
- Smooth & reliable development process
The road ahead
We're very happy to remain Soil Heroes' development team for the foreseeable future. As always, attracting tech talent in-house is a consideration for Soil Heroes. Should they want to start, we'll support them along the way and change roles accordingly.
What Soil Heroes has to say
At Soil Heroes we are closing in on the delivery of our SH Fairchain platform MVP [...] We could not have done so without our team at Tweede Golf; we call them our ‘tech team’, their actual role and contribution goes far beyond that.
Jens
Product owner
Let's talk?
Do you want to know if we can help you with your project? Call or email Hugo for a 10-minute chat.