At Navigate Ventures, we support the founders of the leading B2B Enterprise SaaS platforms  solving the biggest problems in the world, as they look to bridge the growth capital funding gap. 

In 2021, we invested in Barn2Door, an all-in-one business solution that gives farmers everything  they need to be successful in today’s market – whether selling online or in-person. 

Its founder, Janelle Maiocco, grew up in a farming community and has a unique understanding of  the business challenges facing independent farms today. I sat down with her to explore her  insights into such a vital sector of the economy, and why she believes vertical SaaS is the key to  enabling farmers to thrive… 

Great to be with you Janelle. Let’s start by running through your background and career  history prior to setting up Barn2Door. 

I come from Dutch dairy farming roots and was raised in the town my grandfather helped  found in the Pacific Northwest near the Canadian border. Kids would milk cows on the way to  school, and my summer jobs involved riding tractors and picking a lot of berries. Growing up 

there, I developed a huge affection for farmers, their incredible work ethic, values, and role  within community life. 

I went to a university in Seattle where I got my MBA, which was fabulous because it landed me  in a tech ecosystem. I very quickly got swept up in entrepreneurship and ended up working for  a food tech venture fund, including consulting for a lot of food-based statewide commissions.  I’ve always been intrigued by food – after ten years in Seattle’s tech ecosystem, I went back to  culinary school to become a trained chef. 

Working as a chef gave me an insight into just how much demand there was for local farm  products – everyone wanted to get local food from farmers, but the process was so clunky:  email lists, cash, check, phone calls etc. This was my light bulb moment, it was crazy that farms  could be failing while the demand for good, local, healthy food was so high. 

So I started building software for farmers to bring their food to market. I never pegged myself  as an entrepreneur, but I knew that this was too big of an opportunity to pass up. Saving the  future of the local food system—helping farmers be successful and making sure that people  had access to real, nutritious food in their future—was an easy yes. 

Did you land on the idea behind Barn2Door straight away? 

My first company was a two-sided marketplace rather than a vertical SaaS solution. It seemed  like the obvious solution for food. As consumers, we love convenience. Even though nine out of  ten people prefer local food, they won’t buy it unless it’s easy. We’re also very familiar with  visiting marketplaces where all the supply options are on the same website.  

But I quickly found out that marketplaces are cost-prohibitive companies to run. You must  acquire two types of customers—supply and demand – and manage logistics, which is all very  expensive. As a result, most marketplaces take a 30% - 80% slice of suppliers’ gross revenue in  return for handling all of the marketing, sales, logistics, insurance and security. For farmers, a  marketplace is simply an expensive sales channel. It’s not how independent farmers actually run  their businesses.  

The other challenge was the geographic constraints of tangible products in a local market. With  a marketplace, you can’t help every farmer everywhere because you’re physically hog-tied to a  region for logistics. If I really wanted to help farmers all across the country, I realized that I had  to do something different than a marketplace.  

I looked around at other vertical SaaS companies like Toast, Mindbody, Procore and  ServiceTitan, which were disrupting multiple industries with vertical SaaS, and saw that no one  had done the same for farmers. This was the inspiration for Barn2Door – to create an end-to end business solution that would power every aspect of a farmer’s business while letting them  own their brand, customers and sales channels, while setting their own prices and managing 

their own logistics. As a result, a farmer can de-risk their business by not relying on a single  aggregator or commodity markets. 

How did you go about validating the concept and gaining traction? 

The key was to show that we understood our audience – farmers. Our first differentiating  feature was the ability for farmers to sell by weight— something we actually patented  domestically and internationally. We’re able to tokenize an upfront deposit on an animal, then  auto-calculate a final charge by final weight (after butchering) online or in person via POS. This  was built specifically for farmers, which generic solutions like Square or Shopify did not offer.  

We have maintained that mindset ever since – focusing on building features that farmers  specifically need for their unique products and operations. We want farmers to run their entire  business on Barn2Door, making every transaction easy for them—wholesale, retail, in-person,  and online. Once a farmer migrates their business, they’re all-in and rarely want to leave. 

How important do you think it is for founders to have deep domain knowledge in the  industries they’re seeking to transform? 

I think it’s mission-critical to be a domain expert. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everybody has good  ideas; it’s really all about execution. Domain expertise is a huge competitive advantage because  it informs our “why” and shapes what we build and how we solve problems. 

In my case, I started Barn2Door with a great deal of knowledge in food, farming and agriculture.  I have an MBA, technology sector experience, and I am a trained chef. I worked and lived in all  of these industries. I’m a product-driven CEO, so having been in all of those seats is invaluable.  It’s how Barn2Door became the market leader. 

Does this also apply to investors? 

Absolutely. We sought out vertical SaaS–minded investors rather than agriculture industry  investors, because they’ve seen success in other verticals and offer a wealth of experience and  knowledge. Building a vertical SaaS platform means a lot of domain specificity as well as  patterns across industries, so it’s important to find partners with experience supporting this. 

What has been the key to your ability to scale? 

Historically, farmers have had rough avenues to market—aggregators, distributors, auctions or  single contracts that have eroded profit margins, controlled prices and owned the buyer  relationships. Farmers are cautious because they’ve been burned before, so Barn2Door has  worked hard to earn trust by being authentic, building farm-specific solutions, and establishing  our business as the domain expert. We help farmers remove the middleman and de-risk their  business by selling directly. And we share data and insights from the millions of ‘local farm 

food’ transactions going through Barn2Door—including best practices, pricing and packaging  guidance, and operational strategies (e.g. building a base of recurring subscriptions).  

All of Barn2Door’s domain knowledge and insights have fueled a content-marketing strategy  that attracts farmers to our blogs, podcasts, ebooks, videos and classes. A persistent content marketing strategy focused on farm success has driven inbound interest, including word of  mouth, referrals, direct traffic and search, which have been ideal acquisition channels. 

How are you thinking about your product roadmap, particularly since the emergence of Gen  AI? 

We’re always looking to improve Barn2Door’s platform, and there are plenty of exciting  opportunities for Generative AI to help farmers with pricing and packaging, onboarding and set up, inventory content and builds, and/or matching them with more buyers. The key thing that’s  unique to vertical SaaS is the amount of proprietary data at our fingertips. Barn2Door has  millions of transactions to leverage and inform Generative AI guidance in our product for the  benefit of farmers. So, yes, we expect Generative  AI to become a central tenet for Barn2Door’s  product roadmap in the future. 

Finally, what does the future hold for Barn2Door? 

Barn2Door’s goal is to become a household name synonymous with local food, and disrupt  agriculture the same way Uber disrupted transportation and Airbnb disrupted hospitality.  Barn2Door opens the door for farmers to make more money in a sustainable, predictable way -  which is game-changing. With software, Barn2Door can serve farmers anywhere, because we’re  not limited by geography or the need to handle distribution. 

More than a million buyers are using Barn2Door to buy directly from local farmers. Once we  own sufficient supply in this industry, there’s a lot of opportunity for revenue expansion. We’re  actively engaging investment partners with the experience and ambition to build a category defining brand. 

Thank you so much for your time Janelle. 

I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, thank you. 

-ENDS 

Janelle Maiocco, CEO and Founder of Barn2Door 

Janelle Maiocco is an experienced entrepreneur with a wealth of food-tech and agriculture  experience, and a passion for supporting independent farming everywhere. 

About Ivan Nikkhoo

Ivan Nikkhoo is the Founder and Managing Partner of Navigate Ventures, an early growth fund specializing in B2B Enterprise SaaS companies located outside Silicon Valley. The fund targets investments between Series A and Growth rounds, employing a risk-mitigated strategy designed to achieve a short holding period and an expedited path to Distributions to Paid-In Capital (DPI). A sought-after speaker, Ivan frequently shares his insights at venture capital and family office conferences globally and is a regular contributor to several industry publications.