Mobile App Implementation

Tomappo is a web and mobile application that delivers the right information at the right time. In winter, the web-based garden planner lets users organize their gardens (good/bad neighbors, crop rotation) and plan the whole gardening season. The mobile app consists of a lunar planting calendar showing when to plant different types of vegetables, allows users to take notes, and provides weather forecast and more. T4S is a platform that offers garden centers an easy to manage online presence (forum, blog, webpage), direct communication to (younger) users (push notifications, e-mail), business intelligence (analyzing garden center POS data, weather data and our own data) and optimized operations as part of a virtual chain of garden centers (predetermined supply conditions, just-in-time delivery, stock turnover optimization).

Innovation
Business software for garden centers, mostly focused on POS functionalities, live inventory management and accounting and not focused on predictive business analytics. General software for business analytics or marketing (e.g. Mailchimp), which is not tailored for gardening. Tomappo4S combines relevant, gardening-specific open and proprietary data to fill this gap. Regarding mobile apps for gardening, we believe that a good UX, a complete toolbox and a sustainable business model are a necessity for a successful gardening app. Additionally, we are integrating unique technologies like irrigation model based on soil types, weather and phenological stage of plants and social sensors for measuring soil moisture, illumination and temperature.

Why?
Climate change is threatening the self-sufficient food production across the world. As many gardeners, backyard wildlife enthusiasts and farmers across the world have noticed, climate change is already having a significant impact on self-sufficient food production. Higher average temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns are causing plants to bloom earlier, creating unpredictable growing seasons. Even warm-weather plants like tomatoes can be harmed by increased temperatures. All the major warning signs are indicating that we need to take meaningful steps now to curb our carbon emissions. Given the strong relationship between gardens and natural variables such as temperature and rainfall, a changing climate will create some enormous new challenges for gardeners. Fortunately, there are actions that you can take to be part of the solution—even while gardening. By upgrading our mobile app with integration of new responsive automatic irrigation model, gardeners and farmers will be able to reduce water consumption. We want to encourage gardeners to adopt biodiversity gardening - gardening with the intention of increasing native biodiversity and planting heirloom seeds by upgrading our mobile app with seed-exchange platform and additional information about how to preserve and stimulate biodiversity.

Profit model:
Helping the user along the whole season means that we have all the data needed for efficient affiliate marketing of gardening related products and services. This includes seeds, tools, fertilizers, books, online courses, etc. Additionally, we have a premium subscription (18€/year) for the advanced garden planner. Based on our data (3.5% conversion to premium, 0.4 € user acquisition cost, 15-20% affiliate commissions) and market data (5.5% online retail sales market share) we breakeven with 200k users, while repeating the adoption of the initial T4S package in Slovenia in Italy and Germany would lead to a yearly turnover of around 2.5M€ (at an average monthly fee of 110 € per garden center). Once we upgrade mobile app for needs of precision farming we’ll target small scale farmers and market gardeners at first, next step will be targeting food producers in general – at that point mobile app will offer payable PRO version for them.

The app for gardening and garden planner are developed, but are constantly improved. The part for garden centers is currently being tested with wizard-of-oz like experiments before implementing the system. Business development is the current focus of our activities.

We are looking mainly for financial support for further app development - upgrade but also partners for tech-coop and sales / distribution.