Julia has worked for 3 years so far building a modular mushroom farm space that will produce 80-100kg a week. This system will have a ‘plug and play’ environment control sensor system. The MYCOMAKER POD concept will be easy to use, energy efficient, transportable, scalable and suitable for urban and regional spaces. Julia came into the program with a focus on growing sales of her urban mushroom farm by increasing production through development of modular mushroom growing units. And then scaling production, sale and distribution of these units as turn key, plug and play grow spaces for urban farmers.
As Julia progressed through the program a clear value proposition was established through industry and customer engagement on pain points and themes such as cost of DIY builds, lack of know-how, unreliable control systems, substantial farm startup costs and production issues leading to no time to work on a business. In better defining the solution, Julia was able to capitalise on her extensive production knowledge to formulate a solution that delivers a calculated return on investment, is an urban production asset, provides training programs, school & employment training pathways founded in a viable compact, sustainable and controlled environment modular farm.
Through the program Julia was able to test assumption, redirect and refine the MYCOPOD concept whilst benefiting from interaction with other program entrepreneurs on pitfalls and preparing to take a product to market. A significant outcome was to understand that her values based solution needs to be simple, solutions focused, easy to use, easy to understand and contained within a usable, viable and desirable POD design.