Who are you and what business did you start?
I’m Chad Johnson, the CEO and co-founder of the Grain Weevil Cooperation. My son, Ben is the robot electronic engineer and Chief Innovation Officer at Grain Weevil.
Grain Weevil originally came out of a project to encourage Ben to learn robotics in high school. We started out tinkering with robots at home. Eventually, we found ourselves in business with a big problem to solve.
Our robots help farmers manage grain storage in the agriculture industry. Corn and Soybean farmers store grain in large upright bins, and our robots are used to manage and move that grain, and most importantly, keep farmers out of the bin. There are more than 20 deaths from grain entrapments each year.
Fast forward to now, and we have nine full-time employees and have garnered almost 200 million views on social media of our robots. We’ve raised capital and are fully sprinting down the journey of being a startup company.
What was your background? How did you come up with the idea?
I’m an elementary school teacher by trade. When the company was starting, I was working for the Nebraska Public Power District, leading their community education efforts.
Part of my duties was to help run student robotics programs all across the state. I love robots. Our goal was to teach workforce skills, and I would run these fun competitive robot programs for high school students.
At the time my son Ben was in high school – so he ended up being my guinea pig for my robotic contests and curriculum. We got into robots together.
Through the program, Ben built a pretty cool working robot for a startup company in Chicago. It wasn’t for business or anything, just an education project. We lived in a small town and our neighbor, who was a farmer, witnessed Ben’s project robot. He was impressed.
He then gave Ben and me what we now refer to as ‘the challenge.’ It would become the founding moment of our company.
He said, ‘If you can build one of these, build me one to keep me out of a grain bin.’
What were your first steps to starting the business and coming up with your product?
Neither Ben or I had ever been inside a grain bin, but we’d been around them. In a small town like ours, these large grain storage towers were normal sights.
We learned later, that grain bins are a challenge for farmers. Grain bins are hot, dirty, and dangerous workplaces.
Grain has to be handled and managed throughout the entire storage process, and normally the only solution has been a farmer entering the bin with a shovel.
Farmers must risk falls, entrapments, auger entanglements, and chronic illnesses like farmer’s lung every time they enter a grain bin. Unfortunately, entrapment deaths occur almost annually—nearly 25 a year. Worse, teenage boys account for one in five grain bin accidents.
Ben and I learned that the challenge our farmer friend gave us was not only a big problem, it was a worthwhile mission to pursue.
An ugly-looking machine
Throughout 2019, Ben was in college. When he was home, he and I would tinker around with this robotic project. Nothing really worked well, and for a while, it was just a fun project for us to get to work on together. Finally, in March of 2020, we had one built that we thought was functional.
We drove out to our neighbor’s house and plopped the robot into the grain bin.
It was 3D printed, duct-taped together, and overall a pretty ugly-looking machine.
But it worked for about 45 seconds.
It went up a grain slope, down a slope, and turned the corner.
So even though it lasted less than a minute, it did everything we needed it to do.
How did you go about validating the business idea? How did you know there was a need?
We were excited, and after a conversation with a different neighbor, who was a patent lawyer, we decided we should at least get this thing patented.
This was really important for us, as we got our provisional patent the day before our invention was introduced to the world.
The Silo Film Night
Our local county farmer’s group, the Hamilton County Corn Growers Association was showing a movie called The Silo, in our local theater.
The film was created to highlight the dangers of grain bin entrapment, specifically targeted towards farm families. It was a story of a teenager entering a grain bin, getting stuck, and the dramatic rescue mission needed to get him out. It was a heart-wrenching story about the dangers of grain bins.
The showing was free to anyone who wanted to come.
The local farmers invited us to attend and show our prototype robot. We decided to try to get some feedback on what we built.
We had set up a little table with our robot, and a 45-second video clip of the robot driving in a grain bin. After the film, we asked audience members, ‘What should we do with this machine?’
We wanted feedback and got tons of great ideas and input from the attendees.
The interesting part was that someone took their phone, and made a little video of our display and robot. They posted it on Twitter, and it garnered over 80,000 views. We got over 400 messages from interested people.
At that point, we knew there was a market for this. If this ugly machine that only lasted a few seconds could get this much attention, there was something here. This was turning from a father-son project to an actual business.
The next step was to get some help.
What does your business do uniquely in the market? How did you grow?
I had run a few businesses while I was a teacher, but I knew this was a bit of a different animal.
From my work at Nebraska Public Power, I had some contacts at our local Agriculture Technology Incubator, The Combine. An incubator is an organization dedicated to facilitating the growth of new startup companies. It’s like a training ground and education program for new business ideas.
Building a startup
We joined the Combine Incubator companies in late 2020 and began down the path of building a startup company.
Building a startup company is a little different than building a small business. A small business normally starts small – they build their product or service and then sell it – they grow over time. For us, it would have been building 2 robots, and then selling them, and then building a few more, and then so on.
A startup is quite a bit different.
What’s attractive about a startup is the potential of exponential scaling. You have to establish that there’s a market, and you work on growing and developing the company before you start to sell the product.
The Combine highlighted the importance of customer discovery. They kept pounding over and over again – learn from your customers.
When we started, we hadn’t spent hardly any time in a grain bin. We didn’t understand the real “why” behind what we were building.
Ben and I did hundreds of customer interviews, traveling to farms, and visiting with farmers across the state. We would throw our robot into their bin, show them what it could do, and then garner feedback and questions.
More than a safety tool
Early on, we had great feedback on what we were doing. Getting in a grain bin is the worst job on the farm. Everyone hates the job. We were told, “I would do anything to not have to go down in there again.”
So in the beginning our machine was designed around safety – what does our robot need to do, so that a farmer doesn’t have to go in there with a shovel?
We are a tool that keeps farmers out of grain bins, our mission statement is ‘no boots in the grain.’
And for many farm families that safety aspect will get their attention.
However, building a robot is not cheap.
The product has to also be a wise business investment too. For most, making this one task safer, isn’t enough ROI to justify the cost.
Part of our challenge is that the environment of a grain bin requires us to build a very robust machine. Grain bins are hazardous environments and our machine has to be safe to operate. Dust explosions are extremely dangerous, and our robot had to be explosion-proof. It takes a tremendous amount of power to move a machine through the grain. It’s not a portable drill. It’s very strong and powerful.
So, it makes the robot a lot more expensive than a shovel.
It represented a unique challenge – our team had to add value to what we did. We couldn’t just be a safety device, we had to do more to justify the cost of our machine.
Through more interviews and learning, we found that our robot has a huge value in better managing stored grain. Most of the time when farmers put grain in a bin, there’s a certain amount of loss due to the deterioration of the product over time. These are big humid bins and some of the product will spoil.
Our robots can help with this.
We can move grain. We can break up crusts. We can arete. We can level grain bins. We can prevent loss, and help that grain last longer.
We found that our machine is not only a safety device to keep farmers out of the bin, but is a tool to maximize farmers’ opportunities for high-quality grain.
That’s what has set us apart in this market and increased the ROI of the Grain Weevil.
What were some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned along the pathway of building? What would you tell new business builders?
The biggest thing that has surprised me the most, is how long it takes.
We are approaching four years and we still aren’t yet to the spot where we can sell robots. We have a fleet of robots and are starting to charge for services, but the process of getting from idea to true product is long.
There are a lot of hoops to jump through for a product like ours. There’s liability and insurance, and some of the biggest challenges we’ve faced have been in the regulatory and manufacturing environments.
It’s just surprising to realize how long it takes.
We’ve been fortunate to receive grants and funding from our local community. We have the support we need to stay viable until we reach the market.
But boy, if you are planning to launch a new business you better figure out how to plan to last for twice or even three times as long as you think you need to.
It’s going to take a lot more time than most people think.
Did you ever have any, Oh Crap, Moments? When you thought the business might not make it?
The biggest moment for us like that was this fall. There was a two-week period where we ran into some serious issues.
We have gone through years of development up to this point, and we finally thought we had a commercial robot ready to go out and provide services.
We decide to test our chops in a large two-million-bushel flat storage facility. Our goal was to test at the commercial scale, so we took ten robots out to this facility to move some grain. This was a huge customer opportunity – this company could buy a lot of robots in the future. I mean, huge customer opportunity.
And in like 30 minutes, we broke four robots.
We were supposed to be there for eight hours that night, and we had to stop after 30 minutes.
We went home and fixed the robots overnight.
Back the next day, we started again, and three more robots broke for different reasons. It was a disaster.
I was really worried. We had all these opportunities lined up for us all fall, and we had no reliability in our robots.
Back at the shop, we were scrambling to figure out the problems.
In just a few days, we had another big job coming up. We were supposed to travel to Indiana to level and manage a site with 26 individual grain bins. Three days before the trip, we had zero working robots.
I was already making plans on how I was going to save face with the client and ask for an extension. We had a contract to do the job, and I didn’t really want to do it with a rake. We had some late nights in the robot shop.
The night before, we finally solved a big problem and had eight robots working. We were overnighting hardware and redesigning things on the fly.
We drove them to Indiana, and had a successful two days, completing the job.
Then we were able to take the fleet of robots back out to the large facility we failed on and completed that job.
So, yeah, those are the kinds of things you encounter when trying to do this. You think you are ready for some big tests, and the machines tell you that you aren’t quite there yet.
I like to say that you could probably take those two difficult weeks, and it will tell you if you are ready for this kind of work. It would either convince you to never go into your own business, or it would jazz you up about how exciting this is and how fun it is to solve problems – the excitement of the challenge.
When you reflect on building your enterprise, how has it changed your life? Positive or negative?
A Family Affair
We are in a very unique situation – very few, if any, startups begin as father-and-son duos.
Early on, a venture capitalist told us to drop the father-son ‘bit.’ He said you can’t go out and find one tech startup that’s father-son; it doesn’t work and you shouldn’t try it.
Almost immediately one of our farmer’s customers spoke up. He explained that every one of our customers is going be a father-son operation, keep it.
So for me, this really is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I had a wonderful job where I was, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build robots with my kid.
With Grain Weevil, we can do something that not only has a great market upside, but is meaningful, and is making an impact on an industry. It’s just like a perfect scenario for me.
My wife works for us too, this is a family company. I get to come and work with my family and solve problems together. And it’s a lot of fun to see your kid be successful. Not many people get to experience what I’ve been experiencing these past few years.
Taking care of myself
The biggest challenge of the business has been personally taking care of myself. Our family has been intentional about spending time away from the business – taking time to go fishing and spending time together that’s not about, you know, robots.
But I have not done a very good job of taking care of myself. I was already a heavy-set fellow, and I’ve probably gained 30 pounds. I like to go on the road and I’m the one that’s out doing the meetings for the team. It’s easy to just have a burger in a meeting or just ride in a car too much, or all the other excuses that I could come up with.
So for me, the issue is weight. But for a lot of other business owners, it’s something else. They could ignore their family, or ignore their well-being, or something else. The hardest challenge in all of this is being disciplined about not letting the business consume all parts of your life.
So I’m working on that, but I wouldn’t trade this for the world.
This has been 99% positive, with the 1% being the challenge of taking care of myself.
What are some of your favorite books, classes, or resources that have helped you?
Where can we learn more about your business?
Lesson Breakdown
In this section, Humble Starts provides a summary of the main lessons from Chad’s story. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own journey towards enterprise building.
Learnings from Chad:
1. Pursue what is interesting to you
Chad and his family were pursuing a love of robotics long before they started a company. He had incorporated it into his teaching role and gotten his son involved. They didn’t set out to start a company – they just kept pursuing this passion, which turned into an enterprise.
When you start a company, you’ll spend a large amount of time working on the enterprise. Often it’s years of your life. Make sure it’s something you enjoy building.
2. Find a REAL problem.
The Johnsons found their start because they tried to solve a big, important problem. Grain bin deaths are a big deal. Because of the weight of the issue, their team garnered a lot of feedback and a lot of attention very quickly.
Solving important problems is a great way to de-risk your business. Starting with the problem ensures you are building something that people want and will pay for.
And they found this problem directly from their target customer (their neighbor farmer). If you are looking for important problems to solve, go directly to the customer.
3. Build it your way.
Family is a core value for Chad, and he brings that nonnegotiable into his startup. Not many venture-funded projects are family teams.
But that’s the beauty of building a business – you get to build the way you want. You get to bring what’s important to you.
