The Rootical Times #3

The Rootical Times covers regular updates about the progress made with piloting Rootical in Uganda. In the spirit of full transparency, these updates for (potential) financial partners and anyone interested to follow our journey are shared here, publicly, on our website. Enjoy reading and learning along with us!

Systemic Venture Building is on!

The Rootical Founders-in-Residence have passed the half-way mark of the Rootical design process. 13 Weeks, 12 design sprints to build businesses that are designed to shake up Uganda's food system.

Based on our participatory mapping of the food system dynamics in Uganda, we identified key design challenges and framed them as How-might-we questions. For the past 7 weeks we have been deep in building solutions and learning more from real users to answer those design questions. Time to check in.

Some Rootical fun during a farm visit to Busaino Fruits, leading agroecological entrepreneurs in Jinja.

3 Things we are re-affirming:

😵 Impact venture building is not for the faint-hearted. Metabolic's Artichoke Theory of Risk illustrates this well. Being a purpose-entrepreneur means you're in this for years.

You’re playing the long food game, as a founder. You need to have the difficult conversations. For instance, with the people you are about to co-found with. Face doubt. Embrace ambiguity and uncertainty. Face your flawed assumptions. And go back to the drawing board when you need to.

⏰ Time is our most scarce resource. Ugandans are highly entrepreneurial. So are our Founders-in-Residence. They diversify income streams and, thus, reduce risk. Do they “multi-task” because the businesses stay small? Or do the different “side hustles” remain small, because they cannot go all-in? 

🚀 Our most promising founders are humble high potentials. While they might not have the proven managerial track record at scale or business acumen yet. They are talented and committed. They listen and question their assumptions. They put in the work and develop a growth mindset.

What have we been up to?

As you can see in the pictures below, we have been busy designing food system shaking businesses and had fun while at it!

• We moved from problem statement to ideation and prototyping

• We enjoyed an inspiring farm visit to Busaino Fruits in Jinja, and goat muchomo!

• We joined the National Agroecology Actors Symposium to share our insights from mapping Uganda’s food system dynamics.

• We had a series of experts — including on soil and water, sales and pivoting, to self development by a top athlete — join us as guest speakers.

• We used a lot of post-its, again, while brainstorming.

• All Founders-in-Residence joined the Agroecology Market Systems Expo 2023 during the #Agroecology week of action to build networks and gather feedback on their prototypes.

• We developed our roadmap for testing key assumptions on the road to product-market fit based on the Social Venture Canvas developed by USV.

• Some of us went to plant trees in Jinja with UWEPO’s syntropic agriculture expert of UWEPO

• Our female founders worked through the first Women-in-Leadership sessions with Girls 4 Girls.

• We joined our fellow Agroecological entrepreneurs at the Neycha Accelerator Bootcamp for an inspiring and enjoyable networking cocktail. Thanks for this, Shona and Biovision!

3 Key challenges we have been running into:

🥵 Going out there is not easy. Asking questions, engaging in insightful conversations with strangers -- real people, potential users -- is challenging. Yet, real listening is at the core of Rootical's human-centred design process. It is what the teams will be doing for weeks and months to come.

🔎 Confirmation Bias. We naturally tend to look for information that reaffirms our preconceived ideas. Yet we need to ask to listen. To design to learn and to get answers. Instead of going out as the experts we are, we need to go with a beginner's mindset.

👀 Quantity vs. Quality. There is some (false) feeling of validation in numbers. We need to focus on quality and depth. What we do is not scientific, quantitative research. It is iteration-based and human-centred learning and designing. 

Every uncomfortable insight, every feedback that questions our assumptions, brings us closer to building a business that answers a real need. The market will be our final judge.

We applaud our Founders-in-Residence for killing an idea, even after weeks of research. We celebrate learning, and moving on! If we are not killing ideas, not pivoting, and only affirming what we already (think we) knew, we are not doing the work.

We. Are. Learning. A lot.

A lot of what we learn goes to confirm we're on the right track. The momentum for investing in food shaking businesses is building. Dozens of conversations we are having with potential partners and investors, are showing us.

We're learning the value of the Rootical process, design and venture building tools we have been developing. How to streamline our startup studio engine. By fine-tuning, better structuring and tweaking them for the next iteration. For instance, having a stronger focus on how to process and use feedback — to stay close to your problem statement and avoid people repeatedly pivoting all over the place. Or, another example, to engage in difficult conversations among dysfunctional founder teams earlier on. 

Most of all, we are learning a lot about the people we want to work with. 

• The high profiles, more established business managers, have solid experience, in sales, networks, and as operators in particular. They could be crucial in building 1 Billion Ugandan Shilling Businesses. The risk is they might have too much ongoing responsibilities to fully commit. 

• The grounded founders, they have grounded experience in working with farmers or as domain experts. Yet they might need more active support to build a commercially viable, scalable and impactful business. They are beyond passionate and ready to make sacrifices to found with Rootical.

• The high potentials, have a solid background as well as the necessary sense of self, humbleness and attitudes. They think big, but start small. Deeply committed to solving a challenge with their community, they build for impact at scale.

Of course, we also encounter the exceptions to the rule. We can't wait to learn more about how this rich mix of profiles and their soon-to-launch businesses, turn out.

Have a Rootical day!

Rootical Founders-in-Residence, or professional photo models?

Follow our regular updates via LinkedIn and Twitter and do contact us if our journey and impact are aligned with your vision and/or the vision of your organisation: all hands on deck are needed to build a future-proof food system, in Uganda and beyond.