The Rootical Times #4
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 for anyone interested to follow our journey are shared here, publicly, on our website. Enjoy reading and learning along with us!
A lot has been cooking since our previous update in November last year. 16 Potential founders were hard at work at that time to prepare for the 2023 Rootical Pitch Day, where they presented 8 groundbreaking regenerative agri-food business models.
— You can find an overview of the teams and Rootical pipeline here.
— You can watch the recordings of the Rootical Pitch Day here.
Team Garden Fresh in an online break-out room during the hybrid Rootical Pitch Day
Our progress at a glance:
8 Teams pitched to 100+ attendants at Rootical's Pitch Day in Kampala (Dec-2023)
7 Founder teams have been invited to the Studio Co-Founding stage
That 3rd stage of our venture building journey focuses on piloting towards incorporation
Currently, 4 teams are actively building their business, learning by driving real sales
3 Teams are inactive with their founders reassessing whether to continue building (or not)
We have been raising additional “runway” capital to set-up operations for 3 businesses
While piloting, our first companies have made 2500$ in revenues (Feb-May 2024)
They are working towards product-market fit and getting ready for incorporation later this year
In February, Specioza Kajumba joined the team as a communications intern
She has been writing great founder stories to present the Rootical Founders-in-Residence
In May, we started working on an additional venture that we will be building in-house:
We want to develop a business model that addresses the issue of landscape level degeneration, caused by deforestation, over/under-grazing, and land use changes coming from crop farming.
Rootical is about 60% Funded to run two more cohorts in 2025-2027
We plan to launch our second Call for Founders (Cohort 2) in Uganda in October 2024
This also covers a Rootical replication in another East African country
Soon we’ll incorporate Rootical Ltd, Uganda’s — probably Africa’s — first steward owned business.
Rootical has already mobilised over 1 Million in funding and nearly 100,000$ in startup capital
We’re a Talent Business
If there’s one thing we are learning and reaffirming, it is that we’re in the business of talent.
We have to become exceptional at attracting, selecting and nurturing talent — the founders we work with.
A startup studio brings together resources, ideas and talent to build a conveyor belt of startups, food system shaking businesses in our case. On the people side, that is a mix of exceptional drive, commitment, and availability.
Drive, grit and determination to address a key issue in your community and deliver on impact.
Commitment to, and trust in, the process. With openness to listening and questioning one’s own assumptions. To test your ideas with real customers and gather valuable feedback as much and as soon as possible.
Giving priority to building with Rootical, when providing for one’s family and juggling with competing priorities at all times, is not a given. Availing 3-4 days per week, if not more, seems to be the optimum.
More than ever, we are convinced that if we are working with the right people, at the right moment in their life journey… the right ideas and money will follow, no matter how many pivots, creativity and perseverance it would take.
Who are the right people? Find out from Faridah, Rootical’s talent manager, via the link!
Full-house at the Rootical 2023 Pitch Day, and another 50+ participants joined virtually!
Learning by Selling
These have been very insightful months. We’re learning fast and a lot, about how to take an agroecological business from 0 to 1 in Uganda, and how to best support our Founders-in-Residence.
With initial validation during testing and feedback gathering last year, and with substantially more and frequent customer interactions between February and now, the Rootical founder teams are learning by doing, learning by driving real sales.
They have offered their products and services to hundreds of smallholder farmers — we are not actively developing a consumer facing brand at the moment — and are learning each day. We are figuring out co-founder team dynamics in practice. We are focused on validating or rejecting (and fine-tuning) the underlying assumptions for each business model. We are getting the unit economics right: there’s power in action data showing you the truth in real numbers.
We are consistently taking small steps each day and week, towards early traction and proof-of-concept. To validate the business case and impact potential, to figure out what it will take to ramp up operations and sell our way to product-market fit — that magic moments when the demand for our products and services will overwhelm us, by being larger than our supply capacity.
