I Audited Our Own Website and Found We Were Underselling the Product

For most of this year I wrote our website like a company that had not shipped anything, because that was true. Every capability was marked planned. Every page carried a line reminding you that nothing was available yet. I was more worried about overclaiming than about anything else, and I think that was the right instinct at the time.

Then we shipped. And I never went back and turned that caution off. Last week I sat down and read our own site the way a stranger would, and what I found was a company quietly telling people its product does less than it does.

CropVision — photograph an affected plant, get the likely disease and an honest confidence level — has been live inside YieldAI Global for weeks. It has its own page saying so. And two hundred pixels below that, our homepage listed Disease Detection under a heading that read On the roadmap, planned.

The same was true of weather, of yield prediction, and of the voice assistant. All shipped. All still sitting in the planned column. One chip on the homepage read multilingual voice, planned, directly underneath a card listing Voice Assistant as live. Both were on the same screen.

We describe YieldAI Global as a set of modules and we print the number on the homepage. That number said fifteen. The actual list was missing yield prediction and the voice assistant, so the real number was seventeen. We had been undercounting our own product in the one place a visitor looks for a summary.

It is a small thing. It is also the kind of small thing that makes someone wonder what else on the page is out of date.

Our Terms of Service still described AGRIVISION AI as a pre-launch company where no product is generally available — on a site that sells a subscription at $9.99 a month after a thirty-day trial. That is not a marketing inconsistency. That is the document a customer is bound by, contradicting the thing they just paid for.

It now says what is actually true: these terms cover the website, YieldAI Global is live and governed by the terms published at yieldaiglobal.com, and the no-offer language applies to the products we have not built.

While I was in there I checked our roadmap product names properly for the first time. FarmOS collided with farmOS, an open-source farm management project that has been running under that name since around 2014. AgriSense collided with a UK pest-monitoring company trading under it since 1984, two live US trademark registrations, and at least four current agtech companies — one of them building the same IoT sensing product we had sketched.

They are now FieldOps and FieldSense. Both are still concepts rather than products, which is exactly why renaming them cost nothing. Finding this out after launch would have cost a great deal.

I could have fixed all of this quietly. Nobody had complained. The mistakes ran in the direction of modesty, which is the safer direction to be wrong in.

But building in public is not a thing you do only on launch days. If I am going to write posts about being honest with farmers, the site those posts sit on has to be accurate about what it does, what it does not do, and what it costs. The corrections are the work, not an embarrassing footnote to it.

Everything described here is now live on agrivisionai.org. If you find something else that is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and say so.