Ollie Hallam
Ideas Program 3
31 Aug 2020
About
Ollie Hallam from Hopetoun, Victoria is our youngest participant to date and works on the mixed enterprise family farm. Ollie applied to the program with an idea that stemmed from a problem on their own family farm.
He wanted to explore an application to assist primary producers in the management of essential paper work, e.g chemical users log, crop and stock rotations, paddock layouts, machinery locations and information, as well as allowing the user to assign jobs, all in one place.
The idea
Ollie identified a need to develop some software that would give farmers the opportunity to convert information about specific activities that are happening on the farm and make it easily accessible for future reference. It will also allow the farmers to easily sign and plan their work day.
With the larger farms with more employees it will allow individuals to keep track of what is happening, allowing them to easily adapt to emerging situations in real time. He also predicted that it would allow contractors and new people to the farm to easily navigate to any location with the relevant information ready at hand.
It is a program which provides you processes and support for you to test and find out more about your business through giving you the material in which you can apply to other ideas. Interview more, don't be afraid to build prototypes that aren't perfect, trust the process.
Program Impact
Whilst Ollie had a set idea in mind as to what should be included in the app, through his customer research it challenged him to really test his assumptions. The interview process helped Ollie to navigate which features would actually benefit his potential customers and create a really customised solution versus including functions and features that were just ‘nice to haves’. He pivoted his idea to be much more focused on task management for example.
“I thought I kind of knew it at the start though this was not the case, so thank god that I had completed interviews to pinpoint real pains and potential customers.”
Following the program, Ollie is finishing high school and then will look to undertake more customer interviews with the hope of developing a prototype.
Program Partners
