My First Software Product

I've been a developer for a little over six years now and, up to this point, I've worked on some cool projects through my jobs, but have never really created my own product. At the same time, I've been getting more involved with agriculture and started a small urban farm out of my back yard.

Last year was my first year growing and selling produce through the local farmer's market. Once the year was over, I realized I didn't really have any actionable information as to what or how much I grew, harvested, or sold. Over the course of the season, I kept some notes in a spreadsheet detailing what and how much was planted, but it's not in a format that's easily to pull useful information out.

I began looking for existing solutions back around October, but most of what I found either didn't meet my needs or was a lot more complicated than what I wanted. Consequently, I decided to start building my own solution. The "finished" product is Agrigate - A platform that collects, manages, and analyzes all of your agricultural data to help you run a more efficient, profitable farm.

I say it's a "platform", but in reality it's an application that you can install on your computer and everything runs locally. I thought about making it web based initially, but I feel like it's better to have your data locally and not have to worry about having internet access to utilize the software.

I also hate how everything's become a subscription, so with Agrigate you have the option of purchasing once (with a year's worth of updates) and if you desire, you have the option to renew at 1/2 price for another year's worth of updates.

So what can Agrigate do? Currently, there are three main sections of the app: Farm, Market, and Business.

The Farm section contains an area where you can add crop metrics such as days to maturity, row spacing, and ec or pH levels. It's also where you can track information about every crop you plant and includes location tracking and automatic lot and batch generation.

The market area allows you to record sales at various locations and view their details

Finally, the business area allows you to manage business-related tasks such as managing customers and contacts.

In addition to the three work areas, there's also a dashboard that allows you to easily see what's currently happening on your farm.

As I continue to build Agrigate, I plan to add additional features such as reporting and integrations with payment processors, and email marketing platforms.