- Case study 01
- Mobile & web app
Role
Founding designer
Scope
Product strategy · UX · UI
Impact
50 → 30,000 MAU
The context
Spraying windows are short.
The stakes are not.
The windows to act are short, and the weather shuts them fast. Read the field, decide, get the pass done before it closes. Every call is quick, and every quick call can swing the yield, the revenue, the compliance, the ground itself.
I learned its shape the slow way: five farm visits, thirty interviews with farmers and agronomists, seasons spent watching how a plot actually gets worked. Every call this case makes traces back to that ground.
One app for all four.
HYGO is the answer this case builds. The app reads each plot’s own weather through a built-in agronomic model, then turns it into two calls: the best window to spray, and how much product can safely be cut.
The goal
A free version with one job: bring users in.
When I joined
One year
In alpha
50
Users
Dose cuts
Core value
What I found
Farmers needed speed, rather than precision.
The savings were real. Getting to them wasn’t.
The old flow
Reaching the dose meant a five-step wizard. Nothing persisted, so every treatment started it over.
Start
Products
Plots
Equipment
Slot
% Dose reduction
Re-entry, per day
2-3×
In season, I watched the same products get re-entered two to three times a day, just to reach the spray window again. Nothing persisted, so every check meant redoing the work.
Same-day re-checks, 90 days
Share of farmers reopening detailed conditions a second and third time the same day. Checking twice is a habit, not an exception.
“We’re checking the conditions all the time, for a treatment or whatever. It’s a reflex, about twice a day, to plan out the next few days.”
Philippe, farmer
The other pivot
Value had to land before setup.
Why?
The old flow asked for the whole farm before it showed a single piece of advice. My answer: level the information.
No setupThe a-ha momentThe instant a user first sees the product's real value, typically at the end of a first successful action. In HYGO: opening the app and reading the spray window in under 5 minutes., as early as possible: a first read of spray conditions, the moment the app opens.
Add your parcelsFull precision, dose and timing tuned to each plot.
FormerReworked core value
Cut product doses
with precision.
The minor use case was blurring the major.
What it cost
We took the planner from about 15% of our users.
Growers who send employees out to spray, and who used the planner to hand them a calendar. The rest of our users spray their own fields.
Killing a feature nobody uses is easy. Pulling one your most engaged users lean on is not.
The trade-off
Kill the planner
- Gain:
The main flow reads clean for the growers who spray their own fields.
- Gain:
One planning model to build, test and maintain.
- Loss:
The 15% lose a calendar they had built into their week.
Keep both
- Gain:
Nobody loses a tool they rely on.
- Loss:
Two planning models to build, test and maintain.
- Loss:
The main flow keeps answering two questions, neither cleanly.
I argued to kill it, and we did. A team our size cannot maintain two planning models. We tore the planner down, rebuilt around the primitive, and gave the handoff back as a text to the driver. Then we watched the damage: a few complaints, fewer than the share predicted, and new users getting through a flow only half of them used to finish.
The ecosystem
Everything extendsfrom that primitiveto cover the whole journey.
The mixture was the primitive. Prep, spray, log and prove each reuse that one calculation, each shipping premium, so every stage HYGO covers is another reason to upgrade.
- 01Free
Plan
The farmer builds the mixture and picks the window to spray. Every step downstream reads from this one.
- 02Premium
Prep the tank
The same calculation returns the dose reductions and exact quantities: the order to pour each product into the tank.
- 03Premium
Spray
Out in the field, the app tracks the live conditions the mixture was timed for: a humidity drop, incoming rain.
- 04PremiumAuto
Log
The treatment it computed is the record it writes: one notification, a few taps, filed with an agronomic note.
- 05Premium
Prove & manage
Traceability and stock update themselves from what was sprayed. The mixture, now proof.
The impact
50
Monthly active users
×600
Growth · 2021–2026
Product-market fit
Users kept bringing users.
The primitive had found its market. It gave people a reason to stay, and to bring others: close to a third of new users arrived by word of mouth, and free users kept saying, unprompted, what the tool was worth.
A marketing push ran in parallel, so the curve isn't the product's alone. But every signal that defines fit was there, and each traced back to the same rebuild. This was product-market fit, and the product had earned it.
32%
Avg. word-of-mouth acquisition · user surveys
“It's crazy that all of this is free.”
Other cases
