Plant Mate | Expensive Solution for a Straightfoward Problem?

We have another product review where Matt watches a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign. This startup that he’s looking at is a product that is supposed to help with your indoor plants when you go on vacation. Watch to see If he thinks this is a serious problem that needs fixing.

CapForge has worked with 1000+ ecommerce businesses and other small businesses and has seen some great products out there! 

In this series, we look at new products on the market and see if they are worth investing in. Think along the lines of Shark Tank, but with no real money involved just for fun. 

Video Transcript: 

Product Promo Video:

Do your plants wilt and suffer when you travel? Are you tired of unreliable plant sitters? Or find yourself forgetting to water them? Meet Plant Mate. The solution to all your plant care worries. With our automatic plant watering system you get four soil moisture sensors that accurately detect when your plants are in need of a little hydration. fill up your plant mate. Connect the sensors and water hoses. Add the plant to your app. And relax as you watch your plants thrive. Back us on Kickstarter and together we’ll bring Plant Mate to life. 

Matt’s Review:

Hmm, back us on Kickstarter and this is Indiegogo. I guess they must be running parallel programs. So problem is clear, right? If you’re not around to take care of your plants, they can die. The solution though is a lot. If you really care about your plants I feel like you probably have figured something out. You’ve got somebody that’ll come over or you bring your plants over to them. Or like us, when we go out of town we’ll put the indoor plants outside by the sprinklers so they get watered with the rest of the outdoor plants to get watered by the automatic sprinklers. Maybe not a perfect solution but it seems to work well. This I imagine is gonna be fairly expensive because of all the electronics and Wi-Fi and remote and app and everything else that it has going on. Electric motors to pump the water and sensors from moisture and everything else. It’s a lot if you only have one or two plants. But it only does up to four. So if you love your plants you probably have 20 plants and that means you have to buy five of these things. But if you only sort of like your plants and you only have one or two, you’re probably not gonna spend enough – you’re not gonna –  it’s not gonna make sense to spend this much money to save a couple of plants for a couple of weeks. So I don’t know. I don’t know what I would do in their – well I know what I would do in their place, I wouldn’t launch this business. But it seems like there’s a challenge here to figure out the optimal number of plans you can support with one piece of equipment. And I don’t know if they did research to come up with 4 being the right number. Or if that’s just kind of what made sense for space and size and cost. But I feel like there’s gonna be a pretty narrow window of people who are gonna wanna spend this much to save more than 1 or two, but not more than 4 plants, for a week or two when that’s the only solution they can come up – so I don’t know it seems like an expensive solution to a relatively straightforward relatively small market problem. That’s my first impression on it. We’ll see if it turns out to be a huge winner and these things are all over the place, obviously, there’s more people out there than I realize that care enough about saving their plants. But that’s my first past impression, is that this is an over-engineered solution for a problem that’s not that big of a problem for the people who are gonna be willing to spend this kind of money.