5 Lessons for Building a Profitable Agribusiness, According to Seyi Alabi
AGRI-INSIGHT
Agriculture is full of opportunities, but not every opportunity becomes a successful business.
For young agripreneurs, building a profitable business in today’s digital economy requires more than a great idea or the latest technology. It requires solving real problems, understanding your customers and creating solutions people will actually use.
Speaking at GroundBreakers Live 2026, Seyi Alabi, Co-founder of Crop2Cash, shared lessons from his journey building digital solutions for smallholder farmers across Africa, including the failures that shaped his approach to innovation.
Here are 5 lessons from his session on Building Profitable Agribusinesses in the Digital Age.
1. Start with a Real Problem
According to Alabi, agriculture remains one of the best sectors for innovation because it is still largely informal and filled with inefficiencies waiting to be solved.
However, he warned entrepreneurs against pursuing ideas simply because they sound exciting or innovative.
“Find the problem, not just a fancy problem, a real problem. Do your research, look at the numbers. If the numbers support that problem, then you’re on the right path.”
He encouraged young entrepreneurs to identify challenges that genuinely affect farmers, agribusinesses, or consumers and use data to validate whether those problems are significant enough to build a business around.
2. Validate Your Assumptions Early
One of the most insightful moments from the session came when Alabi shared the story of an early startup idea aimed at reducing post-harvest losses.
His team developed a Facebook Messenger bot that would allow farmers to display and sell their products online. The idea looked promising but failed because it was built on assumptions rather than realities.
“One assumption that was very wrong was assuming the average smallholder farmer in Nigeria would sit down and be operating Facebook when they are on the field.”
The team also assumed buyers would purchase agricultural products through Facebook rather than existing market channels.
The lesson, he explained, is that entrepreneurs must test their assumptions before investing heavily in building a solution.
3. Build for the Customer's Reality
A recurring theme throughout Alabi’s session was the importance of understanding the context in which customers live and work.
While developing their first product, his team discovered that many farmers still relied on basic mobile phones and had limited access to the digital tools the solution required.
“We were thinking like city people, basically.”
That realisation changed how they approached innovation.
“Don’t build what you want. Build what the market demands.”
For digital agribusinesses, success often depends less on advanced technology and more on creating solutions that people can easily access and use.
4. Design Solutions That Fit Local Contexts
Beyond technology, Alabi stressed the importance of designing products that reflect the language, literacy levels, and realities of users.
Many smallholder farmers face language barriers that make it difficult to use digital platforms designed only for English-speaking audiences.
To address this challenge, Crop2Cash developed products that support multiple local languages.
“Our products exist in ten local languages.”
For Alabi, localisation is not merely a feature. It is a strategy for increasing adoption, improving accessibility, and ensuring that solutions reach the people who need them most.
5. Be Willing to Pivot Towards Bigger Opportunities
Perhaps the biggest lesson from Alabi’s entrepreneurial journey is the importance of flexibility.
Although his team initially focused on post-harvest losses, their experience revealed a more pressing challenge facing farmers: access to finance.
Rather than forcing a struggling idea to work, they shifted their focus to solving a problem that affected millions of farmers.
“Right now we’re providing formal finance to smallholder farmers and it is a problem that is very, very existent and very permanent.”
Today, Crop2Cash provides economic advisory and financial services to more than 540,000 smallholder farmers across Nigeria and Kenya.
Their success demonstrates that entrepreneurs who listen to the market are often better positioned to discover larger opportunities than those who remain attached to their original ideas.
Technology Is Not Enough
As the session concluded, one message stood out above all others: technology alone does not build profitable agribusinesses.
The most successful entrepreneurs are those who understand the problems they want to solve, validate their assumptions, design for their customers’ realities, and remain adaptable as they learn.
For young innovators hoping to build the next generation of digital agribusinesses, Alabi’s advice was simple but powerful: focus on the problem, understand the market, and build solutions that people can actually use.
