PlantingWiz

One photo away from free tailored recommendations for an optimized garden that fits the local climate and supports more biodiversity.

Primarily seven issues are considered in our solution.

The first one is an enormous lack of biodiversity everywhere. Biodiversity is a huge factor regarding resilient environments and climate change. The garden owner will also benefit from more biodiversity in their garden. A resilient garden will be more sustainable and can save money and frustration.

To get more biodiversity, we have to consider which plants are native to the area, which contracts insects, and which can work as food and habitats for wildlife. All of the above requires massive amounts of research to find the plants that fulfill these needs for your specific garden.
That leads us to issue two: Extensive research requires time and energy most people do not have. Meaning, no one does it extensively. 
There is a need for a solution that makes it easy for garden owners to pick the right plants.
Garden owners typically think about their gardens as being aesthetically pleasing. It does not have to be an issue although it can be expensive. Landscapers cost money. The only option is to plan out your garden yourself if you cannot afford to spend money on help.
Regardless of who plans your garden, they might not consider the environment. This means you can end up with plants that cannot survive the conditions of your garden. Ending in a waste of plants and money. Waste we want to avoid.
The problem is not just inconvenient for consumers. When a freshly bought plant suffers and looks bad, the buyer usually blames its seller. This causes even the most responsible plant stores to constantly lose consumers. Stores can try to educate their customer base, but making every customer a gardening expert in the small amount of time they spend in the store is impossible.

Making it easy for garden owners to select the right plants makes urban areas greener. Issue number 5: According to WHO, mental health conditions are increasing worldwide. Plants are proven to lower conditions such as stress, anxiety, and depression (Journal of Environmental Horticulture (2019) 37 (1): 30–38).
With more plants everywhere, we might be able to fight this issue.

Lastly, the online data economy is more than 20 years old, but companies still cannot get detailed data about people's gardens. This leaves a market gap that we can fill.

Our solution satisfies the needs of both the eco and the non-eco-conscious customers because having a garden that is out of sync with the local ecosystem will cost significant sums of money in future maintenance costs and make keeping plants a constant struggle.

PlantingWiz is a website that can give users plant suggestions based on only one photo. From the photo uploaded to our website, we can obtain more than 30 different parameters of the desired planting site, like the amount of sunlight, average temperatures, and rainfall. Our server then analyzes the given data and suggests optimal plants to the user.

The plants suggested will be the best fit for the environment of the user’s garden. The plants will enhance biodiversity by letting more native and insect-friendly plants spread throughout neighborhoods. By supporting insects, birds will have more food resulting in the whole ecosystem being strengthened. Our plant database will not have modified flowers or similar that might look pretty but do nothing for insects. Instead, we focus on a high variety of “natural” ones. Thereby PlantingWiz becomes a solution to issue 1.

For the user, there is no required research. Just a few clicks, and you will have the best possible recommendations free of charge. You will even get a match percentage to evaluate your plant. Thus, solving issues 2 and 3.

We provide the user with our plant recommendations free of charge, maximizing the number of users using our service. We not only give the user their plant recommendations, but we give them a list of possible plant vendors where they can buy their plants.

We certify our vendors and make a deal with them about recommending their websites to our customers. The users will get high-quality plants for their gardens, and the plant vendors will get a loyal customer base, who are more likely to be satisfied with their plant choices while saving countless plants from being wasted.

Everyone with a space to plant plants outside could benefit from our solution directly. PlantingWiz makes it fast and easy to find the plants that best fit your space regarding soil, light, temperature, and more. The customer will not only find plants with the best chance to thrive in their space but also the plants that benefit nature the most by supporting life around them. Even if you only have a pot or two, PlantingWiz can help you choose what to plant.

We have made our service free of charge so more people can use it. The most important thing is to get as many users as possible so PlantingWiz can benefit everyone. With a large number of customers, our service will begin to affect people without gardens too. PlantingWiz will ensure green space everywhere. Thereby, improving air quality in cities and mental conditions.

PlantingWiz is developed to improve the life of smaller creatures too. Insects, birds, and more will be thrilled when PlantingWiz is widespread across the globe.

Our team is well-positioned to deliver this solution since we have the skill and thought required to make and marked PlantingWiz. We are a group that cares about the environment and we want to make a difference that will stick. That is why we have thought thoroughly about how we get people to use our solution and made it as user-friendly as possible.

We are a two-person team at the moment with very different backgrounds. Our diverse skills complement each other so we can view issues from all angles. As an international team, we have been able to market research in two very distinctive countries from the beginning. Our questionnaire showed the same result, however. It became apparent that our idea is useful everywhere. 

Henriette is from Denmark and is currently in a gap year. She has several years of experience working on innovative projects regarding the environment. In her danish high school, Henriette came up with a substitute for milk and researched how it could be made, for example. Her project won the Lundbeck Foundation Communication Award 2022, and she keeps working on it to this day. The award got her to London, where she meet Zalán.

With big ambitions and an enormous passion for the natural sciences, she is determined to make the best possible plant model for PlantingWiz. Through her upbringing, Henriette has been exposed to the many ways of gardening. Her surroundings keep inspiring her as she learns more about the complicated nature around her.

In high school, Henriette took Biotechnology, Math, and Physics at high levels and plans on continuing her studies in these subjects in the fall of 2023, when she will start university. Check out her website, Planetguidance.com, to get tips on living more eco-friendly.

Zalán is from Hungary and is currently a first-year Computer Science Engineering student at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He has five years of experience coming up with innovative solutions and deploying them to small markets. 2 of his projects have been awarded “outstanding praise” by the Hungarian Innovation Association. His other currently active project has helped over 500 students get a more efficient education in public schools throughout Hungary. Zalán's background in technology makes it possible for him to develop the software needed for PlantingWiz.

Together PlantingWiz has quickly grown.

We have put out a questionnaire to the locals around us. We, therefore, have answers from both Hungary and Denmark. The two countries will be where we start our launch and marketing campaign. 

Later we will need more insight into other population groups to see where to expand first. Our solution will have the most prominent impact with as many users as possible

In the questionnaire, we start with some demographic questions so we know who we are asking.

When launched, we will start with a test group to give us feedback on design and more.

Planning your garden has never been easier! Our unique solution provides the user with free recommendations tailored specifically to their local environment. With more than 30 different parameters gathered from one uploaded picture, we can give multiple suggestions in under a second. The best part? Our solution limits plant waste and ensures more biodiversity!

As of spring 2023, we plan to launch our service in parts of Europe, while preparing to scale globally. In the first stages of launch, we will focus on finding and cooperating with future partners so PlantingWiz can be a free service. We have comprehended our goals for the next year in these three bulletins:

• Launching PlantingWiz to the EU
• Expand the plant database to fit all the climates in the EU
• Find and cooperate with new partners

For the biggest impact sustainability-wise, our marketing campaign should be extensive. The more users the better.

The user uploads a photo to our website. We use the metadata in that photo and run Computer Vision algorithms on it to create a list of more than 30 parameters. Using our plant recommendation model, we give the users a list of ideal plants for their exact planting spot accompanied by a match percentage.
We plan to use our website to recommend plant sellers for our users right after they get their recommended list.
To make this work, we use big data, software, and computer vision algorithms.

We plan on launching it in spring 2023, so we do not currently have any users. We will start in Denmark and Hungary. We hope to serve around a few thousand in the next 12 months after launch. However, this is a very rough estimate. We will evaluate our marketing strategies after each month and update them as we learn and grow in size.

So far the only barriers for the next year are time, data storage, and data laws.

Currently, we are at the MVP stage. We are cautious about launching our service to the broad market because our planned unfair advantage lies in our partner network. While building an algorithm with accuracy matching ours is a huge challenge, copying our business model, while using a lower-accuracy algorithm could mean competition for us and lesser positive impact. We plan to build a reliable partner network first, and then start to advertise our service to our users. We are now in the process of finding the right partners.

Here is the executive summary of our business model. You can find the current full version here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w8J_6jmSzyeKXLuatFq2oaFERykFvRxfQha3rUr9Xns/edit?usp=sharing

Includes answers from the questionnaire.

It’s nearly impossible for the average customer to choose their plants with environmental factors and future maintenance costs in mind. This problem plays a big part in the serious deterioration of local ecosystems. This same phenomenon causes plant vendors to lose customers because the plant will not look as good as it did in the store if the plant is incompatible with the local environment. Customers will blame the store typically. By solving the market problem, we can make positive changes in the domestic ecosystems.

We have not found any company that specializes in this problem. The closest competitor that we were able to find was Google. However, Google isn’t threatening our market segment. It takes at least 30 minutes to google every parameter to find a close match for a garden. Using PlantingWiz, it takes less than 10 minutes to find the perfect one.

After taking just one picture of the desired planting site and uploading that picture to our website, we provide our users with our accurate plant recommendations and garden planning advice free of charge. We get our revenue from directing our users to our partner plant vendors and taking commission based on this traffic. With this model, we can provide PlantingWiz free of charge for users.

Nearly everyone who wants to own a plant outside will find our service useful: From people with small balconies to people with huge (300m^2+) gardens to governments and private clients.

We could not find any company that gives automated plant recommendations to people. Our closest competitors are garden planning software developers, but their mission statement is completely different from ours.

Our product has reached the MVP phase. We need to build out a partner network before we are going to be able to function on a national level. We want to prove our viability of functioning nationally. Then following a capital raise round, we want to get traction on the international market.

When we have reached the international market, PlantingWiz will have a huge social impact improving the lives of all people and animals. 

We don’t have a precise profit margin projection yet. We expect to be profitable from the start because, with a built-out partner network, our only cost is the small server fees (currently 70 USD/month for a production-grade plan). We would only need capital investment to grow our outreach to our users and corporate partners.