At startups, you don’t research in labs—you learn on the fly. And at Farm Hill, we were flying blind.

There were no dashboards, no conversion funnels, no analytics tools blinking red. All we had were whispers: a few emails from confused customers, support calls that dragged on too long, and a gut feeling that something—everything—was off.

So I rolled up my sleeves and did what made sense: I started listening.

I sat in on every support call I could. Not just to hear the issues, but to understand the tone—the hesitation, the frustration, the moment someone gave up on ordering lunch altogether. I reached out to early customers and asked simple, open-ended questions. Why didn’t they reorder? What stopped them? Sometimes they answered. Sometimes they ghosted. But the patterns were there.

The biggest “aha” moment didn’t come from a spreadsheet. It came from watching a friend try to place an order on their phone. They tapped. They squinted. They gave up.

That’s when it clicked: the website wasn’t just bad—it was blocking people from ordering. On mobile, it was nearly unusable.

So I started working on our mobile app.