What Farmers Taught Him About Building A Company

Taylor Hoekstra spent years selling products through an unlikely channel — farmer YouTubers — years before anyone called it the "creator economy." That experience taught him something most people in the outdoor industry hadn't figured out yet, and it planted the seed for Popfly.

Before writing a line of code, Taylor spent two years and roughly 500 conversations validating the idea, testing a simple question: would people actually pay for this? In this conversation, recorded live at Outdoor Retailer, Taylor walks through the classic cold-start problem every founder building a two-sided marketplace has to solve — get supply first, use supply to pull in demand, then reinvest in supply relentlessly. He also gets honest about the early years trying to convince outdoor brands that working with creators was worth their marketing budget, long before it was an easy sell.

Second Nature is proudly supported by Popfly and Halo: