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There’s a graveyard of agricultural marketplaces.

I’m not going to name them because the founders don’t deserve the pile-on, but I’ve watched at least six well-funded, well-intentioned ag-tech platforms launch in Australia over the past decade and either shut down or quietly fade into irrelevance. Every single one of them had a beautiful product. Clean UX. Real-time data integrations. Mobile apps. The works.

None of them had enough people using them to make the market function.

That’s the marketplace problem. It’s not a technology problem. It’s a community problem. A market only works when there are buyers and sellers who trust each other enough to transact. Technology can facilitate that trust. It cannot manufacture it.

Why we started with a Facebook group

This is the part that some people in tech circles find embarrassing. We built a Facebook group before we built the platform.

It’s called “Robbie’s Realm — a REALM360 Community.” It’s not elegant. It doesn’t have our branding standards. It runs on Meta’s infrastructure, which I have complicated feelings about. But it works. People post in it. Conversations happen. Producers share information about markets, freight, weather, prices — the actual things they need to make decisions.

The reason we started there wasn’t strategic genius. It was pragmatism. Facebook groups have zero friction for adoption. Every producer I know is already on Facebook. You don’t have to download an app. You don’t have to learn a new interface. You join, you scroll, you post. The barrier to entry is low enough that people actually do it.

What we were really doing was testing whether there was a community to be built at all. Because a marketplace without a community is just an interface. And an interface nobody uses is just expensive decoration.

What the early members taught us

The people who joined in the first few months were, almost universally, producers who were frustrated with existing information sources.

They were frustrated with the delay — by the time price information hit the mainstream ag media, the market had already moved. They were frustrated with the aggregation — generic commodity reports that didn’t account for the freight differential between western Queensland and the southeast, which can be the difference between a profitable sale and a breakeven one. And they were frustrated with the lack of reciprocity — they were being asked to provide data to platforms (prices they’d transacted at, operation details, volumes) with nothing coming back in return.

That last one was the most important insight. The information asymmetry in agricultural markets isn’t just a problem for producers. It’s a deliberate feature of some parts of the supply chain that profit from that asymmetry. When we created a space where producers could share transaction data with each other — not with us, with each other — the information flow that emerged was genuinely valuable in a way that no data product we could have built from the top down would have replicated.

The hard parts of building community

I’m not going to pretend this has been smooth.

Early-stage communities attract a mix of people who genuinely want to contribute and people who are there to extract — to sell, to pitch, to spam. Managing that without killing the openness that makes the community valuable is a real skill I’ve had to develop, and I’m still developing it. The moderation decisions that feel like they’re about one post or one member are actually decisions about what kind of community you’re building. Every call sets a precedent.

There’s also the problem of critical mass. A community with fifty members feels different to a community with five hundred, which feels different to five thousand. We’re in the middle phase now — big enough that there are real conversations happening daily, not big enough that network effects are fully self-sustaining. That means we’re still actively working to bring people in and to create enough value that they stay.

What REALM360 is becoming

The Facebook group is not the destination. It’s the proof of concept that the community exists and wants what we’re building.

REALM360 is evolving into a proper platform — one that can carry the market intelligence tools, the price feeds, the freight data, and the community functions that a Facebook group fundamentally can’t. You can follow its development at realmgroup.global/experiences.

But the lesson I’ll carry from this phase is the one that should be taught in every product and startup programme: the community is the product. The platform is just the place where the community lives.

Build the people first. Everything else follows from that.

If you’re not in the group yet, come and find us. The door’s open.

— Robbie