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If you read part one, you know I tried to build an online Highland cattle marketplace years ago, and eventually I let it fade away. I still thought about the idea every once in a while and what I would do differently now, but for years that was really as far as it went.
Then earlier this year, a guy named Jason randomly messaged me wanting to buy my farm. He had the dream of moving to the mountains, buying some land and eventually having cattle of his own. I was pretty burned out at the time, so I would be lying if I said the thought of selling everything and having an easier life wasn’t briefly tempting, but ultimately I said no. I did offer to help him find a farm of his own, though, and somehow I basically became his unofficial farm consultant.
We started walking properties together and looking at whether they would actually work for cattle. A farm can look great in a real estate listing and be a completely different story once you start thinking about pasture, water, fencing, access, and all the practical things that come with actually putting cattle on it. Spending that much time walking around farms and talking about cattle naturally led to a lot of other conversations too.
At some point I mentioned what I had tried to build years ago and what I had always wished I could turn it into. I wanted smaller breeders who didn’t have a huge social media audience or travel all over the country showing cattle to have a better chance of getting their animals in front of more buyers. I also wanted buyers to have an easier way to find those breeders, instead of already knowing who they were or where to look.
I had some pretty specific ideas about what I would and wouldn’t want to build. Things mattered to me ethically, especially knowing who you were dealing with, making it harder to use stolen photos or fake identities, and giving buyers enough information to make their own decisions. I had plenty of ideas about what I wanted something like this to do. I just didn’t have the technical skills to build it.
That was when I found out Jason’s background was in technology and product development. He was also looking at the livestock world as someone trying to get into cattle himself, while I had spent years buying, breeding, and selling them. We started talking about what he was running into as a buyer and what I had been frustrated with for years as a breeder and seller, and somewhere in there, this old idea started coming back to life.
One thing that mattered to me was not losing people in the process. One of the fun parts of a real auction is talking to everybody, looking at cattle together and getting caught up in the whole thing. Online auctions give us access to cattle we might never have seen otherwise, but sitting by yourself watching a countdown on a screen isn’t quite the same.
I think people our age are in an interesting spot because we grew up with social media, but we’re old enough to remember how things worked before everything moved online. I like parts of both. I wanted to follow farms I care about, learn about their cattle, talk to other people during a live auction, and keep some of that social part of an auction even when everybody is sitting hundreds or thousands of miles apart.
The more Jason and I talked about it, the more ideas we came up with, and eventually we decided to build it. It’s still kind of funny that he originally messaged me about buying my farm, and somehow we ended up building HoofnHorn.
