Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel McCollister.
Daniel, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I am just a normal dude who was paying a landlord to live in a house in the valley. My reason for living there was actually to have a practice space to play music in. For most of my 13 years in LA, I was a musician in a rock band.
Anyway, after moving to this new house, just as a side hobby, I thought I would start a garden. I had no serious intentions with this at first, I just thought I might grow a little food.
Soon, this became a full-fledged obsession and I was staying up all night reading gardening books, watching videos on the Internet, and taking in everything I could about growing food.
When I felt comfortable enough, I started adding raised beds to my back yard. I grew kale, collards, brussels sprouts, onions, garlic, beans, tomatoes and about a bit jillion other thing.
When I felt really comfortable and confident, I then added nine more raised beds to my front yard. I had no fence. I didn’t want there to be a “barrier” between me and my neighbors. I think we are too blocked off from those around us in need to commune with people we don’t know and wanted my garden to be a meeting place for my community.
After growing food for a while, the idea for Crop swap came to me. Why wasn’t there any easy way to trade homegrown fruits and vegetables with neighbors instead of buying crap at Vons? Why was I buying limes…, picked 2 weeks ago, in Mexico….shipped in a gas guzzling semi to get to me? Cop swap needed to be and I wouldn’t sleep until it did
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
At this stage, we are still not on
android and that bugs the everlasting shit out of me but we will be this summer.
Really, I think the only challenges have been raising money. We want to always maintain the integrity of our app and therefore don’t want to take money from people we don’t agree with. This is of course being righteous in a moral sense but presents challenges for a business. No matter, we will manage and will come back even stronger this summer ✊
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Crop swap – what should we know?
We are an app that makes it possible to buy sell and trade homegrown produce with your neighbors.
I am proud of our ethos. I am proud of the partnership I have forged with my best friend and business partner Roberto Reiner. We are in this for life and won’t stop until we have improved our messed-up food system
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Integrity. Everything we do we do with integrity and will never change that.
Contact Info:
- Website: cropswapapp.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cropswapapp/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/cropswapapp/
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