About
It all started with too many tomatoes.
Why I built Growerslink — and what it’s become.
The disconnect.
I grow black cherry tomatoes. One season I had more than I could eat, and no way to sell them.
Not because people didn’t want them — they did. But there was no direct way to connect. I tried Marketplace, classifieds, the usual sites. The listings just got buried under cars, couches, and gym equipment. A few kilos of fresh tomatoes don’t stand a chance.
And while I couldn’t shift my crop, I’d walk through supermarkets and see people paying a premium for “organic,” “local,” “vine-ripened.” The demand was right there. The growers were too. Nothing was connecting them.
The product was there. The buyers were there. All that was missing was the link.
The Link.
So I started building.
First, a focused classifieds — somewhere growers could list and local buyers could actually find them. That solved the immediate problem.
Then I looked at it and thought: if growers are in one place, why not bring their suppliers in too?
Growers buy from suppliers. Suppliers spend on marketing to find growers. The buyers — restaurants, families, anyone who wants fresh food — already exist. All three live in different corners of the internet, each paying a middleman for the privilege of finding each other.
So I started thinking ecosystem, not classifieds.
Growers & Farmers get one place to sell their produce, source what they need, and connect with suppliers who save on marketing because their customers are already here. Suppliers pass the savings back. Growers sell to consumers without the supermarket markup. Everyone wins because the middleman is gone.
I never scaled my own growing into income because it felt too complicated. Listing, selling, payments, finding buyers — too much friction for tomatoes-on-the-side. Take that friction away and the calculus changes.
It’s the same shift ride-sharing made for cars. A spare seat became a paycheck. Same logic for growing — a hydroponic setup in a spare room, mushrooms in a garage, microgreens on a shelf, a backyard full of potatoes. None of it is unusual. What’s been missing is the structure that makes selling it worth your time.
That’s Growerslink.
The traffic Dilemma. (Useful first)
The ecosystem was one problem. Getting anyone to show up was the bigger one.
The easy answer is paid ads. I didn’t want that. Ads buy attention; they don’t build anything you keep.
The better answer is to make the site useful before asking anyone to sign up. Useful to visit. Useful to bookmark. Useful even if you never register.
The tool.
In a gold rush, the smart move isn’t panning for gold — it’s selling shovels. Growerslink is the shovel. Infrastructure that sits underneath whatever you’re doing in horticulture.
Right now, four layers:
1. The directory. Every kind of Australian horticulture business, indexed by state and category — hydroponic stores, plant nurseries, seed suppliers, wineries, orchards, market gardens. More than a thousand entries, and growing. A plant-growing directory is next: what grows where, when, how. Different resource, same idea.
2. The interactive map. The directory plotted. Search by location instead of category. Answers “what’s near me?” — usually the first question anyone asks.
3. Classifieds. A focused marketplace where listings don’t get buried under cars and couches. Fresh produce, seedlings, used gear, surplus stock. Location-aware, so listings appear on the map too. The thing I needed when I had too many tomatoes.
4. Storefront. A full online store for anyone ready to ship and scale. Professional design, integrated payments, commission on transactions. The same business that lists in the directory and posts classifieds can run a real shop from the same account.
Each layer works on its own. Together they’re the ecosystem.
What’s next.
Australia is the proving ground. The directory keeps growing, the listings keep coming, and the structure now exists for everything that sits on top.
New Zealand is next. Closest market, same growing culture, same problem on a smaller scale — growers without a clean way to sell, suppliers without a focused place to reach them.
Canada follows. Different climate, same structure: growers, suppliers, and buyers scattered across a huge country, paying middlemen to find each other.
The playbook doesn’t change. Build the directory first. Populate it. Make it the most useful place to land for anyone in local horticulture. Then open the ecosystem.
One country at a time. The internet makes this look fast. It isn’t.
That’s how the real home of horticulture gets built.
One more thing.
If you’ve read this far, thank you.
I’m building Growerslink in the open — not because it’s polished, but because nothing useful gets built behind closed doors. Kindergartners beat MBAs at building towers from spaghetti and tape because they build, watch it fall, and build again. The adults plan. The kids ship.
So Growerslink is live, imperfect, and changing constantly. The problem is real. The demand is real. The solution makes sense. The shape of it gets worked out by the people who actually use it.
Because at the end of the day, we all have to eat.
— Dirar
Founder, Growerslink
Your turn.
If this could be your home, join here → and tell me what’s missing in the form below. If it’s already your home and you’d like me to add something, the form’s yours too.
