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Koidra AI

Chief of Staff: taking AI greenhouse automation to market

As the CEO’s partner at a seed-stage AI startup, I defined who we sell to, built the sales pitch deck and a 6-month marketing plan around their pain points, and stood up Sales Ops from scratch.

Chief of Staff to the CEO2022 – 2024

Strategy & OpsGTM

Outcomes

lead-to-opportunity conversion
+24%
Within 6 months
marketing plan
6-month
Weekly LinkedIn + email, monthly article
funnel KPIs tracked
4
List growth, engagement, followers, conversion
Sales Ops infrastructure
0 → 1
CRM, pipeline stages, scoring, automation, analytics
Ionah Nguyen in a Koidra shirt holding a vine of ripe cherry tomatoes in a greenhouse
On site in a greenhouse, where Koidra’s AI meets industrial operations.

How it fit together

  1. Pipeline analyticsSee and forecast the funnel
  2. Workflow automationRemove manual handoffs
  3. Lead scoringFocus on the best-fit leads
  4. Standardized pipeline stagesOne shared definition of progress
  5. CRM processesClean, consistent data foundation

+24%

lead-to-opportunity conversion

within 6 months

The Sales Ops stack I built at Koidra, from data foundations up to analytics.

Context

Koidra AI is a seed-stage enterprise AI SaaS startup that builds autonomous control for greenhouses and industrial operations, powered by AI and IoT. Its horticulture line runs from Datapilot (centralized greenhouse data) to Autopilot Grow (autonomous climate control) to Autopilot 360 (whole-facility automation). As Chief of Staff, I worked directly with the CEO on company-wide initiatives, owned go-to-market for this line, and tracked business priorities and KPIs.

Challenge

Koidra had strong proof: back-to-back wins at the international Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge and commercial trials that raised yield by nearly 20% for cucumbers and 28.5% for eggplants. But the growers we wanted already knew their problems and didn’t know Koidra, or that intelligent automation could solve them. And there was no sales operation to catch and nurture the leads marketing would create. A sale also isn’t one person’s call: it needs a head grower, an owner, and often a CTO to agree, over a 1–2 year sales cycle.

Approach & key decisions

  1. Define the buyer before the message

    Step 1

    I wrote an ideal customer profile around one persona, a head grower running 2.5+ acres of greenhouse across several sites, selling premium produce to grocers and restaurants. Because no one buys Koidra alone, the strategy was to win a champion who carries the idea to the owner, CTO, and VP of Growing.

  2. Map five pain points to five answers

    Step 2

    From customer discovery I named the problems growers already feel: inconsistent yield across sites, poor control of water, nutrients and energy, a shortage of skilled growers, sensors that don’t drive decisions, and little real-time visibility. Each one maps to a Koidra benefit: precision control, AI optimization, labor empowerment, scalable rollout, and unified reporting.

  3. Build the sales pitch deck for the sales team

    Step 3

    I turned that map into an 18-slide horticulture deck. It opens on the grower’s problem (labor and energy cost, manual control, siloed data), shows the three products as a value ladder, and then lets the evidence do the selling: trial results, competition wins, partner quotes from Soli Organic, Great Lakes Greenhouses and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and press coverage.

  4. Plan six months of education, not hard selling

    Step 4

    Growers knew their problems but not that intelligent automation could solve them, so the marketing plan was educational. Each month had one theme (partnerships, then results, then labor, then data and AI) delivered as one LinkedIn post and one email a week plus one article a month, with a clear call to action, retargeting for people who engaged, and segments by country, crop and title.

  5. Build Sales Ops to catch what marketing creates

    Step 5

    I set up CRM processes, standardized pipeline stages, lead scoring, workflow automation, and pipeline analytics, and tracked four KPIs: email list growth, LinkedIn and email engagement, LinkedIn follower growth, and conversion to a demo or consultation.

Work sample

Horticulture sales pitch deck

The deck I built for Koidra’s sales team to use with greenhouse growers. It leads with the grower’s problems, presents the product line as a value ladder, and backs every claim with trial data and third-party proof.

Open the full deck (PDF, 18 slides)
  • Cover slide: Grow with precision using intelligent automation
    Cover: the promise in the grower’s words
  • About Koidra: higher yield, more savings, autonomous labor
    Three outcomes a grower cares about
  • Improving greenhouse profit: labor and energy, manual control, siloed data
    Problem first: labor, control, and data
  • Solutions: Datapilot, Autopilot Grow, Autopilot 360 as a value ladder
    The product line as a value ladder
  • Autopilot Grow: how sensors, controller and AI close the loop
    How Autopilot Grow works, in one picture
  • Rated number one for smart greenhouse solution, with trial results and grants
    Credibility up front: trials, wins, grants
  • Eggplant trial in a commercial greenhouse: yield up 28.5%
    Commercial trial: eggplant yield +28.5%
  • Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge: net profit versus competitors and expert growers
    Beat expert growers by 27.8% in net profit
  • Partner quotes from Soli Organic, Great Lakes Greenhouses and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
    Partners say it, so we don’t have to

Execution & collaboration

  • Led customer discovery and competitive analysis to reposition Koidra CoPilot, then wrote the messaging, website content, and sales enablement materials.
  • Gave the sales team one deck and one story for horticulture prospects, tied line by line to the customer profile.
  • Designed AI-powered workflows for prospect research, competitive intelligence, support knowledge retrieval, and candidate screening across Sales Ops, Marketing, Customer Success, and HR.
  • Prepared quarterly investor updates and board materials, and coordinated company-wide all-hands communications.
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