How Nexa drives product innovation with Terac

Nexa builds smart implants for cattle. Tiny, rugged devices that monitor animal health, behavior, and performance in real time. Their mission: help ranchers catch disease early, streamline breeding management, and maximize herd productivity while minimizing costs.

In an industry where margins are tight and every animal counts, Nexa's technology promises to transform livestock management. But building hardware for agriculture isn't just about engineering, it's about deeply understanding the people who will use it every day.

"We're building a future unknown to many farmers today. That means we need constant clarity on what operators, growers, and facility managers actually struggle with day-to-day. Without that understanding, we're just building expensive gadgets that sit in a barn."

— Zarif Azher, CEO

Terac helps Nexa stay relentlessly customer-focused by running hundreds of AI-moderated interviews, giving them direct access to the ranchers, farm managers, and operators who make or break adoption decisions.

The challenge: farmers are busy, offline, and nearly impossible to reach

Nexa knew that the success of its implant platform depended on deep alignment with the people on the ground:

• Cow-calf operators managing breeding programs across thousands of acres

• Feedlot managers overseeing animal health and performance at scale

• Ranch hands and farm technicians doing the daily work of monitoring and care

But traditional research approaches kept hitting the same walls:

Cold emails went unread. Many farmers don't sit in front of email all day. They're driving tractors, checking fences, and managing livestock. By the time they get to a computer, your message is buried.

Surveys yielded thin, surface-level responses. When Nexa did get answers, they were often one-word replies or checkbox selections that didn't explain the why behind farmers' decisions.

Site visits didn't scale. Traveling to a handful of farms gave valuable context, but couldn't represent the diversity of operations or provide the volume of feedback needed to validate product decisions.

"It was incredibly hard to get more than a handful of farmers on the phone, let alone structured feedback. We were basically guessing what would matter most to them: their workflows, their pain points, what they'd actually pay for. That's a terrible way to build hardware."

— Alvin Zhang, CTO

Nexa needed a way to reach real farmers and ranchers on their schedule while still getting the rich, qualitative insights that drive smart product decisions. That's where Terac came in.

The solution: AI-moderated interviews that meet farmers where they are

Nexa set out to validate their implant concept with dairy farmers managing herds of 500+ cattle in California. A difficult demographic to reach. They needed to understand:

• Current health monitoring workflows and pain points

• How farmers identify and handle sick animals

• What data they trust and actually use in daily decisions

• Their willingness to adopt new technology and pricing expectations

• How implants would fit into the existing rhythms of ranch life

Using Terac's vetted panel, Nexa recruited 150+ high-quality farmers that met their exact specifications. Terac's AI interviewer then conducted in-depth conversations with each farmer, adapting to their schedule and communication style, and delivered rich qualitative insights back to Nexa in a matter of hours, not weeks.

"Terac made it possible to have conversations with people we otherwise could never reach. Their AI moderator doesn't make farmers sit down, schedule a time, or deal with our research team. They can respond on their own time - during a break, after dinner, whenever. That flexibility is really important to these folks, and it completely changed our ability to get real feedback."

— Zarif Azher

The AI interviewer wasn't just capturing yes/no answers. It asked intelligent follow-up questions, probed for details when responses were vague, and adapted its approach based on how each farmer talked about their operation. The result: unfiltered insights into how cattle implants would actually work in the messy reality of ranch operations.

The impact: from guesswork to data-driven product strategy

Using Terac, Nexa transformed a hard-to-reach audience into a continuous feedback channel that informs every major product decision.

Key outcomes:

1. Direct access to the voices that matter most

Nexa went from struggling to book a handful of phone calls to having conversations with hundreds of real ranchers and operators. This wasn't just a group of professional survey-takers. These were potential customers sharing real experiences from their operations.

2. Nuanced, story-level feedback that reveals the "why"

When you can't conduct user interviews face-to-face, it's critical to still understand the deeper context. Terac's AI-interviewer captured not just whether farmers would adopt implants, but why or why not in their own words, with specific examples from their daily work. This qualitative depth gave Nexa the context to make confident product decisions.

3. Learning cycles measured in days, not months

What used to take weeks of phone-tag, travel coordination, and manual synthesis now happens in days. Nexa can test hypotheses, gather feedback, and iterate faster than ever before.

4. A repeatable discovery engine for ongoing innovation

Nexa now has a scalable, repeatable way to test new implant features, validate analytics ideas, explore service models, and understand pricing sensitivity. They're not limited to one-off research projects. They can continuously stay aligned with customer needs as their product evolves.

5. Confidence in go-to-market decisions

Beyond product development, the insights from Terac informed Nexa's messaging, sales strategy, and positioning. They know exactly how to talk to farmers because they've heard how farmers talk about their problems.

"Without Terac, we simply wouldn't have heard from this many real farmers. We'd be building based on assumptions and anecdotes instead of hundreds of real conversations. That's the difference between a product that sounds good in a pitch deck and one that actually gets adopted in the field."

— Zarif Azher

The bottom line

By embracing AI-moderated user interviews with Terac, Nexa built a sustainable competitive advantage: the ability to stay deeply connected to their customers' reality, at scale.

For any team building products for hard-to-reach audiences, Terac provides a way to have the conversations that matter, without the logistical nightmares that usually come with qualitative research.

Nexa isn't guessing anymore. They're building with confidence, backed by hundreds of real voices from the field.