Stumbling into founding a venture
Preface
A new reader enquired that she would like to know more about the origin story to get a better context of the work that I did. Honestly, I forgot to make the introduction of my journey into Agri-space. I remembered that I wrote a post for our team at Subjimandi.app which covers my travails into the vortex of Agri-marketplaces.
Following is a slightly edited version of the chapter that published first on our Internal communication tool, Basecamp on Aug, 2020.
Introduction
When I envisioned to enter the Agri-space as an entrepreneur. It was never about solving every problem that conspired in the field of agriculture. I am an upper caste, middle class and a graduate engineer male who hails from services childhood. I couldn't possibly relate with farmers and wipe out the problems in the field of agriculture for the last 70 years.
In my time working across product design roles in different companies, I gained substantial field experience on how logistics works. It looked simple; movement of cargo from point A to B. But, the context in which the movement happens changes time to time. This was my understanding in few years of experience trying to design and help build software for multiple companies and seeing them not get adopted. (editor’s note: will write more about this topic in the future)
It is the year 2018, when I ventured into my first startup for a brief six months in urban commuting with few of my school friends. It fizzled out during the shock of demonetisaton as our customer, state transport corporation was forced to change its focus. In this aftermath, while working as a contract product designer is when I slowly trickled into the space of agriculture when a logistics veteran started my inquiry. He was mentioning the quantity of agri commodity movement he did for the public procurement agency, FCI.
It struck me then that we could approach this space with a different mindset, logistics services. My belonging to agriculture doesn’t matter as much as the service we will try to offer.
Formation days
There was a barrier to reach out to farmers and sell my uninformed idea of solving their market access problem through integrated logistics. So, for a good half year I had been refining the the thesis of how to work on the value proposition to all the stakeholders.
This path led me to discover multiple concepts and helped me crystallise the value proposition. Fine tuned the business models and economic concepts that I didn’t know could be applied in such manner. Yet, the chance to enter the field was far elusive without any connects.
A Game of chance : Cold Outreach
I am a big believer of cold emailing and reaching out to interesting strangers. I have written to multiple people in the past. Our company’s existence happens to be one of the shining examples of one such outreach turning into an opportunity.
I am an avid listener of podcasts and was listening to the Amit Varma’s “The Seen and the Unseen” podcast. An episode which dropped on 16-september-2018 was in Hindi. It happens to be the only one episode in Hindi. The guest was Mr. Gunvant Patil of Shetkari Sanghatana (SS) .
I can write a whole story on Gunvant Patil but that is out of scope for this book. In brief, he is a current member and ex-general secretary of SS in Maharashtra. SS is a farmers organisation founded by Late Sharad Joshi.
The ideas discussed in the episodes inspired the heck out of me and led me to write to him a week later introducing myself and the idea I had been working on.
He replied back to me a month later saying that we will meet once he is back from USA. We did meet in Hyderabad on one of his visits in October and he invited me to an event of their organisation in the month of December. I decided that it was now or never to enter the field.
December 13th , 2018 was the day I committed to start Subjimandi.app and Pipehaul at a motel in Shiridi after attending the death anniversary celebrations of Sharad Joshi. Gunvant helped me gain the confidence and the contacts to enter Nasikh 1 year later and start our procurement in 2019.
Rest, you could say was history. Today, Gunvant happens to be one of my closest and most trusted people. He is the guiding light behind our ideologies in Subjimandi.app.
I am writing this story in the introduction to inform you that we may or may not be successful. But what got us till here is people taking the chance, lending credibility and believing in our approach. We won’t be successful because we have a brilliant insight or have the money but becasuse we align with the market in a way that benefits producers and consumers in a far superior manner.
My social and financial status provided me the opportunity to spend the time to convert this concept into a company over a longer than usual duration of time. So, our ideas are not our strengths if they just stay with us. They need to manifest into bigger than just ideas. And this book is my attempt at documenting all of it in one place to help you and our future teammates to know everything I learnt so far.
Present Situation
We stuck to the model but iterated in the execution. I will write more about it in detail but for now having found an exit through an acqui-hire, my role from a founder has transformed into an operator contributing in agri-space. We stuck to the spirit of punching above our weights by constantly writing in public about the work and our thought process. This helped us find a bunch of fellow participants who have cheered our wins and supported us in tough times.
I would not say that we were successful but we also didn't die a silent death. It was a journey that gave each one of us more than we would have thought and helped us become part of agri-space.
Signing off till next time
Vivek , rookie operator