Easier access to market can increase farmers productivity and profitability

My name is Wycklife Abok. We are trying to increase the market accessibility by creating a platform that can enable farmers to easily access the market through their mobile phones. I am part of an experimental incubator that gives startups and entrepreneurs funding in exchange for testing and sharing leanstartup hypotheses. adamberk helped me run this experiment. The link to my specific hypothesis is trello.

We wanted to provide remote usability testing services for web and mobile applications. After conducting a brief market research, we thought there was a good product-market fit with e-mauzo. We went lean and without an actual product we did market research interviews. I thought that 100% of 28 of rural farmers would commit to use my platform to advertise their farm produce. We made 28 interviews to be precise and 26 of those interviewed promised to use our platform for their marketing needs which translates to 93%.

In the past one and half months ago, we compiled all of our findings: After a careful analysis of the agricultural industry in Kenya and discovering the needs and ways we can complement our core product with; we found value in online marketing platform. Right now, we are in the phase of product development and finding a base market for our platform.

Experiment

In this experiment we had the chance to talk with 28 local farmers in Kenya over their needs, current solutions and their willingness to buy our solution. Our hypothesis was that each of them would buy advertisement space in our platform, for being more user friendly and gathering deeper market insights. We interviewed to 28 farmers who accepted our meeting request. We arranged meetings with them the subsequent week in their respective regions.

Results

Of the 28 farmers, all of them accepted the fact that they are not getting the best out of their produces market wise and there is a lot to improve while gathering market information. One of the most surprising insight that we have acquired was that lack of price information is the dominant challenge that cuts across. Our solution should be able to solve a problem of the end-user. In our case we need to make some bit of modifications so that the end user farmer or any other stakeholder can utilize the platform. In this sense, we will design a marketing platform/ application should be user friendly and able to run on legacy systems or devices running on older operating systems and versions and have a collaboration with established mobile money transfer services for easier transactions, so that our end users can actually use the product on their mobile phones even in rural areas.

Another important learning was that there were more immediate and frequent needs than our proposed platform for market price variations problems and lack of cross-sector collaboration such as other government agencies and other non-governmental organizations. On sharing with my mentor about this experiment, he mentioned that government agencies are not our benchmark market, but a totally different customer segment, thus including them as one of our customers may cripple our future operations. We always aim to sell our solutions to farmers and farm product customers, thus there is a lot to think about on this matter.

Ultimately, we have taken a positive step to validate our assumption that rural farmers in the agricultural industry could significantly benefit from marketing platform and there is a need in the market to make this industry open and more accessible.

Next Steps

1. Create a mobile platform and understand the needs of rural farmers to make an actual mobile application.
2. Understand the market needs of rural farmers and how we can support them without duplicating solutions that already exists
3. After creating a marketing platform, check with farmers if they could use our marketing product.

In our next experiment, I BELIEVE that 15 people (54% of the people interviewed) will use our platform between February 3 and March 3 because we are addressing an unmet marketing needs among rural farmers in Kenya to market and sell their farm products using their mobile phones.

The budget for coming up with the marketing platform is as follows:

1. Mobile app development — $2000

2. Mobile money integration — $500

3. Google Maps integration — $200

4. Synchronization between devices — $300

5. Promotion — $500

6. Initial transportation — $800

7. Ware housing — $1000

8. Licensing — $200

Total cost is $5000

Questions

What would you do in my case? Also, if you have any further questions on the experiment I would love to answer.