Launching into Growth Stage with Janani App
Update (Jan 1, 2021)
Global health pandemic arrived just as we were winding down the physical outlets at the end of 2019 and getting ready for our next phase — digital growth model with an extended field team. Covid-19 related lockdowns resulted in a pause for most of Janani’s marketplace activities. After providing emergency services & support during the lockdowns of 2020, we are (tentatively, very tentatively!) planning to restart executing on our growth phase plans from A̶p̶r̶i̶l̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶1̶ October 2021.
With the end of 2018 came the end of our pilot phase and the associated three-district-wide effort. Some of our learnings from these years have been captured on this platform. One example: Building a Tech Platform for Aggregating Farm Purchases in India. With the beginning of 2019 comes the launch of Krishi Janani’s next stages of growth, now to be spread out across the entire state of Tamil Nadu.
The End: Pilot Phase
Krishi Janani has been working in three districts — Coimbatore, Erode, and Tiruppur — for the past two and half years. These are physical locations, we operate out of local retail outlets. Our goal of aggregating small farmers’ purchasing power is based on these physical locations. Our membership, sales, and services were based in those physical locations.
This was our initiation and learning phase. Physical locations resulted in our geographical reach being circumscribed to a small radius around the center, even when we sent out our mobile truck to interior, hard-to-reach villages. We became part of the communities we were in, to the extent of setting up our own farm (more on this in a separate blog post later). Krishi Janani sourced products from various manufacturers, sold considerable amount out of these outlets, and provided trainings for farmers to switch to regenerative agriculture. We learnt a massive amount, primarily about the difficulty of being a farmer. That phase comes to an end now. As we close out that chapter and open a new one, the demographic of our 5,200 farmer-members look like this.
The Beginning: Growth Phase
Now comes the next phase of our social enterprise’s life — the much dreaded, filled-with-chasms, the most-feared — “growth” phase. We have envisioned this phase to be predominantly digital. The hub of this effort is the just-launched Janani Mobile App (beta; Tamil language app; available only in India; you can download it at Apple App Store or Google Play Store). With that app, our target audience grew overnight from 350,000 agricultural households in three districts to 3.2 million households spread out across the entire state of Tamil Nadu.
Given these metrics, why the “dreaded, filled-with-chasms, the most-feared” adjectives to describe this phase you might wonder.
It is extremely hard / almost impossible to convert what is a semi-successful, small-scale pilot into a mega-sized, successful growth enterprise. Many, many social enterprises fail to clear this barrier.
Let us take just one variable — geography. The three districts with the ag household population quoted above covers 15,000+ sq km. Of this, we are serving only a small portion as you can see from farmer-member stats table above. Trying to serve the entire state means that our geographic scope just expanded across a cool 130,000+ sq km! Now imagine selling a product or service, any product or service, across this exponentially grown geography and population. Some of our bestsellers — herbal bran (50 kgs) or cottonseed oilcake (70 kgs) — begin to look very different in that light.
This growth phase requires a completely transformed mindset, approach, product & services mix, operational model, and workforce. That is what we are embarking upon next. Do we know all the answers? Definitely not. However, in keeping with our lean & agile model of learning and building our business model as we go, we have a handful of hypotheses to test. And, we stand ever-ready to learn and grow. At this rate, we are becoming experts in the art of building our wings as we hurtle down (with due thanks to Ray Bradbury for that inspiring quote)! :)
Janani app is one aspect of it. There are many others that are on the drawing board. We will be elaborating upon each of these as days go by.
Krishi Janani got this far, thanks to the many well-wishers and supporters we acquired over the years. Wish us luck as we step into the great unknown again.
