The seasonal change that affected my startup
My first dream as a social entrepreneur and an avid environmentalist, is a movement and a behavioural design based product aimed at growing a healthier world. The vision reads,
At Ugao we are building a Green Revolution which empowers everybody to grow healthy food, together. We believe that such a dream can thrive with help from the entire ecosystem — the environment, growers, farmers and the communities.
Yet changing behaviour is hard and sometimes more so of yourself and your team’s than of your users. It hurts to change, whether it’s a resolution, plans for that picnic that’s been taking forever or your habit of waking up late everyday. But it hurts worse when you fail.
For one, the team at Ugao, did fail for a while, but for one we did what we do best:
I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.
- Michael Jordan
And boy we tried…
The growth of Ugao
Early community
Ugao started off in late 2015 as a heartfelt movement throughout the Indian grower community, at the grassroots. Farmers love our vision, growers enjoy our company and community members direct the ethical fate of this movement. We believed in the unity of this ecosystem and helped in the same as well.
We rounded up with 4000+ members on our Facebook group and had already connected more than 150 agriculturists, farmers and growers through our events and community efforts — all in 6 months.
Market fit
By the beginning of 2016, we had a huge momentum — big community getting bigger by the hour, volunteers, mentors and influencers in the right places and by the dozen, NGO initiatives volunteering with us, the list does not end there. We had business mentors of 3 different kinds and experience backgrounds, 2 of them who were at times the driving force of the product.
With 6 months of data collected beforehand through active and passive enquiries and interpersonal engagements, we were thorough with our iterations. We come to a unique idea of keeping the movement and the product different and mutually co-existant— the product will aid the movement that Ugao is. By the end of this we are ready with the base prototype for the first version along with monetisation plans and a 10 year vision based on the speed tech is scaling at.
Slow development
Over the next 8 months things go haywire from the technological end, facing our first massive delay and the demoralisation that comes with it. Somehow we get our landing site up and running.
Yet to our entire team this was good enough, the day we launched it, 23rd October 2016, our entire team got the morale boost that they lacked for 8 whole months at one go. I am not sure why but we ended up proactively increasing the number of our volunteers and smart guns. UG data scientists, ecology and botany initiates joined us from IIT Kharagpur and Bombay to work with our product thinking. Our amazing mentors backed us through all of this reminding us to “stay clear of investments” the entire time.
Finding Neverland
We didn’t have a working product — but we had 1000+ active community members in a year, a website and now a pretty expansive team all working as stakeholders or volunteers, no one really earning.
In the frenzy of lost focus we did everything — charted up the database model, mathematical models for machine learning and recognition, researched into future tech possibilities and the effect of the same on the movement, almost everything.
Last light in the tunnel
In the December of 2016 the inevitable happened — database and models for product version 1.1 were ready while the product itself never ended up being completed. The teams that worked the most were also the ones that were most demoralised.
It was a highly stressful experience for everyone in the team and finally with backing from the mentors, we decided to call it off for the time being.
Takeaways usually don’t taste this good
- Focus only on the most important. Cancel out the noise.
Speaking at conferences, working on moonshot plans, walking the team dog, these don’t guarantee anything for your business. At some point everyone in the team grew their favourite vegetables, a warmer memory than a lot of those far out technological ideas we came up with. - Know yourself.
How far will you go and when do you stop — every step taken should be planned even if an iterative one. Back your decisions with insights, the interpersonal and the business related ones.
By being true to ourselves and our team’s purpose we create a strong and flexible iteration process charged up with impatient and regular efforts. - Get to know your team (like you know yourself).
Work with your team. Lead, don’t oversee. Stay with them, spend time with them, you are making a family — especially when it comes to ethical problem-solving, the bonds need to be deeper. The interpersonal and team relationships should be bigger than the distractions of money, politics and self interest. The only way to do this is to know exactly who you wish to work with and what they look to achieve. - If mistakes repeat, know what the real mistake is.
Having learnt a bit about mistakes and written about the experience too — the most harmful mistakes usually have its origin in either our negligence, blind spots or gross miscalculation of our resources. I have learnt to fix the the first two problems, which makes the third one much clearer. - Do not take up more than you can handle.
Not as a product, as a team or even as volunteer service. It’s like the story of the boy who stuck his hand into that jar full of chocolates. Challenge your assumptions, biases and try to picture the reality of things. - Get up, get back, get at it again. Everyday.
For any product, especially in community building and behavioural ones, there are numerous improvements that are waiting to be made throughout the flow. With increasing frequency and shorter wait times between builds and shipments we can indulge in focused neural activities, making good use of some of that super-fast and efficient neurotransmitter, Myelin — practice makes perfect. In this case it also helps in establishing a “Never say die” attitude oiling the iterative cogs in the organisation.
Grateful to the ones who mattered the most
Thanks to the mentors we had
I have immense gratitude and respect for our incredible business mentors — Giridharan Natarajan of Babajob (currently working on his own startup), Sattam Dasgupta of Ittiam and Tushar Bansal of Simplilearn.
Without their expertise and guidance I would not have seen Ugao for what it is and would have missed some very important cues, that we finally took. Thank you for believing in me and supporting me through each step of the way. The way all of you made me believe in Ugao, myself and my team, has taught me to look at life in a gutsy and direct manner.
Grateful to our community mentors
Without our community mentors who impacted at both grassroot levels and macro scale product building decisions this would have been an impossible feat. Their knowledge and their eagerness to mentor me and such a movement were unparalleled. My deepest gratitude for the energy you guys brought into this — Ardhendu sir (Ecologist at DRCSC), Nick Smith (Founder at BRGTN), Rosie Harding (Co-owner at Assagao Kitchen Garden and Food Forest), Sanghamitra Staub (Co-owner at Staub Estate, Coorg) and Sujata Naphade (touted as one of India’s few zero budget agriculturalists).
Heroes as volunteers
Graphic design — Siddhi Surte, is one of those graphic designers who’s got a really keen eye and she’s in good demand for good reasons. Thanks a bunch for the really cool illustrations you put out for us.
Content — Atrei Chatterjee and the wonderful Reya Ahmed of Saintbrush, you guys took the words out of my mouth most of the times, thank you for the lovely and fun experience.
Community — Gopal Bansal and Sukanya Majumder (Founder at Sukanya’s), both of whom we borrowed for a while from their own projects, thank you for holding strong through the ups and downs and figuring out a lot of what we threw at you guys.
Data — Varun Nair, Omnicommerce Project Manager at Decathlon, long time friend “slash” tech aficionado, did an immense job helping us figure out parts of SEO and data analysis towards the initial stages.
And the team we had
Prateek Mehta — The first week he spent with us Prateek said to me “I will get your social media up to where you need it to be”. He just turned 24. This guy is a wiz (worked on projects with Tata Motors, Uber and Unilever) at what he does and he does digital marketing real good. He dropped an app, a few of his friends were working on, to join us and since then has helped me through major chunks of this experience. Currently he is working in Vietnam.
Ravi Sharma — We met at Embibe, where I was working at primarily at the time, and he was an intern Product Manager. Yet another young achiever, from an IIT, Ravi came up with quite a few innovative statistics and angle points to data thinking at Ugao. At his age (he’s 21) he’s an SEO expert, growth strategist, product thinker, creative problem solver and has a bloody good pair of eyes for analytics. He is currently working as a Junior Data Scientist at Embibe.
Rajendra Aluru — Another really talented guy at met Embibe, and yet another Data Scientist who is currently working there — Rajendra and I stayed up nights to develop Ugao’s database, as well as the machine learning models required for version 1.1. He is impeccably talented and has the will to make his dreams a reality, and often.
Sonika Sil — An amazing graphic designer, problem solver and community ethusiast who also grows food. We were lucky to have worked with her on-screen as well as on-field. Without her daily intervention a lot of Ugao’s on-field activities wouldn’t have achieved it’s scale. She is currently working at Happy Mcgarrybowen.
Last but not the least, the beautiful community of growers
Thank you for growing! Thank you for all the food, plants and gardens — without minds and hearts like yours we would be missing the patience to understand nature and the courage to cultivate a healthy world.
Forward-facing
There are many products and services to help nudge us towards our goals — whether that’s making healthier eating choices, developing better financial habits, or maintaining a more active lifestyle. To create a team that can successfully accomplish these can be difficult, leave alone an entire movement.
We see the approach, leverage and delight of behavioural product design in a much greater light at this point, especially after the similar but more intrinsic experience we have had. The deep-seated psychological factors involved in decision-making are coming clear to us as we approach this problem with a biological insight — that of the hormonal stimuli. That is a long topic which you can learn more about in this hollistic article about behavioural design and maybe as we go ahead on this blog.
In light of recent events and re-evaluating our initiative at Ugao, I and parts of the old team have decided to restart the movement. What we make of the new product is yet to be seen. Join us once again on our Facebook group for renewed discussions, problem-solving, information and resources about growing food.
