Our work has been constantly questioned by some versions of these, “Does crop price information asymmetry still exist?” or “Is crop price information important for farmers?”
After answering over 10 million crop price queries, we have realized that not all information is equal in the eyes of farmers. For them, the real deal is the information that checks the following five attributes:
1. Credible
2. Hyperlocal
3. Real-time
4. Relevant
5. Actionable
Sadly, the ubiquitous public crop price database often falls short and does not enable farmers to get better prices. To address this, for past few months, we have been running a small experiment in Chhindwara mandi to crowdsource crop sale data points from farmers and provide this price data back to the community behind a paywall.
To our surprise, over 1,000 farmers purchased subscriptions without any active marketing or nudging on our part, with over 20% resubscribing in the same season. This experiment's result illustrates that when information is credible, hyperlocal, real-time, relevant, and actionable, farmers not only seek it but also pay for it.
We're not pioneers in this; in the early 2010s, ventures like Reuters Market Light and Intuit’s Fasal proved a similar hypothesis using SMS-based services. However, that era had its constraints in data generation and payment processing. Today, the majority of farmers have access to a smartphone within their household, and their ability to generate multimedia data is unlike anything in the past. Further, the UPI payment infrastructure has significantly lowered costs and frictions to collect subscription payments and distribute monetary incentives to data contributors.
And this enabling ecosystem gives us optimism to enable millions of farmers create individual data points and leverage collective datasets in a way that builds their agency and improves their livelihoods. Price information is just the tip of the iceberg; the potential use cases extend much further.
We're actively hiring to test this model further and are offering a $250 reward for successful referrals (but hey, don't recommend yourself – we promise you'll be well-compensated; you can read more in our blog on compensation.)
At Gramhal, we looking for people with entrepreneurial spirit, agility to run lean experiments, and bias for rigorous execution. Please apply or tag your friends for following roles:
User Researcher: Craft personas for information, mandi, data contributors, and subscribers.
Operations: Design and lead experiments to find the optimal model for price data collection.
Sales & Marketing: Develop a scalable marketing framework and sales strategy to maximize revenue per mandi.
All links in the comments.
#hiring
