Key Features
Tech Stack
Questions:
How do you intend to scale up? Do you plan to become the aggregators you intended to replace? Or will you adopt a more cooperative model? What is your monetization or cost recovery strategy? What is your end goal for the product?
2. Aggregator vs. Cooperative: The current aggregators operate on Opaqueness (hiding the farmer to protect margins). We are building on Transparency. The goal is closer to a "Digital Cooperative." We want the end consumer to know exactly which batch came from which pond. If we become just another faceless middleman squeezing margins, we have failed. We pay significantly above the local Mandi (market yard) rates because we remove the 4 layers of brokers between the village and the city.
3. Monetization: Currently, it is a standard D2C margin. The price gap is massive—farmers sell raw seeds for pennies, and city consumers pay premium prices (often a 500% markup). Even after paying farmers double the market rate and handling logistics/packaging, there is a healthy margin for the platform because we own the entire chain.
4. End Goal: The "Adopt a Crop" Subscription. I want to move away from one-off transactional sales to a model where a user subscribes to a specific patch of yield for the season. This gives the farmer guaranteed income before the harvest (solving their working capital crisis) and gives the consumer 100% traceable food.
We are starting with selling packets to prove the logistics, but the destination is "Farming-as-a-Service."
I am a developer living in Barsoi, Bihar (India).
The Context: My region produces ~90% of the world's supply of Makhana (Fox Nuts). I see farmers harvesting these seeds from muddy ponds daily, yet they sell them for pennies to aggregators. By the time the product reaches cities, it is 5x the price and often stale.
The Project: I am bootstrapping a direct-to-consumer platform to cut out the middlemen.
The Stack:
Built with Bolt.new (Rapid prototyping in the browser).
Deployed on Vercel.
No Database yet: I built a "WhatsApp-First" checkout flow. I want to handle the first 50 orders personally to verify logistics before automating it.
The "Hard" Tech: We don't use industrial popping machines. We use the traditional wooden mallet (Thaapi) method because it preserves the crunch better. (There is a video of this process on the site).
Happy to answer questions about the tech stack or the supply chain logistics in rural India!
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