♠ Jack of Spades

Field and strategy

Go to the field before the whiteboard.

Before Bull sold a single bag of inputs, I spent weeks in agro-retail shops across seven districts to find out whether it should, and how.

Hands played

• The question

  Seven districts, shop by shop

  Should a five-year-old procurement company enter the fertiliser and biostimulant market? Interviews in agro-input shops across four North Gujarat districts, two in Saurashtra and Kutch: how an input product actually gets launched, who the competitors are in each belt, and where Bull could fit.

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• Finding: the brand pays for its first customers

  Two or three seasons before revenue

  Trials go to farmers free. A crop cycle of three to five months tells them whether it worked, and the first two or three seasons are given away before anyone pays. Entering this market means funding it before revenue, not after.

• Finding: a market that has burned its buyers

  Trust, already spent

  District after district told the same story: brands that cut organic manure with cheap filler, sell for a season or two, disappear on the third year's truckload, and come back under a new name with the same formula. Farmers have learned to distrust anything new, even free, and stay with the chemical fertilisers they know.

• Finding: the market runs on credit

  No upfront payment

  Retailers sell to farmers on udhaar and collect after harvest, so a new brand finances its own distribution as well. You design pricing, margins and collections before you design a product.

• What Bull did with it

  Partner first, brand later

  Enter through a name farmers already trust rather than a new one. Bull now sells Banas Dairy's Bhumi Amrut range to its own farmer network, and its biostimulant went out as a trial in the districts the survey ranked highest.

• Summer groundnut, Deesa

  Set up, then stopped

  Built the sourcing plan for a summer-groundnut season in Banaskantha, from a village-level acreage survey to factory conversations. External factors stopped it before the season; the plan stays on file.

• Department of Agriculture

  Still open

  Made the case for state support for Bull to the department's leadership, including the Principal Secretary, across a series of meetings.