Experience at a tech startup in Agriculture Industry.

It's a startup enabling farmers to make smart choices.

It’s been almost 8 months since I joined a startup. This is an Alwar based startup, and this is my first fulltime job. So I cannot really give honest comparison from experience because I really don’t have experience of any other workplace or mode of organisation. I’ll try to put whatever I have learnt from the journey so far, about growth startup offers, work-life balance, tech and people in follow up posts.

Let's take on the startup from problem and money angle

Startup and growth:

First job at a startup.

I had no experience of what is the environment in a startup, but the picture I had in my mind of some matrix level AI and spaceX kinda vibe just hit the ground as the actual product is a mature web app, and the problem we are solving is rather simple, but user is immature which makes tackling the problem hard.

The startup isn’t solving problem where people are seeking comfort, but people who are rather lost and have no idea about how to make a big purchase like Tractor, but they want to make profit with farming which made this a hard problem to solve.

The startup offers multiple products to its user like Tractor Junction, Truck Junction, Infra Junction and recently launched Bike Junction, primarily known for its brand, Tractor Junction, where people can sell and purchase tractors on the platform. There is a suite of in-house products that are actively worked upon and used.

These platforms provide useful information about various automobiles, latest models, specification and comparison tables to help the user make a better decision from the insights. How the startups functions became fascinating to me. It does not need to be a complex web app like Microsft Teams or Google or Facebook or Github. The startup has provided me enough insights about the kind of work and products are out there and helping people. I had no idea, how basic problems are being solved.

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Something about Product Funnel and making money:

It’s an opportunity that I got to know how most online businesses make money. The realm of online is mainly advertising and marketing. The traffic of the platform determines the value of your product where one can crack deals with related brands who want to advertise their products.
There are multiple models to make money, some are:

1. In our case, brands like New Holland, Eicher, who want to promote their newly launched tractors, they can purchase banner rights, dialog rights deals to advertise our user base or organic traffic our platform has.

2. The platform provides options to user to purchase the lised things, we offer new tractors and old tractors, we get commission from the journey of user to actual conversion on various stages of customer journey of buying new tractor from brands.It was fascinating to know how you can sell a lead(an interested customer) at various stages (depending upon the level of interest) to brands and we have a call centre team that works in the background to mature a lead.

3. I went to Alwar for an in-house project for the old tractor vertical we have and it was great to know about it. The old tractor vertical has a backround robust operations team, about which I had no idea. It’s like watching Badmash Company for the business insights. Old Tractors have a great mature cum desi market and it’s procurement, refurbishment,and selling goes behind the scene. So this was a great experience to know about how operations happens in the field. The pure Indian startup vibe.

4. And there can be some extra ways to make money like ecommerce, selling insurance/loan for the listed product, service as a subscription.

The startup revolves around generating business, be it writing loads of content to boost SEO, thereby enhancing traffic on platform

or

creating content/running ads on social media sites to drive traffic from there to platform or building tech apps to support operations with some tool to manage cost and analyze processes

or

understanding user and improving UX based on metrics and analytics data, by improving the UI, launching the new pilots like ecommerce, better engaging representation and design of information we offer, etc.

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So it is fun for me to know how our startup functions and how it makes money. These insights are super interesting to me. Being a developer, these are valuable to know user psyche and I view side projects more from problem solving angle than a medium to improve my coding skills as my forte.

I will write my experience from a developer's standpoint as well.