Building the First Digital Farming Community for Farmers in Thailand
By: Mirza Salman Hossain Beg
Tags: Agritech, Product Development, Entreprenuership, Innovation, Startup

The intrapreneurial journey in building a new business through innovation

Prelude

Being born in Bangladesh in the ’80s, I saw a different narrative of the country growing up as a child than the most new-generation urban kids born later in the ’90s. Most of the year, I was living in the lush green military bases with almost untamed natural habitats surrounding them, and our annual long holidays were spent at my maternal grandparent’s countryside home at the heart of a beautiful northern village called Rampura. One thing remained very common between both places. I would look out of my windows and see farmers cultivating their lands around the year, and would see the whole crop cycle unfolding before my eyes. When we would visit our grandparents’ place for the holidays, my days and weeks were spent with the farmers and their families in the neighborhood. I would join their harvesting festivals, their daily conversations over several cups of tea along with bhapa pitha, a local steamed rice cake made with solid chunks of molasses. I would hear the stories of great harvest and witness first hand their tears of loss from their past farming seasons. During those weeks spent over cold winter, I would join with their families for a hearty meal sitting around a clay stove that would keep us all warm as we would chatter about their hopes and dreams for a better life. This was part of almost every year of my childhood for 14–15 years.

Why I moved to dtac and took on the job to head innovation

17 years later, as I was done delivering on the promise of digitizing the largest telco in Bangladesh (Grameenphone) — building the digital channels and distribution while setting up an amazing team that would carry on my legacy — I was ready to move out of my comfort zone and explore opportunities beyond Bangladesh. The opportunity to work for dtac showed up, but there was no clear direction as to what my focus to drive as the Innovation Head would be. The task was rather to get on board and tell the management where should dtac invest next to find new business opportunities beyond the traditional telco.

Driving innovation and new businesses from a corporate (the journey of being an intrapreneur)

When I joined dtac in March 2019, I took a look around the company to see if there was anything from the existing business that I could pivot into a new business, and luckily, I found one — CSR project called ‘Smart Agri’ that dtac was already dedicating for over a decade in Thailand. The solution was simple agriculture-related information sharing with the farmers, first starting out as SMSs and later moving into a static mobile app in partnership with RBK Foundation. While the impact was still limited due to the CSR nature and focused only on dtac users at that time, the narrative to help the Thai agriculture industry at large instantly struck a chord from my childhood. All the memories from my childhood years with and around farmers started pouring in, and I knew I was clear in my vision of what we needed to do next. I showed the then management my vision to transform the Thai farmers with a digital platform that will move away from the existing CSR initiatives into a sustainable commercial model that’s most needed. We also proposed to do it in partnership with another big global corporate with no prior relationship with dtac/Telenor. It took us almost 6 months to convince everyone, and I put my own career on the line to take a bet on digital farming as a new innovation business opportunity for dtac that’s worth exploring. I was given a 6 months window to prove a POC and get a go-ahead to actually turning it into a commercial project in dtac. The clock was ticking and it was time to walk the talk!

The journey of Kaset GO

Driving innovation and building a new business in a corporate is always one of the toughest things to do. Most people within telcos often don’t come from non-telco backgrounds, and even if they do, it’s really difficult to make sense of businesses that don’t exist. However, I was really lucky to have the dtac management team to sponsor this ambition and empower me, K. Praphan, and my dtac team (including the amazing Yara team led by Andy Leong, my co-founder in this project along with Karen Chua in establishing the strategic partnership, and the rest of the talented team members from Yara) to build this dream. Not to mention the equal endorsement and strategic guidance from the Yara management. Without their sponsorship and support, this collaboration wouldn’t have come this far.

Almost the full team behind Kaset GO, and of course my eyes were closed as I was dreaming!

Kaset GO, the first digital farming community platform in Thailand, and most likely in the SEA, is the result of a unique partnership between dtac and Yara. For the first time in history, these two companies joined hands to bring their unique capabilities in delivering something novel for the market.

The journey of the Kaset GO digital platform partnership formally started back in June 2019. At that time, we didn’t even have a name, just two self-organizing teams from two different companies trying to make sense of the different cultures and ways of work while researching the farmers across Thailand for a potential solution.

Given our agile team structure from the start, we were able to move fast and set up a functional cadence for the teams to execute our first prototype. The team followed various design thinking principles to take in as many inputs as possible while we were in the field listening to the farmers, developing our HMW (How Might We) questions, drawing up countless sketches, making a paper-prototype to run very early-stage user testing, and then coming back to the drawing board to repeat the same process again. After several rounds of customer immersion, validation, and internal war-room debates, we finally agreed to test our hypothesis of building a farmer-driven community that would be the most ideal platform approach based on the inputs received directly from the farmers. With USD 100K as seed money jointly put in by dtac and Yara to build the prototype, we went back to the field and hired a 3rd party agency to run neutral research on the acceptance and validation for this digital farming platform. We only had 10 weeks to deliver a working solution and roll out our POC (Proof of Concept) alpha version of the web-app.

In November 2019, we launched our POC app called ‘Kaset Tong Roo’ among a controlled group of 149 farmers from Rayong and Chanthaburi (two provinces in Thailand). With a physical event organized to introduce the app (without branding it or revealing the brands behind it to stay unbiased), we were sitting behind the dashboard of Google Analytics, waiting eagerly to see what happens next. The result? In less than 2 months’ time, 149 farmers shared and endorsed the app within their circles reaching more than 6,000+ farmers (40x growth) organically. From only two pilot provinces, our app was being used in more than 17 provinces all over Thailand. Farmers validated the community approach and loved the expert 1 to 1 chat feature for more personal deep dive on a particular query.

By this time, we knew we were onto something, and we needed the management go-ahead to build the commercial MVP app with a faster time to market. In February 2020, we passed our management decision check-point and secured the budget to build the main product platform. And 2 weeks later, the world came to an absolute standstill with the lockdown from Covid-19. We were already hurting a lot for not being able to work under one roof as a team (Yara Digital is based out of Singapore, with few resources from Thailand), and with the Covid-19 in the scene, there was no certainty for the team to get together during the pivotal months of developing the MVP product. Luckily enough, we were already collaborating with the best online collaboration tools due to the nature of the partnership and it wasn’t difficult for us to adjust to the new normal.