From a voice note to a funded company
- Client
- Fieldnote
- Industry
- Agriculture
- Location
- Kaduna, Nigeria
- Year
- 2024
- Engagement
- Venture partnership
- Duration
- 14 weeks to launch
- Team
- Cross-functional team of 6
- Disciplines
- Zero to one, Full-stack, UI / UX, Branding
Overview
Fieldnote began as a two-minute voice note from a founder in Kaduna. Fourteen weeks later it was a mobile app in the hands of 2,000 farmers. A year on, it has 60,000 users and a seed round led by an agritech fund.
- Farmers using it monthly
- 60k
- Average price received at market
- +23%
- Seed round raised
- $1.8M
Farmers were selling blind.
Smallholder farmers often sell to the first trader who arrives, with no idea what the same crop is fetching thirty kilometres away. Fieldnote's founder, Ibrahim, had watched his own family do it for years.
He had the insight and the network, but no product and no technical co-founder. That is exactly the kind of founder our venture partnership exists for.
Fourteen weeks, step by step
- Week 1 – 2
Field research
Forty interviews across three markets. We learned most users share one phone per household and prefer voice to text.
- Week 3 – 4
Prototype
A clickable prototype tested in Hausa and English. Two of our three first concepts were thrown out.
- Week 5 – 12
Build
React Native app, price-collection backend and a WhatsApp fallback for low-end phones, shipped in four cycles.
- Week 13 – 14
Launch
Pilot with 2,000 farmers through two cooperatives. Weekly releases based on what we saw.
- Month 12
Seed round
$1.8M raised. Drams remains a shareholder and product partner.
Interface
Made for one-handed use in bright sunlight
High-contrast type, large targets and voice playback on every price. The app works on a 2G connection and weighs under 9MB.
- Monthly active farmers
- 60k
- Average sale price uplift
- +23%
- App size on Android
- 8.6MB
- Idea to launch
- 14 wks
Stack
Mobile
- React Native
- Expo
- SQLite
Backend
- Python
- FastAPI
- PostgreSQL
Channels
- USSD fallback
Brand
- Name
- Identity
- App store assets
Marlow Freight
Stabilising and modernising a 9-year-old logistics platform