India's answer to Amazon for Cattles 🐄

Under-served category for the a really long time.

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Last week I found myself griping about the milk quality in Bangalore, even daring to compare it to the one back in my hometown.

It left me pondering - How is it that, despite being the world's leading milk producer with a cattle population exceeding 308 million, the Indian cattle market remains notably unorganized and fragmented?

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Say hello to Animall 👋

Started by IIT Delhi students Neetu Yadav, Kirti Jangra, Anurag Bisoy, and Libin V Babu, Animall is a digital platform building demand <> supply cattle marketplace for Indian farmers. A few name it as Tinder for cattle.

In the last 4 years, Animall touched 80,000 farmers, handled ₹565 Crore of total transactions & reported ₹30 in gross revenue last year.

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Moving offline discovery to online.

Historically, farmers have acquired cattle through unorganized channels like cattle fairs, local buyers, word of mouth, or recommendations from friends. With smartphones now with farmers, why not cattle discovery online.

Animall is eating the piece of the cattle buy & sell traditional chain by connecting farmers in nearby cities, providing real-time details on cattle sellers & establishing direct connections - removing the middle men.

The core value add of the product is the filters to discover the right cattle based on price, milk production quantity & quality, age & breed. Remember, milk quantity & fat percentage are strong factors in the price.

Snapshot of the category listings in Animall

This is the core engagement play on the app. It drives traffic to the website both from sellers and buyers - its core spread mechanism being WhatsApp. No wonder it does not charge sellers or buyers just yet for sharing contact details.

There are two opportunities here - first is building premium filters that help a buyer discover the right breed of cattle in budget & second is a conceirge service to line up cattle visits on behalf of the buyer. But both have it’s ceiling.

Also most of these are cash transactions - even when Animall tries to route the transaction through their platform, its an extremely hard behaviour to build. I would not push it & focus a lot more on other pieces.

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Enter “cross-sell”.

If you had to capture a large portion of the value chain in this cattle market, there are a few things you could do as a marketplace play.

1. Sell consumable products for cattle

2. Solve insurance for high value cattle

3. Solve access to credit for cattle purchase

4. Marketplace for artificial insemination

5. Solve vaccination needs post purchase

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Let’s assess the opportunities.

Selling consumables for cattle - the market does exist but the appetite to pay for ordering special foods competes directly with what is available cheaply in the local market. Even if you figure out the right pricing, delivering this and managing ops will eat into margins. However, a small market could be created by building special foods that are mixed with the regular food to solve for milk production.

Solve insurance for high value cattle - this is a huge problem. If you scout the Animall website, you will find cattle worth few lakh rupees too. The average price point however is ~₹30,000 to ₹50,000. The overall unorganized cattle insurance market is a category creation play. This is a place where the first real cross sell for Animall could happen.

Solve access to credit for cattle purchase - this is the most “need” product in this whole value chain of purchasing a cattle for milk production. The problem though is how underwriting for such loans would work. This means the loans need to be given with insurance & will always be short tenure (less than 3 years loans). If under writing is figured for farmers with little to no access to credit scores - this could itself become the biggest revenue source.

Marketplace for artificial insemination - this is today done through brokers and family/ friends network. It limits the possibility of getting insemination from top breeds sellers which farmers do not have access to. Animall could become that digital supply marketplace where the purchase and delivery of artificial insemination could happen. Again, this will need specific bets and is going to be a full stack solution & comes with ops - something the company is already burning money with.

Solve vaccination needs post purchase - this is today done by the local vet. But a full stack solution from credit → insurance → vaccination could complete the full lifecycle of the purchase. But, I wouldn’t put a lot of focus on vaccination considering the thin margins.

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These opportunities can only work with “Trust”.

Farmers need to trust the platform more than their traditional brokers. There is a vacuum of trust in this purchase journey and there are a lot of pieces that could solve this trust issue. We wrote about how to design for trust a little while back, do read it and think of it in the Animall scenario.

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We covered an interesting story yesterday. We got some solid words of appreciation on nuances of our story from one of the Ixigo founders.

Glad that this newsletter is going places when it comes to the reader love that we get poured with, grateful for everything you curious souls.

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