Supply-Chain for Agriculture

This supply-chain application features include:

• Generate product history and QR code for vendors (printable for manual use sticking to the product package).
• Showcase their products and product history 
• Take orders
• Search by QR code and products category for Merchants
•  Online sales encouraged by price discount 

ADA payment is encouraged with discounts and audited into fiat currency to meet the government's requirements.
Small and medium enterprises as the primary target customers.

Target markets of our prospects and how our service comes in:

• International market: agriculture/apiculture/Horticulture products exporters like fruits, commodity, honey, and meet. The major value we provide here is the items traceability features.
• Domestic market: all edible items and commodities in demand transacting from producers to merchants. Our main value here is the chipper access to items.

Revenue model

• Transaction fee from the purchases  
• Annual or monthly subscription fee

Value Proposition

• To Cardano: ADA usage for payment and the Cardano blockchain adoption 
• To Users: Avoids expensive middlemen, Avoids Price inflation caused by stacks of middlemen, Easy access, and Traceability of items.

Part of the plan is to pursue the business model in the following repeatable and interminable cycles.

1. Customer Development and Recruiting:  (2 months)

As we start, we communicate with the Agriculture Transformation Agency (ATA), Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), and small and medium enterprises and farmers. Introduce our project and understand the details in their problem set, cultivate their understanding of what a blockchain-powered application can do. 

Parallelly, we build efficient team dynamics. We would hire experts needed to build the platform fully engineered as well as sustaining our project as a thriving business. 

Make some effort to understand how they want our solution to fill the gaps in their business by showing the prospects our MVP to give some idea of the solution.

Having the two intact, once we get an agreement from enough prospects, we will proceed to develop the full solution considering their preferences and efficiency.

Hiring experts starts here and continues as a state of road map requires and affords it.

2. Product Development: (4moths )

Still keeping our communication with our direct customers, we will go on building the platform in a preferred way and ensuring end-user convenience without violating crucial values like security and visibility of the traceability of tokens.

Project milestones according to the scope and features of the software platform we propose.

3. Adoption: (4 months)

We make strategic partnerships with entities including prospective clients to adopt and promote our services along with their own services. We would also give an extended free trial period to use our platform and in return, they will promote it appended to their own regular promotion. 

Commissioned salesmen and women will be employed.

Using the appropriate marketing channel, we spread the news about the value/service we provide to our customer segments

4. Scaling: (4 months)

At this stage, maybe in the next round of repeating this cycle, we would raise investment funds from promising investment organizations/groups such as this to support expenses for scaling our service. Scaling up will require us more budget for expanding technical utilities like servers, human resources for the new scope of the project, marketing expenses, and other miscellaneous expenses.

5. Sustaining and product improvement (Continous)

Sustaining the project as a full profit organization thriving in the space providing values to the stakeholders in the sector and the general economic aspect of the East-African region and the Middle east.

The Opportunities:

The primary target customers will be small and medium enterprises

• Perfect timing: Kenya-Ethiopia trade agreement is at a fresh start, Cardano has made an agreement with the Ethiopian government, and huge encouragement innovative solutions for agriculture and agriculture is one of the major development focus currently. First comer advantage is also undeniably important.
• Immense demand: Export items including apiculture products have a plethora of demand for the item and the item's history traceability in search of certainty on the quality of the products.
• Accessibility of stakeholders: we have enough connections to the producers, others through Minstry of Agriculture. 
• Clarity of problem domain: we have a clear view of the issues
• Supportive Environment: small and medium enterprises are open to cheaper and tech solutions

The Risks and Challenge:

• One challenge is finding a good Plutus smart contract developer and NFT marketplace developer on a budget. Although it's not as difficult if we get help from the Cardano community.
• Fortunately enough, risks in the space are quite a few and at the minimum level, most likely not to happen.

Success Measurements:

In general, success would be measured by the progress according to the milestones. Specific measuring points are:

• Making key partnership
• Meeting project milestones
• Meeting client expectation
• Good user experience
• ADA payment option being well used
• Return on investment a year after Adoption stage (3rd on the road map)
• Self-sustaining
• Early-stage adoption from the land administration office of Addis Ababa, private real estate owners, and end-users.
• Customers actually gaining the proposed value
• The project becomes self-sufficient after securing two clients.
• Enabling services for water and electricity based on clients openness
• Start scaling up to the international market after 18 months of successful adoption of the local market

Budget plan:

Most of the budget will go to salaries of experts helping to realize the project, here is the plan:

  Three months budget:

• Legal consultant or Attorney: $2,500 for 3 months (it may not necessarily be sequential months)
• Quality Assurance officer: $3,000 for three months 

Six months budget:

• Plutus Smart Contract Developer: $12,000 for 4 months.
• DevOps Engineer: $3,200 for 4 months
• Back-end Engineer: $4,000 for 4 months
• Front-end Engineer: $3,200 for 4 months 
• Telegram bot dev: $300 one time pay
• Business consultant: $2,500 for 6 months

12 months budget:

• Customer Service Officers: $8,500 for 12 months
• Project Manager and Team leader: $24,000 for 12 months
• Cloud services: AWS Graviton2-based EC2 instances; p2.xlage($0.9/hr) = $7884 for 12 months
• Internet connection: $3,000 for 12 months
• Marketing: $2,000 for 12 months
• Accountant: $3,600 for 12 months 
• Office rent: $2000 for 12 months (Temporary co-working space rent, until we start generating income) 
• Miscellaneous expenses for some minor affairs in relation to this project: $2,126 for 12 months.

The total budget to pull the project to mass scaling to greater market size is 83,810 USD.

We ask for 57,356****USD funds from Cardano to be able to build the product, the team dynamics, get a business license and the customers, and secure a minimum of three clients.

We have plans to raise the remaining 26,454 USD funds later on after establishing the project as a running business, at the scaling stage from other options like Venture Capitals and investment groups. 

The Team:

Mearaf Tadewos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mearaf-tadewos-634228174/

Nathan Samson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-samson-419349135/

Nebiyu Sultan:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/nebiyu-sultan-30775446/

This blockchain-powered Supply-chain project is inspired by the issues I find in my community issues with edible items price inflation, and several merchants complaints.

Another major problem observed is emerging small/middle size growing enterprises struggling with demand of tracability and trustablity of their products in the international market and my own experience. For instance their is a big demand of honey from Germany in Ethiopia but some of the hone producer I know are loosing the opportunity because they can't provide traceability. Similar issue is experienced in other growing producers.

I obtained these problem observations through the exposure I have got while I was working to establish an agri-tech startup at iceaddis, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

There will be great value in solving the supply chain problem while using Cardano's blockchain and ADA itself.

P.S. While writing my proposal, I kept in mind that fashioning this project to become a win-win for our clients, the end-users (clients of our clients), and for Cardano simultaneously, What are the 5 key things that would define the project's success in short and long terms, milestones, estimating a budget for each milestone, which experts to hire and where to find them, how to find and approach prospective clients and understanding their point of view, and way to run the project as a self-sustaining business.

Let's grow Africa, and grow Cardano.