Biography
Fahad Ifaz is the co-founder of iFarmer, a Bangladeshi startup offering a suite of digital tools for farmers. iFarmer has raised over $4M in funding. Its revenue to date, starting in 2019, exceeds $250M.
Prior to iFarmer, Fahad spent over a decade providing credit facilities to farmers in emerging markets, at large organizations such as Care and the World Bank.
iFarmer’s first iteration was a “rooftop agriculture” startup, where people rented their rooftops to host small agricultural activities. Why didn’t it work?
Our mission was and still is to solve food production for Bangladesh. The country simply isn’t producing enough food, and we thought growing food on unutilized rooftops could be a good idea. Both my co-founder and I grew up in Dhaka, the capital, so we were familiar with the city’s urban makeup.
It was a headache to scale. Each building owner is different. You have to restart the negotiation, explanation process from zero every time. Inhabitants weren’t particularly keen on letting strangers access and fiddle around with their rooftops. And from a more systemic perspective, small agricultural carve outs on rooftops didn’t make a significant dent in feeding Bangladesh’s 173 million people. Maybe this idea could’ve worked in Singapore, where the population is way smaller (6 million).
Eventually, we figured there was no need to reinvent the wheel. We had to work with the professionals growing our food (farmers) and help them do their job better.
You have over a decade of experience providing credit to farmers. What unfair advantages does that give you?
It’s a double edged sword. What I bring to the table is a granular understanding of farmers’ pain points and a strong network in the space, notably in government. What I don’t know is the solution to farmers’ problem, which is iFarmer’s task to figure out.
The crafting of that solution can be negatively affected by my prior experience because I have preconceived notions of how things are “supposed to” work. Some founders excel because they are novices to their sector, so think completely outside of the box. I have to be mindful of not letting my biases hinder our creativity.
Before we dive into iFarmer: you’re seemingly running two software businesses on the side (Alice and Misfits). Isn’t that anathema to the touted “focus” founders must have?
Both of those businesses predate iFarmer. I’m now 100% focused on iFarmer, with both those companies run by partners.
They were useful for two reasons.
First, when you fund a business with your savings (like we did for iFarmer), it helps to have a service business to extend the runway while you scrape together the new company’s initial revenue. It took a full year for iFarmer to start making money.
Second, both businesses work with companies outside of Bangladesh, which helped me stay up to date with international trends and get inspiration from them.
RO insights: a service business as a crutch for early-stage startups
For startups everywhere, but especially in ecosystems where early-stage funding is scarce, founders can attach a service business to their company to survive the initial “valley of death”.
More than a financial crutch, a service business can also upskill the startup’s team by making them work on diverse, international projects.
Here’s how Abdel Malek Al-Mouzayen, founder of Syrian delivery startup Beeorder, explains:
“It is indeed suicidal to do two things at once but we manage. The agency is our learning school.
Projects we work on for the agency yield insights we apply at Beeorder. For example, we’ve learned a ton on e-payments via different projects we’ve done. This is supremely useful in helping develop e-payments in Syria, and we’re even solicited by local banks to help them with it.
The agency also gives me an excuse to travel, which serves Beeorder through the foreign business connections I make.”
Excerpt from Beeorder: food-delivery in Syria, originally published in The Realistic Optimist
Can you synthesize iFarmer’s product today?
Everything revolves around farmers’ needs. We sometimes venture out to build a product for another persona (like an app for agriculture-input retailers), but the end goal is always to help farmers.
Today, we offer four main services:
- Access to credit for farmers and agri-input retailers
- Connecting farmers with buyers for their produce (the “offtake” business)
- Advisory services for farmers, both through human help and digital products
- Logistics around the distribution of agricultural inputs (ex: fertilizer)
Agri-input retailers aren’t the main client persona but they play an essential role in the chain. Can you expand on that?