Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Gaurav Gogoi, Co-founder & CEO of Eteakol, a B2B platform for sustainable products based in Assam, India and Berlin, Germany.
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Here’s what Eteakol is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Small farmers and manufacturers of sustainable products from India lack the resources and capabilities to gain direct access to global markets. Likewise, smaller brands and retailers across the world don’t have direct access to these sustainable farmers and manufacturers due to the opacity of the supply chain. The unnecessary layers of middlemen in the traditional supply chain drive up the costs of sustainable products for the end user while leaving producers, specifically small-scale farmers, with a tiny fraction of the purchase price.
The Solution:
Eteakol is a B2B platform for sourcing sustainable products directly from small farmers and manufacturers in India. Eteakol provides the buyer a hassle free procurement experience and transparency of the source of the sustainable products. We ensure the products are sustainable by vetting each of the vendors on the platform for ESG compliance and conformity to the UN SDG17 goals within their production processes. We then take complete charge of getting the products to the buyers by handling all international logistics and fulfilment services, including customs clearance and duties.
The Team:
We are a team of 6 with world class experience in different domains across India and Europe. I lead the team and have a background in e-commerce specifically in managing P&Ls as well as having built logistics systems and loyalty programs for some of the biggest ecommerce platforms. Nirab is well versed in regulatory and logistics activities and is in charge of our fulfilment and shipping services. Raihane is a domain expert in sales and marketing with a background in ecommerce marketplace. She is in charge of setting up our demand generation activities. Baishali has a background in sociology and political science and takes charge of setting up our supply operations and understanding the needs and requirements of the small farmers and manufacturers across India. Xia Xue is an analytics god, having a background in business planning and development for large ecommerce companies and is responsible for Eteakol’s strategy and commercial planning and analytics. Our super intern, Anshuman, supports Baishali in the supply operations team to onboard the farmers onto our platform.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I was visiting my home in Assam, India in early 2021 when Baishali and I met with a small tea farmer, Tridip, in a nearby village. I had heard that he grows his tea plants organically and more importantly, also handcrafts different varieties of tea himself instead of the usual practice of selling his leaves straight to a bigger factory.
Curious, I visited to try his tea and was amazed at the quality of the product - it was better than anything I had ever had in Europe or India. However, he was unable to scale up production due to a lack of local demand. His production costs are naturally higher than mass-produced, non organic factory made tea and although the price of his premium tea was very competitive for the global market, India is a cost sensitive market.
With further ground research, I realised his problem could be solved if he and many others like him had direct access to the global markets where there is an existing and growing demand for products like his. Similarly I did some market research in Europe and realised that brands and retailers/cafes are also very interested in sourcing high quality sustainable goods directly from the farmers and manufacturers due to better transparency and ESG adherence as well as better prices for comparable products.
We only needed a way to connect both the small producers and buyers directly.
I saw the opportunity to pursue my lifelong goal of contributing to the sustainable development of people and society back home and I got together with a few experts in my network to build this B2B platform that focuses solely on sustainable products. We take care of everything from fulfilment and regulations to vetting, merchandising and marketing. This allows the producers to focus on what they do best, i.e produce sustainably and provides buyers with a hassle-free and transparent international procurement experience.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
There are three main reasons:
A fast growing trend of changes in consumer behaviour towards sustainability and ethical consumption.
Macroeconomic trend of production bases moving from higher cost China to lower cost India and Vietnam.
High penetration of smartphones and mobile internet in all demographics and geographies in India.
All of the above facts point to a present and future where demand for sustainable products grows globally and most of those products will be produced in hubs such as India. We will need scalable and technological solutions to connect the supply side directly to the demand side and full service B2B platforms such as Eteakol will enable this for a fairer future across the value chain.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We were able to recently launch our fully operational platform with just 6 people. We have vetted and onboarded close to 10 sustainable tea manufacturers, some individuals and some cooperatives supporting the livelihoods of 100s of underprivileged people. I’m really proud of our scrappy and highly audacious team.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
One of the biggest challenges we have faced recently is in a semi-manual order management system. It gets very complicated very fast to coordinate daily order requirements with various farmers, some of whom are selling internationally or online for the very first time. But we have now identified the pain points of both the producers and our internal team to understand the exact product solution we’d require to automate order management and scale up our demand activities.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I would have prioritised administrative tasks. As an early stage team, we were rightfully focused on understanding the customer requirements, sizing up the market potential and building the product. But in hindsight, we should have also cleared up the legal and administrative tasks sooner to have everything in place in terms of legal compliance by the time our product was ready.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Launching a good product today trumps launching the best product after 10 months. A team should have the freedom to make mistakes but the pressure to make them fast.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Don’t fear taking the leap. There will never be a better time to solve any problem. The opportunity cost of jumping into entrepreneurship will only get higher as time passes.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
At the earliest stage, it is very important to have a team with whom you would like to hangout even outside of work and have fun together. It makes it much easier to define and set the culture and dynamics that you all want to continue working and hanging out in. It makes all the hard work quite fun.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I’m inspired by everyone who has built the products and technologies that make platforms like Eteakol possible. I’m inspired by the hundreds and thousands of producers that make the hard choice of growing and producing things sustainably even though it might mean short term hardships. I’m inspired by everyone across the world who has taken up the cause of environmental sustainability and ethical treatment of the earth. These are some of the main issues we need to solve over the next few decades either through consumer behaviour or political change.
What book do you think everyone should read?
The Hard Things about Hard Things - Ben Horowitz