Bilmizan

Inspiration

The founder "Sayed Nasr" worked for almost 3 years in the poultry production field. Like most of farmers with small holding scales, he faced a lot of challenges with accessing to updated market information (very crucial for a livestock product like poultry with very limited marketing window), and low bargaining power. He decided to pursue an ICT solution that promotes a healthier business system for all of his peers.

What it does

In the Poultry business (and food production in general), marketing is the biggest hurdle blocking the whole operations from running smoothly. A lot of middlemen, waste of time, and low bargaining power for both farmers and wholesalers; Bilmizan brings an end to all of this hassle by offering a tech-enabled platform for connecting poultry growers directly to wholesalers, building a data driven model that minimizes the effort of marketing to 1- downloading Bilmizan mobile app, 2- building your own network of business partners, and 3- start doing business.

Following a Best Match algorithms, Bilmizan will link wholesaler to the closest farm ready to sell its production. This shall bring the transportation cost & time to the minimum, and hence minimizes the the losses the live poultry.

How we built it

We followed the "proof of concept" approach. To minimize the programming effort to minimum, we decided to build Bilmizan with low code programming, cross platform and we chose Outsystems (Outsystems.com) to be the tool for design.

Challenges we ran into

Marketing the idea to farmers and wholesalers who used to do business in the traditional way. Calling a middleman to check prices, trying to negotiate for better pricing, and finally asking to market the herd for them. Initially we faced resistance that such businesses can't go online, and market will not accept it, but we managed to validate our product-market fit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For 6 months, we ran a pilot test with a simple web-based application that enables posting/ receiving deals for sale between farmers & wholesalers, just to make sure that it market accepts the concept. The results were satisfying with +750 farmer & wholesaler used Bilmizan at least once to buy/ sell poultry production.

What we learned

We learned that technology have a lot to do with traditional business like agriculture, and that first movers in these market will gain a lot of reputation and success if they tackled it in the right way or they will ruin the whole experience if they failed to do so.

What's next for Bilmizan

Bilmizan is looking for finalizing its mobile app prototype during the Hackathon and introducing it to the market on the earliest. Hope that our participation in the hackathon give us a push forward, and introduce us to different stakeholders who are believing in our mission of bringing order and transparency to the Egyptian agribusiness.

Built With

• low-code-programming
• outsystems