The Journey of Doodh: Building Kerala’s First Digital Platform for Dairy Farmers | Part 4 | The Numbers That Stayed

[embed]The Journey of Doodh: Building Kerala’s First Digital Platform for Dairy Farmers | Part 1 A Journey Rooted in Gratitudedonjosemathew.medium.com

It has been about months since we last wrote here. A lot has changed since then, and a lot has stayed exactly the same. This part is a little different from the others. The earlier chapters were about building something and pushing it into the world. This one is about what happened after we stopped pushing.

Where We Left Off

At the end of Part 3, we wrote something honest: we didn’t know if we would ever make a profit from Doodh, but we were happy because people were using something we created. We were still visiting societies, still spreading awareness, still hopeful.

We want to be just as honest now. Over the past year, we stopped onboarding new societies.

The Hard Part

We didn’t stop because the product failed. We stopped because the path to scaling it never opened.

Anyone who has tried to work with the cooperative dairy system in Kerala will understand. Every society has its own board, its own politics, its own way of deciding things. Getting one society to say yes was a journey of three, four, sometimes five visits. Getting the next one meant starting over from zero. On top of that came the technical fragmentation between Ksheera and OpenLypsa, which meant the ground kept shifting under us.

And there was a bigger gap we could not fill on our own. A platform like this, one that touches thousands of farmers and their monthly income, is really public infrastructure. It needs support from the top, from the department, from policy, from the system itself. That support never came. Meanwhile the dairy industry kept shrinking, with farmers leaving and losses mounting.

So we made a decision that was difficult to make and even more difficult to write about. We would stop selling. We would stop chasing new societies. We would simply keep the app running, quietly, for the farmers who had already chosen it. Then we went quiet, and we honestly expected the usage to fade away.

What Actually Happened

It didn’t fade.

We didn’t run a single ad. We didn’t send a single reminder campaign. We didn’t visit a single new society. And still, the farmers kept opening the app, day after day, on their own.

When we finally sat down and looked at a full year of data, we were not ready for what it showed. Around 4,600 farmers stayed active, with nothing pulling them back except their own need for the app. Between 850 and 900 of them opened it every single day. Over the year they made more than five and a half lakh visits, which comes to about 123 visits per farmer, roughly once every two to three days.

The heart of it was the milk bill. Farmers checked their bills more than two lakh times, about 106 checks each. This is the same information that used to arrive as a paper slip that got lost, or a monthly bill they had to wait at the society office to see. Now it sits in their pocket, and they check it every few days without a second thought. They opened their daily milk update more than one lakh times, and went back nearly ten thousand times just to verify older dates and past records.

But the numbers that stayed with us were the quiet ones.

Most of our farmers are over fifty. Many were new to smartphones when we first met them. Everyone we spoke to in the early days had the same doubt: will these farmers really adopt a digital tool? Well, one in three of them, around 1,500 farmers, now use the voice mode to listen to their bill read aloud, because reading on a screen was never comfortable for them. Nearly half of all users switched the app into Malayalam, their own language.

The people everyone assumed could not adopt a digital product adopted it completely. They just needed it built the way they actually live.

One Year of Doodh, In Numbers

For anyone who prefers to see it plainly, here is the whole year in one place. Every one of these happened with zero marketing, zero ads, and no new societies added.

• 4,600 farmers stayed active through the year
• 850 to 900 farmers open the app every single day
• 5.66 lakh visits to the app in total
• 123 visits per farmer, about once every two to three days
• 2,09,000 milk bill checks, roughly 106 per farmer
• 1,24,000 daily milk updates opened
• Nearly 10,000 times farmers went back to check older records
• 26,000 uses of voice mode, by around 1,500 farmers who prefer listening over reading
• Nearly half of all farmers use the app in Malayalam

Numbers rarely tell the full story, but these ones tell an important part of it: a product that was left completely on its own, and a group of farmers who kept it alive simply by needing it.

What We Take From This

We remember a line from the very beginning of this journey. A society president told us, “Don’t worry, we know how to use WhatsApp, and you’d be surprised by our skills. Just build it, we will adopt it.” At the time it gave us the courage to start. A year of quiet usage later, it turns out he was simply right.

We still don’t know if Doodh will ever become a business. That was never fully in our hands. But 4,600 farmers checking their milk and their money, in their own language, sometimes just by listening, every few days, without anyone asking them to, has told us something we needed to hear. We built the right thing. What was missing was never the usefulness, and never the farmers. It was the ecosystem around them.

Kerala’s dairy sector is going through a hard time, and it is still waiting for its next chapter. We continue to believe that technology, with the right support standing behind it, can help write that chapter. Maybe not by us, maybe by someone reading this. We hope more people with a solution-driven mind step into this space, because the farmers, as they have quietly shown us, are more than ready.

Thank you for reading this far, and for walking this whole journey with us.