Overview
FarMart is India’s agri community and B2B food commerce platform. I joined in 2022 as the design hire for the FarMart app, and I have owned its design ever since.
What the app is for has changed a lot between 2022 and now. That shift is the real story of this product, and of my work on it.
Who we built for in 2022
When we launched, the app was aimed at agri input shop owners, the people we called agri retailers: shops selling fertilisers, seeds, and other inputs to farmers.
The bet was simple. Build a community around these retailers first. Over time, help them become suppliers who buy agri output from the same farmers they already sell inputs to, and sell that output back to FarMart.
So year one was not a full commodity trading app. It was a community and a set of useful tools for input retailers. What we shipped included:
- Community: Post, see what others are posting, interact, and ask questions.
- SMS marketing: Free SMS credit so retailers could message their farmer customers.
- Fertiliser rake discovery: Help retailers find fertiliser rake information in their district and nearby areas. I wrote that up separately as a case study.
I designed that first wave from zero: onboarding, the visual language, the Hindi launch campaign on the project cover, and the features above.
How the product changed
From 2022 to 2026, the company’s focus moved.
We no longer treat the agri input retailer as the persona we want to convert into an output supplier. The app is now built for agri output traders: people who deal in raw agricultural commodities.
Today we design for putting their day-to-day work into one mobile app: seeing buyer prices, placing leads, getting orders done with FarMart, tracking shipments, GST and debit notes, KYC, and community news. The earlier community-and-inputs chapter still matters as history. It is not what the product is about anymore.
The constraints that actually matter
Two things keep showing up in the work.
Literacy. Users are not opening a consumer app for fun. The UI has to stay readable on low-end Android, often in Hindi, with a lot of information that can still be scanned in a busy shop or mandi.
Ops and compliance complexity. In the agri output commodity business, ops, compliance, and documentation are often weak or incomplete in the real world. That is what makes trading hard. Designing for that means accepting incomplete paperwork and uneven processes, and still giving traders a path that ops and finance can trust.
Those constraints shaped more decisions than any visual preference did.
How I have worked on this
This has never been a one-quarter project. It is a product I have grown with for four years, and my role kept changing shape.
- 2022: starting from zero. If it shipped in year one for agri retailers, I designed it.
- Late 2023: building a team. I started hiring designers, mentoring them, and letting them ship. At most I had three designers on the broader team, and they also worked on other FarMart products. On the FarMart app itself, usually one person was active at a time. I set the patterns and quality bar; they owned features end to end; we reviewed before anything reached engineering. Jai and Simran are two of the people who grew into that work under my direction.
- Still shipping myself. Even while managing, I have kept designing the hardest parts myself: pricing, orders, finance, and anything central to how agri output traders actually close a deal.
So when I say the app shipped, I mean both: work I designed with my own hands, and work my team shipped that I directed and reviewed.
What the app does today
Today, the FarMart app is one of India’s only apps where a supplier can handle almost their full trade with FarMart from a phone, and find new buyers around them while they do it.
In one mobile app, a supplier can:
- See prices from top buyers: Check what trusted buyers are offering before deciding to sell.
- Place a lead: Raise interest when they have stock ready, without chasing people over calls and WhatsApp.
- Get an order done with FarMart: Move from a lead to a confirmed order on the platform.
- Track the order: Follow status end to end so they know where the deal stands.
- GST summary and debit notes: Pull a monthly GST summary and see debit notes in the same finance view, instead of digging through papers and messages.
- Track trucks: Follow commodity trucks as the delivery moves.
- Complete KYC: Finish self KYC on the platform so they can stay ready to trade.
- Community news: Stay updated through the community feature, not only through trade workflows.
Outcomes
- 1L+ downloads, 4.1★ average rating, and 2.85K reviews on Google Play.
- Around YY thousand DAU and ZZ thousand MAU on the app.
- The FarMart app drives around XX Cr of GMV every month. That is only part of FarMart’s overall YYY Cr GMV / month; most of the business still happens offline and is entered through FarMart Pro, with everything processed on FarMart OS.
- A product that started as an agri-input retailer community and is now a mobile app for agri output traders to trade on.