Animall: Slicing the Pie Vertically or Horizontally?

Animall, an innovative tech startup, has emerged as a transformative force in the Indian cattle trading market. Founded by Neetu Yadav and Brijendra Pratap Singh in 2019, Animall aims to modernize and streamline India’s traditionally fragmented and inefficient cattle trading industry. The platform leverages technology to connect farmers, traders, and buyers, providing a more transparent and efficient marketplace for cattle transactions. Cattle trading in India has been largely unorganized, with transactions often occurring through local markets or middlemen, leading to information asymmetry, lack of trust, and unfair pricing for farmers. Animall addresses these issues by offering a digital platform where users can buy and sell cattle more easily and confidently. The platform provides detailed information on cattle, including health records, breed information, and pricing, along with a user-friendly interface for transactions.It was March 6, 2024, and Kirti Jangra had just boarded a two-hour flight from Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, to visit her parents in Haryana, the dairy farming belt of northern India. As she opened her laptop to review her company’s business plan, she contemplated the future of her company. Jangra created a cattle trading app called Animall in 2019. The app sought to improve outdated and inefficient trading systems in India’s cattle trading sector, which she was very familiar with, as her parents were dairy farmers themselves. Jangra’s engineering degree had given her the skills to create technological solutions for the dairy farming industry—her app had been downloaded by over 9.6 + million users, and its Net Promoter Score was over 65. And yet, Jangra felt dissatisfied with what she had achieved. Animall had merely solved the thinnest slice of the problem. Jangra realized that if dairy farmers could access functions such as finance, insurance, and veterinary support, through the app, their lives would improve significantly. She wanted to stay true to her original mission — facilitating and democratizing cattle trading in India — but also contemplated adding new business functions as verticals to the app in order to continue scaling up. She debated in her mind whether it made more business sense to expand horizontally instead, i.e., adding more kinds of livestock (such as goat, sheep, or poultry) to the current offering of cattle, thus reducing business risk. Time was running short as Animall had already completed five years, and a delayed decision could mean a lost opportunity for Jangra.