Agora Livestock
Cutting the fat out of the livestock industry.
We’ve spent most of 2021 visioning, strategising, designing, architecting, and delivering a disruptive new digital service - Agora Livestock.
Launched in November 2021, Agora Livestock is poised to shake up the livestock industry by shifting bargaining power back into the hands of buyers and sellers. This is the Agora Livestock story.
An opportunity in the current landscape.
In the traditional model of livestock trade, agents are king. They alone hold most of the price information, and ergo, the bargaining power in the livestock market. This causes a bottleneck that leads to deals being awarded based on agent networks and often personal preference, rather than a best value basis.
Rob Kelly, founder of Livestock Pricing, saw this problem and set out to inject balance into the market, by launching a price discovery platform, Livestock Pricing, in 2018. After seeing the benefits it could offer to their businesses, a group of livestock industry investors became the strategic seed investors for a new platform. They saw huge potential to disrupt a $20b market, which had failed to keep up with advances in technology. Having raised over $2m, Rob sensed an even greater opportunity in the antiquated livestock industry, and sought out Hatchd in 2020 to see if we could help take his price discovery platform to the next level. After a meeting of minds between Rob and the Hatchd co-founders, a clear opportunity statement was born:
“How might we shift the bargaining power in the livestock market back into the hands of buyers and sellers? ”
A strong partnership was forged alongside this opportunity statement - with Rob, the founder, and Hatchd, the product team. Thus began a year-long journey of service visioning, strategising, designing, architecting, and delivery of the new ‘operating system of the livestock industry’: Agora Livestock.
Redefining the existing product offering.
Initially, the Hatchd product team worked closely with the Livestock founders to plot out the current trade process in the livestock industry via a journey mapping exercise. The main actors identified through this process were predominantly the buyer, the seller and the agent, and each journey was mapped out accordingly. Through this exercise the product team identified each actor’s pain points and potential improvement opportunities in the trade process as a whole.
The existing service offering was primarily focused on livestock price discovery, and that concept was sound. However further refinement of the existing feature set was required to align these newly identified industry opportunities with the company’s growth strategy and way forward. Through a series of interactive workshops, the Hatchd product team helped to define these new strategy requirements and to lay the foundations for a new service to bridge the industry gaps. The outputs from these sessions paved the way for two main workstreams in which Hatchd could add the most value:
Service Delivery: The design, solutioning, build, testing and rebranding of the new service; and
Service Marketing: The subscription model, launch strategy, public facing website and upsell opportunities within the entire platform.
This approach would shape the product team’s way of working, balancing the need to deliver the new product, whilst also ensuring that the design and technology choices made were future proofing product growth to provide optimal user value in the industry and beyond.
Giving power back to industry players.
So we had a high-level strategy and a series of user journeys with fresh new features - it was time for the service reimagining to begin. At the core of the livestock transaction were price grids; essentially tables of what buyers would be willing to pay for livestock of different weights and specifications. However, these price grids were often fragmented in terms of how they were displayed and shared. This represented a major visibility challenge in the industry, further funneling bargaining power to the agents.
In order to address this, a buyer portal was created, where buyers could create and manage their price grids, and then list them publicly, or choose to share them with trusted sellers. Finding a price grid design that would translate the staggering amount of information, in all its possible permutations, proved a challenge. In addition, the portal would represent a brand new way in which buyers and sellers would interact, so it was paramount that the user experience was right. To ensure this, we conducted several rounds of user testing with buyers and sellers, making sure that we launched the service with a price grid creation and sharing process that was both useful and easy to use.
Finding the perfect buyer-seller match.
These price grids were only going to be useful if sellers could access them in some way, so a seller app was created that allowed them to search, filter and save available price listings, empowering them with a greater reach to a wider network of buyers. With greater access to available prices came yet another challenge. Buyers needed access to sellers to show their prices, but did not want their prices so publicly available that they could be shopped around, or be undercut by competitors.
We solved this by introducing the concept of indicative pricing - meaning that buyers could list an estimate of what they would be willing to pay, but not the exact amounts for specific grades of livestock. A seller could contact the buyer directly on a price grid with an expression of interest to sell their stock, and this would give the buyer an indication of whether or not a seller was serious about selling their stock, and decide whether or not to reveal their full price grid.
Thus, what was initially a specialised price discovery platform, was now transforming into a platform of services designed to facilitate simple and seamless livestock trade between buyers and sellers.
A multi-disciplinary team collaboration.
Over the course of the year, the product was delivered in 2 week sprints by a multidisciplinary ensemble of UX and UI designers, backend, frontend and application developers, working with our product managers and testers to ensure quality was rigorously maintained throughout the build. The product team worked closely with Rob, who was the main stakeholder and product owner, and it was imperative that they were co-located together to stay nimble as a team to collaborate during the product build.
“I’ve no doubt Hatchd could have delivered the platform equally as well if I wasn’t sitting in their office as they’ve proven they can deliver with other agricultural platforms. But being in their office aligned us so closely that any product challenges were identified almost immediately and resolved in short, sharp stand-up meetings - you can do a lot on Zoom but nothing beats a team that sits and works together. I think that alone saved hundreds of hours throughout the process.”
In line with the delivery of any product, optimising user value and stakeholder requirements with technology efforts was key. As a result, serverless technology was implemented with scale in mind, to accommodate for a growing user base and frequent use. With the introduction of a buyer and seller portal, a single API was developed that could be utilised across both portals. This ensured a single source of truth between the two portals, where only one update of the business logic was required, rather than the duplication of these efforts across two platforms. React was selected as the front end technology stack to enable a fluid, cross-platform application-like experience. In this way, frontend, backend and application developers were able to collaborate and share code between Web and Native platforms via React.
Sowing the seeds for growth.
Whilst these features were being designed, built and tested, the product team worked closely with our Livestock Pricing partners to implement a new visual style, bringing fresh, modern new elements to the existing brand, which included imagery, photography, illustration style and naming conventions. However, even with enhancements to the existing design language and style, the product team had a growing feeling that the brand was lacking in some way.
The existing brand identity, even refined, was too familiar and congruent with other players in the livestock industry. This visual identity would only appeal to a subset of the personas previously identified during the earlier stages of service visioning. The name, Livestock Pricing did not represent the scale of opportunity beyond the livestock industry. Most importantly, the existing name was now a limiter in the quest to become the operating system for the whole livestock industry.
In order for the service to reach new heights, it needed a change. The stage was set for a full scale rebrand.
The operating system of the industry
See you later, Livestock Pricing.
Hello, Agora Livestock.
Through several naming and brainstorming sessions, a new brand was being born. What would we call it? What should the logo look like? These were the questions that were asked over and over. And, as these questions were being asked, we found ourselves looking to why we set out to do a rebrand in the first place:
To become the operating system in not only the livestock industry, but for other agricultural markets in the future.
With this in mind, the underlying theme of connection became increasingly clear. The first step to achieving our vision was to create connection, and the brand by extension had to embody that. And, through some stroke of serendipity, the name Agora was chosen. The name harkens back to the birthplace of organised marketplaces - ancient Greece, where buyers and sellers would gather to connect, converse, and transact. It was a name that would roll off the tongue, not being too hard to pronounce in various languages and countries. And even more fitting, it was a subtle reference to the origins and ambitions of this new service, with the letters ‘Ag’ representing ‘Agriculture’.
Once the name was chosen, the new logo, which champions the theme of connection, quickly followed. Then everything else, from the typography choices, to the colour palette, easily fell into place. The new vibrant visual identity, coupled with the unique and easily pronounceable name, posed a key differentiating factor not seen before in the livestock industry. This new brand was unveiled in a pivotal investor presentation hosted at our Hatchd premises, to 30 high-profile stakeholders, and was met with enthusiastic approval. Agora had officially arrived to the party.
Cutting the fat, one layer at a time.
The service, Agora Livestock is now live and poised, in a big way, to disrupt the market and become the new operating system of the livestock industry. With the new brand strategy and architecture, Agora has the potential to branch out to even more industries and into other emerging markets that have the same buyer-seller needs. Buyers and sellers are using the service daily and the response from industry has been extremely positive. We are currently incorporating customer feedback to optimise the service and continue to bring value to users in an upcoming 2nd release and beyond. Rob currently resides in our office working closely Hatchd, and has a new addition joining the Agora Livestock team starting early 2022.
To find out more, visit the Agora Livestock website.