When we say that digitalization has transformed a sector or an industry, we only concentrate on technology and the industry. Most of the time, we forget about the most prominent catalyst who actually acts as the ones driving that transformation. As there is no story without a protagonist, our country’s agricultural, food, and healthcare transformational saga would not have been possible without Ruralnomics Pvt Ltd–a brand new eCommerce and supply startup in the Northeast Zone of India, with a vision to be the most respected eCommerce company in the FoodTech and HealthTech space by 2025.

Championed by Siddharth Das, Managing Director and Elvee S Marbaniang, Director, a team of professionals thought and envisioned that Food and Health Services are areas that could be served and serviced locally. This gave birth to Ruralnomics–a bootstrap organization with a clear vision to transform the eCommerce and supply space of the Northeast.

The First-Mover Advantage

Ruralnomcis was incepted in the year 2021, and in the last 18 months of operation, the firm has been able to service more than 50,000 customers orders with a potential CLV (Annual) of ₹12000 per customer through offline, ground sales and an online mode.

Ruralnomics blends the transitional business ecosystem with technology that has enabled it to tie in Customer, Supplier, Distributor, and Payment Gateway. The team has the first market penetration advantage by ensuring that Ruralnomics penetrates every Northeast India district–a total of 4.5 crores households spread over 32 prominent districts.

Siddharth and Elvee believe that the Food (Fresh Meat and Fish) and Health services space is underserved. They wanted to be the leader in these two domains, with maximum customer acquisition and affordable services across the region.

Ruralnomcis operates two brands: Runofresh and Runohealth.

• com is the first Product D2C Online and offline company in the space of Fresh meat and Fish.
• While Runohealth (RCare4u.in) is India’s first integrated D2C Health Services platform that encompasses the entire life cycle of Health Services for B2C and B2B.

Serving the Unserved Populace

Both founders had the option to start in the metro. Still, during the early stage of their research, they were sure that the rural and agricultural sector, especially the Northeast, was a zone that had been unserved for a long time; hence, they decided to incorporate Ruralnomics in this region. They intended to prove their MVP model and then scale it up across Pan India.

Indeed it was tough in the early days to convince customers, but with a powerful ground presence and controlled go-lives, they could penetrate district by district. Thanks to the digitalization effort of the central govt that helped them to win trust with very friendly UI and best-in-class service in some of the remotest areas of the Northeast. Today for the hard groundwork, they enjoy massive support from their local suppliers, distributors, and customers and have assured a 35% repeat customer base across four regional locations. During the initial days, orders were coming through WhatsApp and influencer Pages, but now they receive orders through their respective Apps, which speaks volumes of the ‘Customer Trust they won in the last 22 months.

Ruralnomics made a quick entry into the three nationally renowned incubation centres and is already a victor of the ‘5000 MSME Award, was featured in Silicon India as ‘The Top Ten Startup of India and was victor of ‘East MOJO NEL Competition winning the Northeast Launchpad Event–the biggest business plan event in Northeast India.

Ruralnomics has successfully raised three prominent seed rounds from Angel Investors, Govt and currently closing a Term Sheet for their fundraising.

The Dazzling Duo

Siddharth is the Promoter and Operating Director of Ruralnomics Pvt Ltd. He is the President and one of the Founding Members of a Global HR Tech Startup in Delhi, NCR. The Startup is funded by Industry Stalwarts like Raman Roy and Raj Dutta.

Siddharth has guided many teams in the past. He has worked collaboratively with the Management team of Quatrro Global Services for 15 years. Throughout his career, he has shared cordial relations with many great leaders in the Manufacturing and Outsourcing industries, respectively. With his 20-plus years of experience in Managing and scaling Operations and Technology in Startups, IT, ITES and the Service sector.

Siddharth has excelled in HR and Operations, Consulting, Transformation and Technology. His strong passion for Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Sentiment Analysis, along with other upcoming next-gen technologies (especially in HR and Supply chain), has led to the conceptualisation of Stratemis HR Technologies, where he is currently servicing clients across India, US and Europe.

As a Management graduate from the University of Lincoln and a Post-Graduate from Charles Stuart University, he specializes in subjects of International Business, HR and Information Technology. He is blessed to be born in the Northeast and is diversifying his investment in Northeast India.

Dr Elvee Silcheng Marbaniang is a young, dynamic practising General Physician and an Alumnus of one of the topmost prestigious Medical Institutes of India, Christian Medical College Vellore. Dr Elvee, with his years of association with this premiere institute, upholds the values of what it stands for, where he strongly believes in ‘Service first- above all.’

Dr Elvee has working experience and association with various Secondary and Tertiary Medical Institutions in Meghalaya. His exposure to the healthcare challenges in rural and urban setups gives him a clearer picture of what Ruralnomcis’s vision and objective should be. His charismatic and energetic persona and a strong understanding of changes required in the health sector enable the entire team under Ruralnomcis’ to be mission and vision driven, with the sole objective of achieving their goal.

Dr Elvee, with his background as a general physician, is in a better position to understand your Healthcare problems and the required solutions that Runohealth and its team are committed to. Dr Elvee is one of the Co-founders and Director of Ruralnomcis, with a strong commitment to the mission and vision of the healthcare platform.

Both the Founders have built a solid management team for the organization and are leading the mission from the front. Currently, the company has prominent board members, and Operation Strategy heads. They have been able to sell and place the vision very well to their stakeholders and gained immense limelight from national and internal fund agencies.

Gaining Tech-Insights

Being an experienced leader, Siddharth opines how adopting modern technologies like AI and ML is impacting the startup space and how Ruralnomics is adapting to the change. He says, “AI, especially ML, is changing how we deal with customers and transact.”

Ruralnomcis has been capturing unstructured and structured data across their customers, logistics and revenue life cycle. Siddharth says, “We have intended to be the first ever AI/ML run services company in the Northeast States. A lot of study on the demographics buying behaviours is helping us get great insight into our marketing and positioning strategy.”

Outsmarting Obstacles

Regarding the challenges they encountered, Siddharth says that, like any entrepreneurial journey, highs and lows are part of the game. “We have gone through this phase, and it has been a great learning experience.”

During their journey, they came across many startups that mushroomed and disappeared in front of them in that zone as they lacked scalability issues or investment to run the operation. Siddharth believes, “While you can burn much cash by giving discounts if the discounts do not match your future cash flow, it starts hitting the bottom line very adversely.”

Based on their past experiences, both Siddharth and Elvee have been able to manage by bootstrapping and raising funds at the right time. The biggest learning for them, they say, is to stay humble, stay relevant and scale up wherever they have been able to position and study the new sector through their research team. The second thing is that learning and building MFP is easy but running the MFP is most difficult.

Market Fit Wisdom

To budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into their space, the key advice they would like to provide is: “Understand the market and its trend. ‘If you do not have sufficient data, do not jump in the startup wagon’. Further, study your cash flow and then raise funds.” Also, building the Market Fit Product is vital. The basis for this is to be on the ground, interviewing and understanding market transactions in the sector one wants to penetrate. Finally, create the Market Fit Team to solve the problems.

Envisioning scaling Ruralnomics operations and offerings in the future, Siddharth says, “Our 5-year plan is to dominate the NE market through an offline and online model, and then the next five years will be to scale to tier-2 and tier-3 cities in India.”