Kunal Hinduja

Hatch TEK Program 3

3 July 2023

About

Kunal is a technopreneur at heart who has over 2 decades of experience in the IT industry. Kunal has expert skills in custom software solution development which he has deployed for SMEs across a variety of industries. Before entering the HatchTEK program, Kunal already had experience building a business when he founded and managed a software development company in India, providing offshore software development services to companies in Asia Pacific.

In recent years, Kunal has begun to turn his attention to the food and agriculture sector by building niche SaaS based solutions around Food Safety and Health & Safety themes. In doing so, he has identified a variety of problems which exist within the Dairy sector in Australia which he believes he can solve with a cloud-based SaaS farm management solution.

The Idea

Kunal is looking to build a software platform which bridges the gap between dairy producers and processors, to allow an accurate, traceable and verifiable transfer of relevant product information through the supply chain. The solution Kunal is developing acts to help farmers manage the day-to-day operations of their farms and record keeping, and also allow relevant animal and business data to be pushed to processors who can better manage their supply chain and inventory.
While Kunal entered the HatchTEK program with a deep experience in running businesses and developing products, the approach to build a start-up from scratch was new to him. As such, Kunal was tempted to jump straight to the necessary feature-development and platform build components. In the early phases of the HatchTEK, Kunal recognised the value in utilising the lean canvas as a method to clearly identify the problems within his customer segments and the areas he could focus on to create the most value for end-users. These learnings helped Kunal to refine his vision to be less about providing simply a farm management solution, but for using a record and data-collection platform as a means for then connecting producers with the processors and providing the processors with reciprocal value and features.

Absolutely thrilled to be a part of the Hatch Program and look forward to working with Farmers2Founders.

What's Next?

Kunal’s entrepreneurial thinking has sharpened significantly through the HatchTEK program and he is much more attuned to the principles of conducting customer discovery as a means to validating his concept. While it has been difficult for Kunal to get connections and have conversations with his key customer segments, he is continuing to build a detailed understanding of how he can design a solution to a recognised industry problem. These learnings will help Kunal to build out his first prototype based on the greatest priorities identified.