How Grofunder Used Market Research to Design an Agri-Financing Solution Farmers Would Adopt

Before Kelvin Dol built Grofunder Africa, he spent months in the field talking to farmers, cooperatives, and agronomists across Kenya. What he learned about how farmers trust, earn and manage money forced him to rethink who he was building for. This is the story of how user research reshaped a venture before it ever launched - and what other founders building in Africa can learn from it.

There's a version of the Grofunder story that never happened.

In that version, Kelvin Dol, Co-Founder and CEO of the Kenyan agri-finance platform, launches a financing product built on a simple, logical premise: smallholder farmers lack access to credit, so give them credit, and they’ll grow. The problem is real. The solution seems obvious. He raises capital, builds the product, and goes to market.

Then the market responds in ways he didn't expect. Repayment rates are lower than projected. Onboarding is slower than planned. The distribution model doesn't hold. By the time the problems are visible, fixing them costs far more than understanding them would have.

That version of the story is familiar. It plays out across many African startups, costing founders time, money, and the goodwill of early customers who don't come back. But that's not what happened at Grofunder. Before building anything, Kelvin went to the field and listened first.

We sat down with him to understand what that process looked like, what it revealed, and what it changed.

Grofunder operates in one of the most complex financing environments in Africa - agricultural lending to smallholder farmers. Tell us about the venture and the problem you set out to solve.

Grofunder is a peer-to-peer agri-finance platform. Our goal is to help smallholder farmers in Kenya access the financing and credit services they need to grow. Agriculture is the backbone of Kenya's economy, but formal lending systems exclude many smallholder farmers. The barriers are structural: irregular income, limited collateral and a long history of mistrust between farmers and formal lenders.

We saw an opportunity to build something different. But before we built anything, we needed to understand the problem from the inside.

You took a research-first approach before Grofunder even launched. What drove that decision?

As a founder, I believe market research is one of the biggest advantages a startup can have, especially in the early stages. Many founders fall in love with an idea before fully understanding the market, and that can become very expensive later.

The question we kept asking ourselves was: do we understand this market, or do we just think we do? Those are very different things. Market research helps you understand whether the problem is real, how people are currently solving it, what customers value, and whether there is genuine demand for your solution.

For startups aiming to scale, market research improves both the speed and quality of decision-making by eliminating guesswork. Growth is not just about moving fast. It is about moving in the right direction. When you understand your market, you avoid wasting time on wrong iterations, misaligned features, and assumptions that don't hold in reality.

What did your user research process look like on the ground?

We spent almost three months talking to farmers, aggregators, input suppliers, cooperatives, and other startups operating in the agricultural financing space. We weren't sending out survey forms. We were going into cooperative meetings, sitting with farmers in their environments and having conversations with them.

Some of the things we initially believed would be major pain points were not, in fact, the biggest challenges on the ground. And some of the risks we had completely overlooked had the potential to kill our venture before it even took off.

What we learned during that process allowed us to pivot before launching our pilot. That saved us from learning those lessons after we had already invested heavily in the wrong business model. We refined our lending structure, our partnership approach, and our farmer onboarding process based on real conversations and field insights - not assumptions.

Read: 6 Reasons Market Research is Critical for Startups Seeking Product–Market Fit in African Markets

What were the biggest assumptions you walked in with, and which ones did the research break open?

The first and most foundational assumption was that access to credit alone was the main barrier for smallholder farmers. We thought that providing financing would naturally unlock adoption and repayment. If we could get money to farmers, the rest would follow.

But through market research, we realised the reality is much more complex. Trust, access to inputs, timing of cash flows, risk perception, and behavioural drivers all sit alongside credit as equally important constraints. Credit is one piece of a much larger puzzle.

This also reshaped who we were building for. The field research shifted our target market from smallholder commercial farmers, who have greater market exposure and more predictable income, to smallholder subsistence farmers, who experience these constraints more acutely and whose needs are urgent.

The second assumption was around repayment structures. We assumed farmers would prefer flexible repayment aligned to harvest cycles - pay after harvest, when income comes in. It seemed logical. Farming income is seasonal, so repayment should be too.

What we found instead is that repayment behaviour is more nuanced. Many farmers actually respond better to more structured and predictable repayment schedules, i.e. monthly or even weekly repayments, especially when paired with clear accountability and trust mechanisms. The flexibility we thought they wanted was actually creating uncertainty they didn't want.

And the third assumption was around onboarding. We assumed that one-on-one onboarding was the most effective way to build trust and acquire farmers. Through market research and early field engagement, we realised this approach would be very costly, would not scale, and would be less efficient at building trust at the community level. 

That led to a key pivot in our go-to-market strategy - moving from individual onboarding to working directly with cooperatives as the primary access and distribution layer.

That's a significant set of pivots: target market, repayment model, distribution strategy  - all before launch. Can you walk us through one of them in more detail?

The repayment model is probably the clearest example of market research significantly influencing a product decision.

We initially designed around a pay-after-harvest model. The assumption was that since farming income is seasonal, repayment should align with that cycle. One large repayment at the end of the season after harvesting. It made theoretical sense.

But once we spent more time observing farmer behaviour in practice, we realised that income patterns are more dynamic than we had assumed. Many farmers generate smaller, more frequent cash inflows through side activities, daily sales, or partial harvests rather than one large lump sum at harvest. The harvest cycle we had designed around wasn't actually how money moved in and out of their households.

This insight led us to pivot from a pay-after-harvest model to monthly repayments, which better matched actual cash-flow behaviour while improving consistency and predictability.

And we're still learning. Based on continued field observations, we are now exploring a shift toward weekly repayments. What we are seeing is that smaller, more frequent repayment amounts reduce pressure on farmers, improve discipline, and align more naturally with how cash actually moves in their households. A farmer would find it easier to pay KES 350 weekly than pay KES 6,000 at the end of the season.

This reinforced a broader strategic principle for us: as lenders we should design repayment structures around real farmer behaviour, not theoretical farming cycles.

You mentioned trust as a major constraint. How did the local context - cultural, economic or sector-specific, shape how you approached market research?

Culturally, trust is a major factor. Financial decisions in rural farming communities are rarely made in isolation. Cooperatives, group structures, and community relationships influence them.

Because of this, we couldn't rely on surveys or remote validation. We prioritised face-to-face conversations and embedded ourselves in cooperative environments where farmers already had established trust systems. We were showing up as participants, trying to understand a world we were about to build for.

Economically, we were dealing with highly irregular and unpredictable income flows. Smallholder farmers often do not have fixed monthly earnings. Cash flow is tied to harvest timing, market access, and household needs. This forced us to design market research that focused not just on willingness to borrow but also on how money moves in and out of farmers' households over time.

From a sector perspective, agricultural finance in Kenya is deeply influenced by intermediaries - cooperatives, aggregators, and input suppliers. These actors shape access, trust, and repayment behaviour. That meant our research couldn't focus only on farmers as end users. We had to include the entire value chain to understand the incentives, constraints, and power dynamics within the ecosystem.

Because of this context, our approach to market research became highly field-driven, conversational, and iterative. We did not treat it as a one-time validation exercise. We treated it as an ongoing process of learning - one that continuously shaped both our assumptions and our product design.

What would you say to a founder who feels they already understand their market well and is tempted to skip or shorten the market research phase?

I would say that the confidence you feel in your market is exactly what makes research most important.

The assumptions that feel most obvious are the ones that are least likely to be challenged — and therefore the most dangerous. We conducted market research, read the reports, and spoke with people in the sector. But field conversations revealed a reality that no report had captured.

Market research doesn't just help you find your customer. It helps you reach product market fit faster and scale more efficiently once you find what works. It also sharpens decisions around product, pricing, customers, partnerships, and even your business model. Instead of building unquestioningly, you build based on real insights from your customers.

Growth is not just about moving fast. It is about moving in the right direction. When you understand your market, you avoid wasting time on wrong iterations, misaligned features, and assumptions that don't hold in reality. 

The cost of three months of research is nothing compared to the cost of launching the wrong product to the wrong customer through the wrong channel.

Building in Africa? We help founders move from ideas to solutions that users adopt through research, human-centred design and business strategy grounded in African realities. Let's talk: hello@spindledesign.co