“Startups aren’t for the faint of heart. It’s for the brave, the patient, and the persistent. It’s for the overcomer” - staunchly believes Siddhant Bhalinge. Coming from a business background, Siddhant always wanted to take that plunge in the entrepreneurial sea. Working towards it, he took considerable time to learn sustainable landscape design. After returning to India in the late 2014, he traveled around to get an insight on the agriculture scenario in the rural areas. Exploring the market, he realized that there was a need to educate people about gardening, landscaping, and agriculture. He started working on ugaoo.com at the beginning of 2015 and launched the website on 15th December 2015.

As a startup, ugaoo had come across copious challenges pertaining to gathering ‘the team’. The team also had to get into exclusive contracts with India Post to ship plant care items such as insecticides, pesticides and organic fertilizers but with a lot of convincing and supporting documents, they were happy to assist team ugaoo in this process

for the benefit of the farmers pan India.

Launched more than a year ago, ugaoo is growing month over month with more than 75-80 orders a day with an average ticket size of 1600

For the Love of Gardening

Endeavored to sell quality products and making the best of products available in the remotest areas of India, ugaoo is all about making gardening and farming easier for the urban population who have disconnected from their roots of agriculture. Enlightening on the scope of work, Siddhant speaks, “A majority of the urban population wishes to grow plants, use their village land for farming as well deck up their farm houses, apartments and offices with good looking gardens. Although there is a huge demand, there are very few shops dealing in this market. We aim to bridge this gap along with providing thorough knowledge and step by step guidance on how to succeed in productive gardening. We plans on connecting the experts in this field with the layman and help them in their journey towards going green”.

To assist the people yearning to harness their love for gardening, ugaoo offers books, seeds,tools and a platform that provides all the information and support one need to make gardening a hobby or profession. The dedicated

forum of ugaoo provides a platform that offers a broad range of Gardening and Agriculture supplies such as Kitchen Garden Seeds, Commercial Hybrid Seeds, Insecticides, Pesticides, Organic Fertilizers and a wide range of multilingual books on various topics of Gardening, Agriculture and allied activities.

Certainly, ugaoo has the widest and best range of quality seeds that cannot be matched by any local competitors.

“It is our goal to educate and assist all the avid gardeners and farmers with best management practices, on-site workshops, step by step guidance through our knowledge centre,” he adds.

The Success Story

Launched more than a year ago, ugaoo is growing month over month with more than 75-80 orders a day with an average ticket size of 1600. About 2000 additional orders have been catered via e-commerce sites namely Flipkart, Amazon and Shopclues. Growing at a good pace, team Ugaoo is looking to start selling Hybrid Seeds from other popular brands in India who have legitimate breeding programs and superior technology products. They have already developed the ugaoo app that offers great discounts to all the farmers and penetrate into the Tier 2, Tier 3 cities. “This year, we aim to generate at least 10 crores on its own. Our goal is to achieve more than $10 Million in sales in the fiscal year 2018/19,” concludes Siddhant enthusiastically.