2 . Imagine you’re a farmer in India with a crop of potatoes to sell. Typically, you go to a marketplace called a mandi and get the best price you can from a local middleman, who will then sell them to another middleman.

Sanjay Agarwalla learned about Indian farmers’ lack of access to buyers even when he was a student decades ago. After talking the problem over with his son Aditya, then a computer science major at Princeton University, the two decided to form an online marketplace they called the Kisan Network in late 2015.

“Anything that deals with agriculture in India is pretty large. So, if it’s a problem, the problem can affect millions of people, and the impact of the solution could be enormous,” Sanjay says. After all, some 70 percent of rural households in the country depend on agriculture as a main source of income.

Kisan Network’s app lets farmers advertise their produce and see potential buyers beyond the local mandi. Once the deal is completed online, Kisan runs the produce from the farmer direct to the buyer, each side staying put.

Kisan’s fee ranges from 5 to 15 percent of the sale, and farmers get to keep more than they would under the traditional system, where middleman after middleman raises the price of the produce before it reaches a final buyer. “Even with low-profit crops like potatoes, we have been able to offer 10 percent more than physical market rates. That’s what our entire goal is,” says Aditya. “As for higher-profit crops, the improvement goes up.”

Building products for this new set of technology consumers brings its own challenges. “All of our engineers are from urban backgrounds,” says Aditya Agarwalla. “It’s not like you’re building something you would use on your own.” To be effective, Kisan’s platform must work with inexpensive smartphones on slower networks and be able to support regional languages.

Today, farmers feel it’s better selling to someone who is at their doors. They do not have to typically travel miles to a mandi, staying overnight without a place to sleep.