The $700M Evening Ritual: The Strange Habit That Built DeHaat’s Success

It was 2013, and six young graduate entrepreneurs were huddled around a single flickering bulb in a village school in Bihar. They had just spent another grueling day riding motorcycles across 200 kilometers of rough rural roads, trying to convince skeptical farmers to trust them with their crops. Their “beds” were school benches pushed together, their office was borrowed space, and their bank account was nearly empty.

Most people would call it a day, maybe nurse their bruised egos from another round of farmer rejections, and try to get some sleep. But not this team. Instead, they were firing up their laptops and doing something that seemed completely insane to anyone watching.

They were planning their empire.

Every single evening for eight years, Shashank Kumar and his DeHaat co-founders engaged in what they called their strategy sessions. But these weren’t ordinary business meetings. These were elaborate thought experiments where broke entrepreneurs asked themselves one powerful question: “If we had unlimited resources, how would we expand?”

The contrast was almost absurd. Here they were, operating from just a single struggling hub in a single district, yet meticulously designing blueprints for hundreds of agricultural centers across the entire country. Their nightly conversations had taken on an almost ritualistic quality, starting with immediate challenges and gradually expanding into visions that seemed impossibly distant.

Each evening session began with practical concerns — a farmer’s rejection, a delayed payment, a broken motorcycle — then transformed into something far more ambitious. They would project three years out, five years out, ten years into a future where they controlled vast networks of agricultural operations spanning the entire country.

These discussions produced remarkable artifacts. They sketched organizational charts for teams that didn’t exist, drafted standard operating procedures for markets they had never entered, and calculated cash flows for scenarios involving thousands of employees they couldn’t afford to hire. They identified exactly 296 districts that contributed to 55 percent of India’s agricultural output and created comprehensive roadmaps for reaching every single one.

The technology planning revealed the true audacity of their vision. At the time, they were barely using sophisticated systems beyond basic applications and rudimentary tools. Yet they spent hours designing digital platforms for millions of farmers they hadn’t yet reached, envisioning CRM systems for advisory services they couldn’t provide at scale, and mapping out exactly when and how they would deploy each piece of technology as resources became available.

Their financial modeling was equally elaborate. They calculated the marginal effort required to replicate their model from one district to another, planned working capital management strategies for expansion scenarios that seemed like pure fantasy, and determined precisely how many operational centers would be needed to achieve different revenue targets across various timeframes.

To anyone watching, six graduate entrepreneurs sleeping on school benches while crafting strategies for national domination would have seemed completely delusional. They were surviving on villagers’ generosity for meals and shelter, borrowing money to keep basic operations running, yet spending precious evening hours designing expansion frameworks for managing agricultural operations that would dwarf any existing company in the sector.

But their aspirations kept growing bigger with each passing night. What started as discussions about surviving another month evolved into elaborate blueprints for transforming Indian agriculture entirely.

The real genius wasn’t in the planning itself but in the timing. While they had no money to execute these grand visions, they had something more valuable: time to think deeply. Without the pressure of immediate scaling, they could craft thoughtful strategies, anticipate challenges, and build robust systems on paper before they needed them in reality.

For years, this evening ritual seemed like an exercise in futility. Investors weren’t interested in agriculture. The startup ecosystem viewed farming as un-investable. The DeHaat team faced constant rejections and skepticism about their model. But they kept planning, kept refining their strategies, kept preparing for an opportunity that didn’t yet exist.

Then everything changed.

In 2018, the Indian startup landscape shifted dramatically. Investors who had previously dismissed agriculture suddenly saw its potential. The rapid penetration of internet services into rural areas created new possibilities for agri-tech companies. Market conditions that had worked against DeHaat for years suddenly aligned in their favor.

When DeHaat finally raised its first significant funding round of $4 million in April 2019, something remarkable happened. While other startups might have spent months figuring out how to deploy capital and scale operations, DeHaat was ready on day one. They had already mapped their expansion strategy, developed their operational procedures, and identified their target markets.

The results were immediate and dramatic. Revenue jumped from ₹46 crore in March 2019 to ₹126 crore in March 2020. But this was just the beginning. Over the next two and a half years, DeHaat secured $220 million in total investment and executed the expansion plan they had crafted during those evening sessions.

From April 2020 to the end of 2022, they grew from 80 centers and four hubs to an astounding 10,000 centers and 106 hubs. Revenue soared from ₹126 crore to ₹1,500 crore. Their footprint expanded to 125 districts across India, exactly as they had envisioned during those lamplight strategy sessions years earlier.

The transformation shocked industry observers who saw a seemingly overnight success. But Shashank understood the real story. Those eight years of evening rituals had been an investment, not a waste of time. Every hour spent imagining impossible scenarios had prepared them for the moment when impossible became inevitable.

DeHaat’s evening ritual reveals a counterintuitive truth about entrepreneurial success. While most founders focus on execution in the present, the most successful ones are simultaneously engineering their future. They understand that the best time to plan for opportunities is when you can’t yet seize them.

Today, DeHaat stands as a category leader in India’s agri-tech space, serving over 2 million farmers and valued at over $700 million. The company that started with six guys sleeping on school benches has become a national agricultural powerhouse. But ask Shashank about the secret to their success, and he’ll tell you about those evening conversations when they dared to dream bigger than their circumstances suggested was possible.

Most entrepreneurs wait for resources before they start planning how to use them. The DeHaat team proved that the reverse approach works better. They planned how to use resources they didn’t have, creating a detailed blueprint that turned years of strategic thinking into months of execution when the moment was right.

Their $700 million evening ritual wasn’t really about the money at all. It was about the mindset that separates founders who react to opportunities from those who are ready for them when they arrive.

Want to discover the complete strategy behind DeHaat’s journey from 3 acres to $700M valuation? Read Shashank Kumar’s full story and 8 other transformative agri-tech entrepreneurs in “Techies Who Talked to Plants” by Shah M M(Published by Bloomsbury) — available now on Amazon and major bookstores.

Learn the unconventional tactics and ground-level insights that built India’s most successful agricultural technology companies.