Leafin

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in October 2021, up to 70% of produced food is consumed in urban areas. This number implies that approximately 70% of global gas emissions came from cities. On the other hand, air pollution also causes 1 in 8 deaths worldwide (WHO, 2021). 

In fact, exposure to urban air pollution has a long-term impact on healthy longevity throughout life. We face a greater risk of cognitive development, respiratory disease, and even cancer. And it leads to 4 million people dying prematurely due to indoor air pollution (WHO, 2021). Due to this problem, Indonesia's lifespan loss reached 2.5 years, and thousands of premature deaths amounting to more than $477 Million in health costs just in Jakarta (AQLI, 2021).

Our product is inspired by one of the member problems in urban farming: failed crops. This issue turns out not only to her mother. Based on our market survey, many other adults in Indonesia also struggled to grow their plants in urban areas using the regular gardening kit. Besides that, most millennials in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, are living in a fast-paced environment without having much time to take care of their plants and overly manual steps. During the pandemic, urban gardening as a hobby has also significantly increased in Indonesian society alongside the 200% increase in organic vegetable demand. People are seeking a healthy lifestyle to survive in today's health crisis.

From this issue, we are concerned about reducing air pollution while still fulfilling the food needs in urban areas, starting from home. Therefore, we came up with our Internet of Plants solution: LeafIn.

We are building an aeroponic gardening assistant integrated into the IoT planting kit and AR mobile-based features. Our solution is to help people who start gardening to ease their starting gardening journey by giving AR simulations about the product, and recommendations of the plant for their gardening. In addition, Leafin combines both IoT with a mobile application that is suitable for Indonesia. 

First, our IoT kit planter consists of a flowerpot and IoT kit that measures three parameters of humidity, sunlight, temperature. These parameters will analyze and send an insight to users via the LeafIn application and give user recommendations on the activity they should do with the plant. 

Second, the Leafin application consists of all-in solutions for gardening. LeafIn has four features that can help the gardener: Plant AR, IoT tracker, gardening marketplace, and social feed. The Augmented Reality (AR) feature will detect the most suitable plant inside the user's residence with the help of gardening experts. The tracker feature will provide a gamification method for gardening. Each user's plant will be personified and has a gamified point system that incentivizes and motivates gardeners to take care of their plants. The tracker also provides a reminder and to-do list to the gardener based on their plants' conditions. The tracker will automatically learn from the data and remind the gardener to keep discipline in maintaining the plants, it will also give users the power to water their plants just through a click on the app. The marketplace will be the go-to place for finding gardening tools, seeds, and fertilizer to grow their plants. Lastly, the social feed works as a platform to share users' progress and planting advice with others. The social aspect helps the gardener to have connections with others and really hope it will reinforce them to keep continuing gardening as a community.

Leafin targets upper-middle urban millennials who are interested in gardening but have trouble in keeping consistency and lack of understanding how to start of gardening itself. Based on our research, there are the increase of gardening and planting interest for millennials, however they tend to have problem on starting phase and also maintaining phase of the gardening. This problems led to them to stop of gardening in the first place and discontinue their activity. Therefore, we approach this problem by several phases. 

First phase, we are helping the gardener during the initial phase of gardening using AR simulation and A.I based recommendation, the feature will help to ease the burden of starting the gardening at the first place. Gardener will have the understanding about the kit they will buy and also the plant that suits their habit most.

Second phase, we are helping the gardener during the plant maintaining phase with IoT tracker, gardening marketplace, and social feed that will help the user to ease their habit for maintaining the plant by automated process while also giving recommendations of todolist for gardener for keep their plant health. The social feed become the all in feature to keep gardening as communal activity and gardening marketplace help gardener to find tools and fertilzer easily while also helping local seller to sell via online. 

We believe that LeafIn is aligned with the 'Longevity-Ready Environment' because LeafIn helps to utilize the underused physical space in the Home; LeafIn brings more green space at the home. Pollution becomes one of the aspects that Leafin solves, which helps to create a more sustainable environment. Easy gardening helps people to have activities together in their spare time and led to happiness and activity which affects their health and longevity. 

We are well-positioned to deliver this solution as five of us come from diverse backgrounds in computer science, engineering, management, and finance collaborating in creating both Leafin mobile application and Leafin product. With a background in computer science, Nurrizky and Rizky both have capabilities in creating a mobile application for controlling Leafin products. Alifia and Fawwaz have the ability to design the Leafin product and construct the product composed of light, humidity, and temperature sensors used for our smart assistant. They also construct the aeroponic device with a pump connected to the sensors. Nailah constructs the business plan and is responsible for the business process as well as the procurement of Leafin. Lastly, Yonathan is responsible for the finance of Leafin. 

Our team was established during an exchange program in the University of Pennsylvania, under the Indonesia Ministry of Education scholarship program with 3 members joining one of the prominent venture capital courses in The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania learning about funding and building startup and also marketing for a social cause. Our product has been accepted and incubated as a finalist in Stanford University Center of Longevity Design Challenge with funding for USD 1000 and mentored by fellows from Stanford Longevity Center and currently UX Designer in NuBank (YC18). 

We know that the Solve program has been around for a long time, we also saw its impact on one of the startups in Indonesia that had won the previous MIT Solve, Ruangguru. Currently, the startup is growing rapidly and has even become one of the largest educational platforms in Southeast Asia.

We, who have a big vision for the development of the gardening market in Indonesia, also want to follow their steps to get this exponential growth. 

Through the MIT Solve program, we want to get assistance in terms of funding, business and technology mentoring from experts, as well as network with investors. We also believe that being a part of Solve MIT will also increase people's trust in Indonesia to use our products as it's far more valuable than the other points, so for us, this is an important moment that LeafIn doesn't want to miss. This event is one of our milestones in 2022 to jump even further in the future.

LeafIn is the first in the Indonesian market that provides a solution combining IoT technology and mobile application for people to garden at home. The originality comes with other competitive advantages, including an aeroponic base which will reduce the water discharged by up to 90% from normal gardening.

The mobile application that makes it automatic will lower the chance of failure by up to 98%, and we provide smart assistants which solve our customer's biggest pain point which is not knowing who to ask if there are problems with their plants. All of these solutions come at an affordable price where we sell LeafIn kit at a price of $40/household which is divided into a per-person average fee of only $8.

We believe through delivering this solution Leafin would create a snowball effect throughout the entire life of the user even before they are born. LeafIn would reduce indoor air pollution by 87% (NASA, 2007). Clean air would increase children's lung capacity, cognitive brain development, and prevent respiratory diseases. In the adult stage, Leafin would increase well-being by 47% and boost productivity by 38%. In the elderly stage, Leafin would lower the risk of dementia by 36%. Overall, Leafin would increase longevity by 2.5 years (AQLI, 2021). LeafIn, Live a Greener life for your better health.

Our main target is to support gardeners to minimize the chance of failure while reducing indoor air pollution which is a silent killer threat for those of us who live in urban areas.

In the next year, we want to reach 10,000 users who are helped through our product kits and/or mobile application. Therefore, we want to do a product launch with the kit and features in the application. We will start rolling out the other features one by one and develop a second version of the kit.

In the next five years, our biggest target is to be able to enter the regional market by 2025. By gaining 15% of market share in aeroponic gardening kits as well as the #1 platform for gardeners in Indonesia.

Our way to get there is to do development in stages. We will roll out the features one by one and get direct feedback from users. We will continue to process and update development in terms of applications quarterly. For the IoT kit, the launch update will be carried out once a year whereas the development of LeafIn kit 1.0 to 2.0 does require more time so that all suggestions and improvements can be carried out optimally. 

Not only in terms of products, but we will also develop internally by adding teams over time, attracting investors to accelerate growth, and doing growth hacking with two penetration focuses, which are millennials and gen z, as well as gardening lovers in urban areas.

As a growing startup, we are used to using OKR (Objective and Key Results) tools to track progress towards our goals. At the beginning of the year, we break down the quarterly milestones that will be achieved by the whole team and from each division. Then, we also list down the key results to achieve that milestones.

Key results which is a quantitative aspect will be the main tracking of our progress. For example, during yesterday's prototyping, we had to do 10 times of users testing, but now it's only 7 times so we've only finished 70% of the progress. This progress will have an impact on the achievement of the above objective, namely product launch.

For the impact we want, we will measure through the annual Air Quality Life Index data report and see if there is a decrease in indoor air pollution situation points which are also normalized with CAGR. If it turns out that there is a significant decrease, it means that our initiative was successful. Although we believe this decline will not occur in one or two years, we are aiming to achieve the target in five years.

We believe that measuring the mission through scientific steps and internal progress through OKR will be able to encourage LeafIn's development to be closer to its goals.

Leafin is the first automatic aeroponic in Indonesia that utilizes IoT and mobile applications to help the users in taking care of their indoor plants by fulfilling the plant’s need for sunlight, water, nutrition, and humidity automatically with several sensors. With COVID-19 breakthrough, most of us spend time at home increasing the exposure of indoor air pollution and the risk of health caused by indoor air pollution. Because of that, we would like to encourage people to have an indoor plant useful to reduce indoor air pollution and household toxins. 

There are five main pain points that we are addressing with Leafin. First pain point is the low skill of gardening. Second pain point is urban workers have minimal to no time for gardening. To solve the pain points we provide IoT monitoring connected to light sensors, humidity sensors, and temperature sensors that scan the environment around the plant and automatically fulfill the plant’s needs so the plant will grow and nourish. We also provide a smart assistant where users may chat with the ChatBot customer assistant to solve their gardening problems and plant condition. 

The third pain point is minimal lighting in the house which might hinder the plant from growing effectively. To solve the pain point we introduce artificial lighting around the plant which can fulfill the plant’s need for lighting. We also introduce an AR Simulator so the user can visualize the Leafin in their home and make sure the user finds a sufficient location with a sufficient source of lighting. The fourth pain point is the small space of gardening. We introduce a vertical type of gardening that doesn’t require a lot of space but can produce a lot of plants. Fifth pain point is users are hesitant to have a plant in their home because there is no economic benefit for them and they thought it was a waste of money. 

Leafin will provide economical benefit to the user by producing fresh vegetables which the user might harvest and consume. Overall, we are trying to alleviate Indonesian pain points which hinders or makes them hesitant from having indoor plants.

On the hardware side, Leafin solves indoor plantations that utilize the Internet of Things. To support controlling many devices at a time, our product also uses cloud services technologies that support on-demand traits. In the physical layer, some simple actuators and sensors will support this device. To make sure the monitored plants are kept healthy, our device makes use of temperature sensors to monitor the plant’s temperature and humidity and light sensors to monitor light intensity. The data from the sensors are sent to servers in the cloud to be analyzed and give actionable recommendations based on the conditions received. The algorithms behind the analysis are also optimized so the device could use minimal input, such as water and energy, to give maximum output.

On the software side, Leafin solves indoor plantations using one in all gardening applications with features such as AR simulation and recommendation, gardening chatbot, IoT tracker, social feeds and marketplace. Our application minimum viable product is build using mobile responsive ReactJs. AR simulation is build using WebAR and it has successfully simulate the example of the IoT kit. From the backend side, we are using mongodb as our database due to the flexibility of scaling it and also deploy it in heroku since cloud function is the suitable for building a minimal but high availability of API. Both frontend and backend are developed using javascript. To connect with the IoT kit, we are using blynk while incorporating a message broker to for create real-time data transfer from IoT kit to the database. 

Our team consist of people with diverse background of education from different university in Indonesia: Universitas Gadjah Mada, Bandung Institute of Technology, Univeristy of Indonesia, with background of Biomedical engineering, computer science, business, and finance. Indonesia as one of most diverse country consist of 1,340 ethnics groups which our team consist of people from different ethnicity, such as chinese, javanese, sundase, acehnese, betawi. Two of our cofounder are womens that has strong experience in business and engineering background. Our HQ does not establish in capital city Jakarta instead we are focus in Bandung, West Java.  We are embracing remote working so that founders can work while living in second tier city in Indonesia, instad in the capital city.  

Our business model is from selling IoT kits (sales) which cost $40 per kit. Then, we also apply the subscription model in mobile apps if our users want to use all the features in it, especially the smart assistant.

Our Plan to become financially sustainable is to achieve an investment of one million dollars to be invested in (1) app and development (2) Leafin  IoT kit production (3) marketing (4) selling, general, and administrative. With the investment, we believe we can start selling Leafin to upper-middle-income families at a price of $40 each for a one-time payment bringing $5 as a net profit margin. Our calculation indicates that we might achieve a payback period of 4 years. We are optimistic that we will be able to sell over 5.500 products in the next three years or 5 products per day. We also plan to sell the plant supplies, such as fertilizer and seeds to the customers and that might become a continuing stream of revenue for our firms.

So far, we have successfully created the mobile application and the minimum viable product (MVP) of the Leafin which only costs $21 to make. The product is easy to produce so we are certain that the cost of production will be sustainable. We have connected the product to the application and it worked smoothly. We also have shown the product to several potential customers, interviewed them, tested the product to the user, and asked for their feedback and recommendations. We believe that we are able to provide affordable automatic aeroponic help by IoT and mobile applications for every family in Indonesia.