Aviya Blog
Why we built Aviya
Why we built Aviya Broiler Management app
Aviya was never meant to become a product. It was designed and built initially as a tool to help a couple rearing broiler chickens for subsistence and tiny profits in their backyard track profitability.
The question we tried to answer at the end of every cycle was ‘How much money did we actually make?’ We found we never could really tell because we were not consistently keeping tidy records on expenses and sales. We were going to our agristore, getting a batch of a hundred day-old chicks, the feeds, some vitamins, sourcing bedding shavings from the world-famous Mbare market, and then starting a cycle. At the time, the problem seemed simple, and our idea of the solution also seemed, in that moment, simple.
So, we started building an app to be a cycle tracker with an expenses and sales ledger. Answering:
- Where are we in the cycle? When do we go to market?
- How much did we put in?
- How much did we get out?
This was a great starting point. And for a long time, it felt like we finally had the visibility. We quickly found that was just part of the picture. When you’re a broiler farmer without production systems in place, it’s easy to miss some key details that influence your overall profitability.
I will start with what has been our greatest finding: Financial records are simple to keep, simple to lose, are usually incomplete, exist in many (different) versions and can get overtaken by life. In our own experience, there was just too much friction: whether it was locating the spreadsheet, updating it, having a separate record maintained by our caretaker in a book, forgetting transactions when life became busy, and others.
Then, managing operational data quickly comes into play – especially recording bird losses; easy to notice, but losing the tally over the six to eight week production period.
Another factor, we learnt the hard way: We only measured our birds’ (dressed weight) and nothing in-between. We had no mechanism in place to track growth in any representative way. Not just having the these records – but understanding growth enough to respond quickly, by ensuring that everyone involved has that information the moment it became available and that external help was solicited where necessary.
The chaos doubled (literally) when we ran concurrent batches.
Finding version one
The more we tried to make the app work more for us, the quicker we realised the version one we needed was shaping itself. We were building a broiler management app which would help us understand our financials, manage risk, enable proactive communication – with the ability to have this kind of oversight and information over concurrent batches without overload. The last part of the design was making sure that all this was almost effortless.
This is when Aviya was born. We incrementally tested assumptions, were brutally honest about what was helpful (and what was just another feature) and we trimmed it to the most useful tool we could conjure.
Once we packaged the first version of the app, we asked fellow backyarders to also try it to see how it would work for them. That second round of learning taught us even more about human behaviour, problems we had missed, biases we had carried. For example, understanding that the app needed to be proactive rather than passive, assuming that our easy-to-fund wasn’t everyone else’s, and that there was so much opportunity to reduce user friction.
Taking a step back, we realised that what came out of that review was a product that effectively solved the problems of other smallholders beyond our own view.
From record-keeping to understanding
On our last batch, we decided to bury ourselves in the grower manuals to see what the producers recommend and the benchmarks they set. It was so humbling that what we thought we knew was dwarfed by the information producers already share (though many times it’s presented like a serving suggestion). We learnt so much around light intensity, temperatures, space, humidity, and various other factors we and other smallholders like us seem to have only general information on.
The biggest for us was growth benchmarks. Because they are the best marker on operational data, we baked them into Aviya. Specifically, we managed to get these benchmarks on Cobb 500 and Ross 308, which was a big learning point because for us – until then – a chick was a chick.
For as long as we were weighing our birds on arrival and weekly, Aviya was giving us insights on whether growth was on or off target, and by how much. This became a big influence in how we look at our production process.
Why we decided to make Aviya a product
There is no shortage of broiler management apps in the world. When we started our side-hustle in 2022, we actually tried a few but eventually gave up because every option we tried seemed too technical, enterprise-level, heavy, lacking context (big one), and well…boring.
On this basis, we thought Aviya could find its place in some smallholders’ pockets and backyard operations. This is why we coined our mission: ‘Helping smallholder broiler farmers run their projects as seriously as broiler businesses demand.’
Building for small African broiler growers
Smallholder broiler production is a significant activity in several African countries. In Zimbabwe, small-scale growers contributed approximately 80% of national broiler meat production in 2024. In Zambia, households raised over 82% of the 5.3 million broiler chickens recorded in the government’s 2023 livestock survey. Tanzania’s 2024/25 agricultural survey similarly found that agricultural households raised nearly 97% of the country’s 16.4 million broiler chickens.
The picture differs between countries, but the contribution of smaller growers is impossible to ignore. Small-scale broiler farming is also present in countries including Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria, although its scale and contribution to national production vary across these markets.
And because there are so many smallholders across Africa, we are keen to take Aviya as far as we can into the continent so that as many smallholders benefit from running their broiler projects like serious businesses.
Realising that we were building Aviya specifically for Africa, when we made the decision, we had to be honest about practicality. Not everyone has an active data connection running 24/7. So keeping it purely cloud-only, while that’s the sexiest way, wasn’t always going to be practical. So, we created an offline version. All the data is stored locally, on the grower’s device. The grower will still be able to update it, but there will be limitations to what they can use it for.
What Aviya actually does, in summary
Today, Aviya helps you:
- Manage a cycle from day one to the day the last chicken is sold.
- Record income and expenses
- Generate a standard project profit or loss per project. This can also be exported to email, WhatsApp, or downloaded as PDF. We hope one day it will be usable as a supporting document for credit applications.
- Keep track of weights and give insights of growth versus breed blueprints (Ross 308 and Cobb 500) – These are according to producers in Zimbabwe only at launch. If a producer doesn’t know what breed, Aviya defaults to Ross 308.
- Invite team members as co-managers and assistants (assistants get operational access minus access to financials). Members have an in-app group chat to help with communication.
- Keep all your production data automatically backed up as long as your account is active
Cloud-dependent functionality is only available with Aviya cloud accounts.
We also wanted Aviya to be fun in a useful way. So, the app provides a near-accurate visual reference of your chicken’s growth stage depending on stage in cycle. We have found this more useful than we thought it would.
So, at what cost?
We would like to keep Aviya free to use for as long as possible. We have found the app to be a useful tool for us, and we’d like as many people as possible to take advantage of it. We are excited to learn as much as possible on how people are using it and where we can make it even more useful.
Want to give Aviya a try? Join the waitlist to learn as soon as it becomes available on Google Play Store and Apple Store.