The Ayurveda Experience's Rishabh Chopra: The critical pivot, building a D2C brand w/right customer acquisition strategy, being ROI driven and having a gap focussed approach

Rishabh has always been passionate about taking the ideas of India to the world. During and immediately after college, he travelled over 26 countries as the Country Head of India and then as a member of the Global Leadership Team of AIESEC, a global youth leadership development organisation with thousands of members in over 120 countries.  During these travels, the appreciation for yoga, Indian cuisine, and other prominent aspects of Indian culture were abundantly apparent to him, as to anybody else travelling globally.  In 2009, he worked for a brief period with Mindvalley, a start-up based in Malaysia which published and sold personal development courses to the North American and Australian Markets. After working there, he got convinced that it was possible to build a global business selling to global consumers sitting out of India. So just a few months before he went to ISB in 2010, he started selling courses around subjects of Indian philosophy made with a professor from Delhi University as well as other authors, to the US. He made his first few sales even before going to ISB but kept working on the venture while at ISB.

He was also simultaneously experimenting with another early education venture which fizzled out due to the many mistakes a first-time entrepreneur makes. ISB incubated Transformative, the current holding company and till 2014 the company focussed on trying to make and market courses on its own website around several aspects of Indian and Eastern Philosophy. When that business was facing scaling challenges amongst others, a customer research call to one of the customers who had bought several of our courses changed our journey. The customer had studied Ayurveda in the USA, and was interested in doing a course on Ayurveda. Transformative launched the course as ‘The Ayurveda Experience’, and it did extremely well, and has had several thousand students over the years.

So the business pivoted to being an Ayurveda Education business for both consumers and practitioners in western countries, from there it experimented with being an Ayurveda Marketplace for a while, but upon realising the number of well-known Ayurveda brands in North America, Europe and Australia were extremely few, theayurvedaexperience.com decided to become a platform for ayurvedic brands across skincare, personal care, food, beverages and supplements all of which it builds/or acquires, but ultimately owns.