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Making Bharat Healthy | Rajat Garg & Dr Manuj Garg of myUpchar.com
81 Plays4 years ago
Our guests today, yes you heard it right. In today’s episode of The Spotlight, we have not one but two co-founders who are on a mission to solve the problem of lack of accessibility and awareness for healthcare in Bharat, on the other hand, making it affordable for the Bharat user.
Rajat Garg and Dr Manuj Garg are the co-founders of India’s largest Healthcare Content company, myUpchar.com, providing healthcare-related information in a plethora of Indian languages with an aim to reach tier 2 and tier 3 India.
In this chat, they recollect their individual journeys to Stanford University. Dr Garg has a PhD in Economics from Stanford University and went on to be a Management Consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in San Francisco during which he largely worked on healthcare delivery in India for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Rajat, on the other hand, went on to pursue an MS in Electrical Engineering. They share their interestingly accidental story of coming together to launch myUpchar and rethinking technology to take healthcare in every part of India. Dr Garg calls it a ‘happy accident.’
Bitten by the bug of starting up, these two passionate entrepreneurs followed their heart to revolutionise the healthcare scenario in Bharat.
Tune in to the episode for conversations on a range of topics spanning from startups, technology, healthcare, discovering yoga, connecting with patients from the remotest areas, to scaling out, building supply, pitching to investors, hearing rejections, to finally raising funds, monetizing the platform and fulfilling medicinal requirements.
Key highlights of the episode:
- The potential of content and technology to deliver healthcare awareness.
- Intellectual fulfilment at a prestigious graduate school.
- Building a healthcare consultation platform.
- Getting angles onboard.
- Creating a positive impact by solving health issues in Bharat.
Join us on IG: @thepodium.in
For more founder stories, check out our website: The Podium - A Network of Podcasts
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Beyond Campus'
00:00:00
Speaker
Akshay, did you always knew what you wanted to do when you passed away to the MBA? I was all over the place. Sort of, what about you? I was confused about your career choices. Wondering what steps to take next.
00:00:18
Speaker
In this podcast, called Beyond Campus, Saurabh Garg, founder of C4E and Akshay Dutt, founder of Kundnati, are on a mission to crack open the career success code for the youth. So, let's turn the dream into reality.
Success of Mayubchar Startup
00:00:41
Speaker
Everyone talks about building products and services for Bharat, but very few actually manage to build scalable products for Bharat. One of the rare exceptions in the field littered with dead bodies through aspiring unicorns is a startup called Mayubchar. Rajat Garg and Dr Manoj Garg, who are the co-founders of Mayubchar, have a lot in common.
00:01:02
Speaker
Both Agarps, both studied at Stanford, worked in the best companies in the US. Both were bitten by the Swadeesh bug and came back to India to become entrepreneurs. In this fascinating episode of Beyond Campus, Akshay Dutt talks to both of them to understand how the idea of Myukchar, a medical app for Bharat, evolved and scaled up.
Funding Education at Stanford
00:01:23
Speaker
Did your parents have the means to pay for a Stanford education?
00:01:28
Speaker
So actually, no. So my father was working at PSF at that particular point of time. So, you know, and the Stanford required to show 60, 70 lakhs worth of cash or liquid asset available with you. So I, my mom actually mortgage his house and that gave us enough funds to show to the
00:01:57
Speaker
Stanford University that, yes, we can pay the education fees. And that allowed me to get in there. And once I was there, I did my little best to get the RA. So within first quarter, I was able to get an RA after that kind of funded the entire education. So luckily, we didn't have to draw down on the entire loan. But initially, we had that problem.
00:02:26
Speaker
It was actually a pretty big deal because it's not a small amount, right? So think of early 2000, 60, 70 lakhs was like your entire life worth and then more. So it was a pretty big amount. And luckily, you know, all of them came together. They said, OK, no, he's the first person of our family going outside for education. So we need to support him.
00:02:54
Speaker
and luckily that worked out in the table. So is Stanford where you met Manoj? Yes. How did you land up in Stanford?
From St. Stephen's to Stanford
00:03:07
Speaker
What was your journey like? Fairly similar. I think we were both, you know, all of us are products of our time. So when I was in college, so I went to St. Stephen's for undergrad. I was studying maths.
00:03:20
Speaker
Whether it was the college environment or my family. So my parents are both professors. I have an elder brother and a younger brother. Elder brother was also.
00:03:32
Speaker
studying in Delhi University. He's just only two years older. So there was always this thing that I want to study in a, quote unquote, real education system, higher education system. Because the experience in Delhi University, as good as since Stevens was, it's still a far cry from what one would imagine a proper education system to be. So that was just something at the back of my mind, maybe because I come from an academic family.
00:04:00
Speaker
So when I was in undergrad, so Stevens, I applied to Oxbridge, which was very standard at my college. And I got through to Cambridge. Actually, sorry, I didn't apply to Oxford. I just applied to Cambridge. I got through and then I didn't apply to Oxford because I got Cambridge.
00:04:17
Speaker
But the amount of money that it would have taken to go there was just not affordable for my family. And while my parents offered to mortgage the small house that we lived in, that was just not something I would go with.
00:04:34
Speaker
And there were hardly any scholarships to go around, maybe just two across all of India for anybody going to study abroad. So for the things that I qualified for. So I didn't get the scholarship. And of course, I didn't want my family to pay for it. And there was the third option of taking a loan on my head. But I've just grown up in an environment where
00:05:01
Speaker
despite my economics education and I know loans serve a financial purpose and everything the psychological aspect of being in debt and that much debt at that age just didn't like make sense to me so I didn't want to take a loan on my own so I didn't I didn't end up going to Cambridge.
00:05:18
Speaker
So it kind of stayed somewhere in my mind that I have to kind of go. And as human behavior goes, the things that you can't get are the things you want the most. So then I went to Delhi School of Economics. I switched from math to economics because it just seemed like the things that I was intellectually interested in could be better studied and answered by economics than mathematics.
00:05:46
Speaker
And again, D-School has a very rich history of people going down the academic path and studying and teaching at some of the best institutions in the world and contributing a lot to the study of economics. So as it happened, while I was there, I did well and my professors encouraged me to go for a PhD. That wasn't really part of the plan when I went to D-School.
00:06:11
Speaker
but and it kind of tied in with that whole you know idea of so I applied I got through to a bunch of places and I chose Stanford out of them
00:06:24
Speaker
There are quite a few schools that are offering it just seemed for what I wanted to study Stanford was a good place That just the and the difference and that affordability question was still there, right? I can't afford to pay for a five-year education. Let alone a two-year thing and I couldn't afford two-year education at Cambridge. How could I like pay for five-year education, but thankfully Stanford and most economics top economics programs support their students with
00:06:50
Speaker
fellowships, scholarships, TA ships, RA ships. That's taken care of before you go there. So that's the difference between Rajat's experience and mine where I knew I had a two-year fellowship before I went in and there was a guaranteed teaching assistant or research assistant position which should pay for the rest of the education.
00:07:08
Speaker
So I landed up there. And yeah, it was like, as I said, it was like an amazing experience. It doesn't matter like, you know, which department you're in, you just see these amazing people. So my, one of my advisors just got the Nobel Prize this year. Yes, that's the kind of place that, you know, it is. Yeah, so quite, quite wonderful.
00:07:32
Speaker
So how did the two of you connect? Was it like the Desi factor? Has a little bit, but also my roommate there who was a friend from school since we were in class three. So basically a childhood friend and Rajat are related. So he and Rajat were roommates the prior year. So Rajat had gone to Stanford one year before me.
00:07:55
Speaker
So, Ankit who was my roommate and his roommate prior to that, he was the common connection, how we got to know each other. And funny story, Ankit who's obviously my age because we were classmates in school and Rajat are also related, except that Rajat is Mr. Mama and he's Bhaaja. So, two years apart there, Mama and Bhaaja.
00:08:22
Speaker
OK. So then Rajat, what next after Stanford?
Entrepreneurial Journey in India
00:08:30
Speaker
Did you form a very, very strong bond with Manoj that it remained tight throughout, or was it like something which grew over the years? I think it kind of grew over the years. Of course, we kept hanging out at different college parties and all.
00:08:50
Speaker
But I don't think we were thinking of or we were imagining that we'll start a company together a decade down the line. That was not a thought process at that time. So I actually had it on my way. So after Stanford, I joined Amazon. It was a pretty eye-opening experience about how technology actually gets used at a very, very scalable way to solve customer problems.
00:09:20
Speaker
You don't get to see the impact of technology in many, many organizations. Mostly you are rehashing what somebody else has done 10 years back. But here you are kind of rethinking, re-imagining every particular aspect of the business using technology. And at a scale that was like unseen of, unheard of before. So I spent a few years there then
00:09:49
Speaker
One of the senior VPs at Amazon left and started his company. And he basically was looking for people to have online marketing. So I joined the organization to initially have the online marketing for Data Sphere.
00:10:11
Speaker
And what does Datasphere do? Like what were you marketing? Yeah, so Datasphere had a bunch of websites initially where, you know, basically real estate listings websites. But the focus was more from a perspective of second home management perspective. So we had a website called Landwatch, which was around selling land parcels.
00:10:40
Speaker
larger and land parcels and people will buy them for making a ranch or go hunting and stuff like that. And then there was another for resorts and another for new constructions, et cetera, et cetera. So it was there, you know, when I joined the traffic was in low tens of thousands of visitors a month. Two years down the line, we were the largest real estate listing website
00:11:09
Speaker
in land space and in resort space and doing 2-3 million per month on both the sites. And later, you know, the company kind of
00:11:27
Speaker
outgrew its initial ambitions and we basically started doing two different things and one of the division was real estate division and that was more focused on the new media business and I was then the general manager of the real estate business overall to grow that. So there I spent a total of four years. Which city was this? This is Seattle, Rene Seattle.
00:12:00
Speaker
And then 2011, early 2011, I was just at a point of time in life where I had spent around eight, nine years in US. And I was also contemplating building something of my own, doing some startup of my own. And I came to a conclusion that if I need to start something of my own, India is probably a better bet to live in.
00:12:28
Speaker
Because in either case, you can build any global product sitting from anywhere. And I was able to see myself settling in the US forever. And it was a quite a tough time in life that I had to make a decision whether to settle in the US forever or just come back.
00:12:51
Speaker
I moved back to India in 2011, started a company called Social Apps HQ, which was basically into building Facebook apps that companies can use for running their own marketing campaigns on Facebook. And at that time, a lot of companies were running campaigns to increase their likes, increase their fans, and figuring out ways to engage and sell to their fan base.
00:13:20
Speaker
Give me an example of what you developed, like an app you developed. Yeah, so basically there was a small e-commerce store, right? So, Vin Diesel on his Facebook page put a store showcasing some of his awesome products, right? Some of his fan related products.
00:13:46
Speaker
There was a cycling contest, so recycling group. So they will post pictures of all the events that they will go to and details about upcoming events where people can sign up. Then there were schools who were using our app for hottest girl contest and people will
00:14:11
Speaker
nominate some girl or some guy in the school, and then the rest of the school will vote and rank someone on the top. And you'll see a lot of activity in that 20, 30-day period on the app. So a bunch of things like that that will increase engagement, increase the traffic reach
00:14:40
Speaker
recall of the brands with their friends. Is this something that still happens, building apps for Facebook? Like I've not heard much of it. Not anymore. So around 2015, 16, Facebook kind of deprioritized apps within Facebook pages. So that kind of killed the entire ecosystem about building these apps. So
00:15:10
Speaker
And our business was really dependent on Facebook. So we also then decided to sell that off.
Challenges with Social Apps HQ
00:15:22
Speaker
And after selling that business, we basically I started this e-commerce marketplace called Shimply.
00:15:30
Speaker
So when you sold that, like, you know, I just want to understand how a business gets sold. Like, how do you value a business like that? Like, is it a multiple of revenue or what is it like? Yeah, it depends on a number of things, right? So if the revenue is growing, you get a higher multiple. If you are in a market where you are dependent on another company and then
00:15:58
Speaker
suddenly the company pulls the carpet under you, then it gets valued very differently. So the way we got sold were basically for the asset and database that we had built, because 1.5, 1.6 million businesses had signed up to use our apps. So a company in US was interested in procuring that data. So it was more of an asset sale versus
00:16:28
Speaker
multiplier of revenue sale. Are you at liberty to tell us how much it got sold for? So it was always under India. So we never revealed the name of the company who bought it and the money for which it bought. But it was decent enough to try attempting e-commerce portal on our own. And of course, the joke goes about
00:16:56
Speaker
e-commerce and airlines that if you take, if you want to become a millionaire, take a billionaire, start an airline and you'll end up with a millionaire. And if you want to, you know, become a gharipati, then you start with a gharipati and start an e-commerce business and then to become a gharipati. And then along the way, don't take funding that's being offered.
00:17:31
Speaker
Anyway, good things happened. So we started this e-commerce portal simply. And we were selling authentic Indian products. So a year down the line, we converted the site into a kind of Etsy. Your crops will at that time in India.
00:17:53
Speaker
So we, a year down the line, we converted the site into Hindi and suddenly Ayurveda became like, you know, 50% of our sales. So Manuj and I, Manuj had also returned to India and he was trying hands at different things. So we started discussing this phenomenon and we, you know, kept trying actually different things.
00:18:20
Speaker
for an eighth year. And in December 2016, Manoj and I discussed, we said, yeah, there is something serious here because whatever content we created was getting a lot of traffic from the Hindi world. Sales were already there. So we decided to launch Mayuk Char and shut down the previous entity.
00:18:47
Speaker
So that's how we came about launching my upchar. And what was this jalepe namak chhirakne wala comment that Manoj went off? Yeah, we got funding offer from a renowned angel investor who was ready to invest all of the, willing to get the seed from the range and all that of karoot, karoot, karoot and a half. You are my upchar. For simply.
00:19:15
Speaker
And we were like, evaluation story come here. So I think, to be fair, he was offering the right valuation. It was just that our expectation was not right at the time. And so we didn't take that funding. And of course, I ended up earning quite a lot of money from my own pocket, like literally burning through my entire 401k, all my cash reserves, everything.
00:19:44
Speaker
And so it just, and then during the journey, Karsula raised quite a bit of money. So suddenly,
Transition to Healthcare in South Asia
00:19:54
Speaker
all the investors who were kind of showing interest kind of went away overnight. And they were like, I'll be space map for your investment. So that happened. So when we started Myupcha, we were fairly
00:20:11
Speaker
You know our heads were fairly we were fairly level at it by that time How did your wife take this like you're burning through your savings and all like does she work or Yeah, she she's a doctor Thankfully
00:20:38
Speaker
She kept advising me not to do this and not to do that. What about job and all? But at the same time, she kept funding the household expenses. So that kind of helped out because for a few years, I wasn't able to contribute. So she was a big supporter in that time.
00:21:00
Speaker
Right, right. Same for me also, like for almost first six, seven years of our marriage, my wife was running our household. So I mean, without the women in our lives, I think. So tell me about your journey, like you spent a good six years in Stanford and how was that experience like?
00:21:23
Speaker
So I mean, it was probably, you know, the college is the best time of your life. I mean, as good as college was when I say college, I mean, undergrad, for me, probably Stanford was even better. Just, you know, the kind of.
00:21:38
Speaker
I mean, for nothing else, just the kind of people who are around you, your peer group, your colleagues, the professors, not just your department, but others. Like to give you an example, one of the advanced classes that we did, and I could do the advanced classes because I had a maths background. I had already done a master's in economics and d-school, so I was much better prepared than most others for the PhD program, and I could do the advanced classes much sooner than others could.
00:22:06
Speaker
There was this 17-year-old kid sitting there. And just in one of the conversations with the professor, I was like, so how does this 17-year-old kid manage this class? He goes, well, that 17-year-old kid is a professor in the math department. So that was the kind of place that it was. So intellectually, it was very, very fulfilling. So anything that I dreamt of would be,
00:22:32
Speaker
could be achieved or any sort of, like, art that you have to sit and think and imagine how the world could be that kind of, you know, that was a place to do that. But it just sort of turned out that the whole process of research wasn't, you know, something that I could sort of
00:22:53
Speaker
do for the rest of my life because it's a very slow, long process. I need to see it as a lot faster, a lot sooner. Part of the reason why I switched from maths to economics was because I wanted to be doing something which is closer to the quote unquote real world. The maths that I was, mathematics that I was doing was largely abstract maths. So think of
00:23:18
Speaker
random constructs that you've made up in your head and then you go and you say, you know, this construct, then it's beautiful because then you can do this extra thing and it has this shape and that this. So, you know, it's great if you get lost in that world, but if you pull out and you say, look, I want to live in the real world, then it doesn't work for you. So I kind of went to economics and then it turns out mathematicians had kind of taken over economics also.
00:23:42
Speaker
which is why economics, they welcome people with a math or a technical background. So that again kind of just became very, very abstract and research in any case is a little slow. So there's a huge lag. So there is important work that happens. Don't get me wrong. It just takes a long time to sort of come to fruition. So I needed to be a little bit closer to the real world.
00:24:11
Speaker
I went into management consulting after Stanford. So a little bit of it was seeking more of the real world. A little bit of it was I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do. So management consulting is like a simple place to sort of hide from who you really are or kind of just like mark yourself while you figure out who you really are. And make a lot of money. Sorry.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yes, that didn't hurt. Look, I was like 28, 29. I'd been on a student stipend the whole time. So I didn't mind not being poor for a little while, for that little short while. But funny enough, even when I did, I was making whatever management consulting salary was, I was still largely living like a student. So like my friends who would observe me was like, you know, that grad student life has been ingrained in you. So as a graduate student, you're primarily short of money.
00:25:02
Speaker
and also make money.
00:25:09
Speaker
And I was still living like that. Somebody had to yank me out of it and say, look, you're not a grad student anymore. You can live a little. That was quite funny when I realized how I'm in a habit state anyway. And pay his bills. Sorry? And pay his bills. And pay his bills.
00:25:35
Speaker
But management consulting, you know, so I kind of I ended up spending I was lucky to get spend most of my time at the Gates Foundation. So the Gates Foundation was a client for BCG in Seattle. So were you there in 2011, 2012 in Seattle? I was I left in 2011.
00:25:55
Speaker
So I landed up in Seattle in 2011. And like Rajat said, so that like two of the standards of Seattle used to be there are two colors, gray and dark gray. It's always cloudy, right?
00:26:12
Speaker
So anyways, I was like, it didn't really bother me because it didn't bother me that much. So work from daybreak to the time you sleep. So it didn't really bother me that much. So, but it was very, very... Sorry, go ahead. Gates Foundation. What were you doing at Gates Foundation?
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah, so it was a project on figuring out how you can deliver health care to the bottom half of the pyramid in South Asia through private health care providers. So the thesis is, you know, typically the thesis, if you think about health care,
00:26:51
Speaker
for the bottom half of the pyramid is that the ability to pay is pretty low. So how so to provide them high quality health care, which typically will end up being expensive, the public sector has to come in no private sector
00:27:08
Speaker
There isn't a model within the private sector that can provide you the kind of facilities that you would provide in a tier one city or in a modern Western society where the ability to pay is quite high or if you can afford insurance. Insurance coverage doesn't exist.
00:27:26
Speaker
At least not back then, 2011, the push need up. Now the government has been doing a few things. The success can be debated, but whatever, like it still doesn't cover, you know, you still can't go to the highest end hospital and get yourself a bet there with that insurance. So so the question was, is there a model where you can wear a private player can actually provide good health care and scale it up in a sustainable way?
00:27:55
Speaker
So, which is funny enough the exact same problem we are trying to solve now. So, why did the foundation so they were we were evaluating 16 or 17 different models from all over the world. And at that time, most of them, the only ones that kind of worked were where technology was involved. There was others just didn't work.
00:28:17
Speaker
because like how do you, so let's say the context of India right, probably 70 to 80 percent of medical staff in infrastructure is concentrated in 10 cities, in the 10, top 10 cities right. So, how are you going to take healthcare to the rest of the 95 percent of the population?
00:28:36
Speaker
That's the question. So the people won't go. So let's say the government comes in some day says, we'll spend a whole lot of money and build up all that infrastructure, hospitals, this, that, which is actually not going to happen because it takes a lot of money and we don't have that. But even then, where are you going to bring the staff from?
00:28:53
Speaker
So, we do not train enough doctors, we do not train enough paramedical staff, we just do not train enough people, which is the saddest thing. We have so many people in this country, but we are not training them, which is just, it is just stupid. And whoever does become a doctor or a paramedical staff, because the concentration of other
00:29:17
Speaker
of the rest of the healthcare infrastructure and also because of the opportunities for themselves and their families, they will end up in those bigger cities. So that's where we thought that technology would actually play a part. And for me, it comes around in a full circle where
00:29:41
Speaker
We were looking
Healthcare Platform for Bharat
00:29:42
Speaker
very, very hard at all these models in 2011, 2012, sitting in Seattle. But we didn't really find anything satisfactory. There were things, you know, you can do micro solutions, but it's very, very hard to, we didn't find anything that failed to cover an entire country like India.
00:29:58
Speaker
which is when Rajat actually came to me and said, let's discuss this phenomenon. So that, you know, that whole Ayurveda, Hindi Ayurveda section getting a lot of traffic, it kind of like, you know, like a light bulb kind of went off and it was like, let's double click. And it kind of came together.
00:30:26
Speaker
So though in between your stint with BCG where you were with Gates Foundation and starting my up child, like what were you doing in that period, like a four
Failed Ventures and Discoveries
00:30:39
Speaker
year period in between?
00:30:40
Speaker
Yeah, so after an year and a half at BCG, I kind of decided I wanted to come back to India. I'd spent eight or nine years by that time in the US. And I wasn't married. And as we have astutely observed in this conversation already, it's easier to move around the world when you're single and you don't have other responsibilities.
00:31:07
Speaker
So I figured I can, so my parents were here. Both my brothers were also in the US at the same time. And they were in fields which would not really lend themselves well to coming back to India. So my elder brother
00:31:24
Speaker
was and isn't academic. So, you know, academia in India and the US is very, very different. And my younger brother was in finance. So the kind of opportunities you have in finance in the US or London or, you know, other places are way better than what at least at that time you had in India. And especially without a CA qualification, getting a well paying job in India would have been very tough.
00:31:50
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, my younger brother did his MBA at Wharton. So he was also at BCG, an IIT graduate. So for him, the opportunities weren't that much different. I'm talking about the relative difference in the opportunity and how lucrative the opportunity would be if you were working in London versus in India. So it didn't seem like either of them would
00:32:18
Speaker
It would make professional sense for them to come back to India. And I was a management consultant. You're basically a generalist at that point, even though you've spent six years becoming an economist, in my case, well, eight years. But last two years, you've been a generalist, so you can be a generalist anywhere. And so it was a purely emotional decision to come back, and I did.
00:32:44
Speaker
And after I came back, I just spent a few months just sort of looking around, understanding what's going on. Because truth be told, I hadn't followed at all what was going on in India. You just hear these stories. That was a time in India. Everything like the economy was booming. Stuff was going crazy. The whole world was. India was going to become this promised land. So I'd only just heard of those stories from friends' family, but I hadn't actually looked at any data myself.
00:33:11
Speaker
even though I was an economist, but I was doing abstract economic theory, not like the real world macro data kind of economics. So I spent some time looking around, seeing what's happening. It was actually really, really exciting. Startups were happening left, right and center.
00:33:30
Speaker
So that and living in the Bay Area, you do get bitten by that bug. Someday, you want to do something of your own. So before that, I decided I'll actually, mind you, I was about 29, 30 by this point, and I never worked in India. So I figured I should at least spend some time working in India. And I went to work with this group called Dalmia Bharat Group in their
00:33:59
Speaker
for as an EA to the MD. And we agreed that I should spend some time in their cement business, because I was the biggest business. And for me also, it was just like super exciting. I thought I'll get to see real India, which I did. So I spent like a good six to eight months in Chennai and traveling around all over South India and seeing how sales are done, what kind of, you know, how business is done in Bharat, South India, Pura, and Humata.
00:34:29
Speaker
So it was kind of cool. But of course, you know, that isn't where my heart light was for me just a way to get, you know, experience of real India. And in the meantime, a friend of mine who was just who's just about graduating from NCI. So this is a friend from the school, he and I started talking about doing something of our own. He wasn't like,
00:34:54
Speaker
He'd been thinking about it for a while and whatnot. So we started a small venture. The idea was to build an ad exchange for offline ads. So think of the world of ads except for online. So, you know, your newspaper, your pamphlets, your holdings, what's called outdoors advertising. Can there be like a single platform that kind of aggregates at all? That's kind of what we were trying to build. We had
00:35:23
Speaker
So ultimately the place where we ended up, so neither he nor I were technical people. We in our foolishness at that point didn't realize that it would have been better to start with a tech product and then build businesses. We thought, let's first prove it in a single vertical where we can aggregate ads for a single medium, offline medium, and then we can build a product and auction ads and do all of that stuff.
00:35:53
Speaker
Chalaani, not a lot of obvious words. Chalaani, this is Tiktak, we also pretty much had an offer for a good series, a kind of a funding. We put in, my friend and I had put in a fair amount of money into it.
00:36:05
Speaker
to run it for a couple of years. So the aforementioned high paying salary at BCG was thoroughly decimated. And like Rajat, we didn't look for funding until fairly late in the game. And we were like, he's late, he's late. Because also money was coming in.
00:36:34
Speaker
you figured that at least you're not burning money every day. But ultimately, both of us realized that we've kind of taken it down a path where it doesn't scale. It could have turned into a lifestyle business, like a proper lifestyle business, but we didn't want to create a lifestyle business at that point, either he nor I. So we were quite aligned on that. And we decided to shut it down. I think it was, we gave it a solid two years
00:37:00
Speaker
like we'd gone down every rabbit hole, every corner, explored every possibility. But, so then, so two years went there. So great learning experience. I saw a lot of things, learned a lot of things, how they happen in the real world. Nothing to do with tech, but there are other things also. I mean, there's the real world also, which is, which was a very good experience.
00:37:29
Speaker
Then, in the meantime, I discovered yoga. So, it turned out that I like actually really, really, really like yoga.
00:37:41
Speaker
And then after some time, all I was doing was just yoga. And I used to really enjoy teaching when I was at Stanford. So I started teaching a little bit on the side as well. So it was a very light week that I used to have a couple of hours of yoga in the morning, then study yoga.
00:38:06
Speaker
So I was doing that for two years and I used to rock climb also. So in the meantime Rajat was doing his thing and simply this happy accident with
00:38:26
Speaker
with the Ayurveda Hindi section happened and he kind of pulled me into this and said let's look at this and we did and I was still a little hesitant and but initially because you know that life was kind of going well not like a you know not anybody's dream of like a success professionally successful life but a very happy life for sure.
00:38:52
Speaker
Um, so he was like rock climbing bunker yoga bunker thanks to rock climb also Okay, so Okay, because this seemed really interesting it was just like dude like this is like so far in 2016 everybody was nobody was talking vernacular. Uh, in fact, what was the thesis With which you started like so you had ayurveda
00:39:21
Speaker
as a product category that was selling and to people who have Hindi as their first language. So what was your thesis and what did you see it becoming when you started up?
Mayubchar's Mission in Healthcare
00:39:35
Speaker
So the initial thesis was that if you look at US, UK and any other developed market, even there a lot of people look for healthcare information.
00:39:51
Speaker
when awareness and access is not really that much of a problem. And your case in point, you know, WebMD, Healthline, Mayo Clinic, all of them getting like 100 to 200 million visitors a month. And when you look at India, awareness is not there. Access is not there. So our initial thesis was that if we create something like this, really, really good repository of healthcare information in Indian languages,
00:40:21
Speaker
then the demand will automatically come because people must be looking for this. And since there's nothing out there that is serving it, it's not getting captured. It's not getting reflected anywhere. So that was the initial thesis that given the demand outside in English where awareness and access are not a problem. In India, both of them are a huge problem. So if we create something like this, a lot of people
00:40:51
Speaker
looking for this information would be asking for that. So you were essentially looking at building a content platform. So initially we started with building a content platform. And as we, you know, executed for first 12 months,
00:41:10
Speaker
It was very, very clear that we'll have to do the access solutions as well beyond the awareness part, the content part. So we were like literally people were asking questions on our Facebook pages, on our, you know, on the email, on the
00:41:40
Speaker
And then the doctors who were writing content on our platform, they were getting calls and emails from all these people. So Manoj and I said, let's build out a consultation platform so that people can ask questions and we can address them in a structured way.
00:42:01
Speaker
Because like this, it's impossible for us to answer 500 questions on Facebook. And YouTube was not there, but when we started YouTube channel, same problem, thousands and thousands of comments every day, all of them asking for an answer right away. So it was virtually impossible to handle all that load. So we started a consultation platform. People came in, asked the questions.
00:42:30
Speaker
enrolled a number of doctors on our marketplace. And we started offering free consults to our consumers. So that was the initial part. And then as we dug deeper and deeper and deeper, we realized that there is a lot more to be done because doctors will write medicines which are not available locally or are not genuine. So how do you solve for that?
00:43:02
Speaker
How do you solve for revenue? Because nobody wants to pay online. And especially if you go in these tier three areas, cities, rural areas. So I spend some bit of my time in Eastern UP trying to figure all of that out. And what we realize is that people go to quacks. They don't get charged for consultation. They pay for medicine.
00:43:31
Speaker
And then if something goes serious, then they go to a Sakari hospital again. In the government hospitals, they don't pay for consult, they pay for medicine, primarily because medicines are not available in the common dispensary and they are available outside. So once we realized that we said we cannot charge for consults because we tried and we were not getting any conversion rate. And we realized that this is the root behavior. So how do you then monetize on the pharma side of it?
00:44:02
Speaker
So, went through a ton of iterations to solve for it and now I think we have a model that once we scale it out will really, really solve for the healthcare access problem in Bharat.
Expansion into Consultation and Supply
00:44:18
Speaker
Okay. So, when you first started the free consultation, you were paying the doctors who were doing this or like what, how was the supply of it being handled?
00:44:31
Speaker
So in very, very initial days, we basically tried to convince the doctors that, hey, you know, these patients are in very, very remote areas and they don't have access to doctors. So why don't you provide us with some of your time to answer that. As a philanthropic activity. But very, very quickly we realized it's not possible because we are not getting like 10 questions a day, right? We are getting like 1000 questions a day.
00:45:00
Speaker
So then we basically started paying doctors a fixed fee per concern. So it's not a large amount. And doctors do it primarily for some bit of extra cash. And of course, the fact that they are able to create a positive impact in the rural part of India. And also, the third angle for them is that a lot of the doctors get to see a ton of variety of cases.
00:45:30
Speaker
that they won't be able to see in their local training. So from a learning perspective, from a social impact perspective, and of course some bit of extra money as well. So all of these combined kind of works for our doctors. So and these doctors would be like typing out the answer in Hindi, because I'm assuming the questions would be coming in Hindi. So most of it is done in English. So
00:45:58
Speaker
Patients also write typically in English, not pure Hindi. So Hindi input keyboards are not by default on the phone. So usually people kind of learn typing in English. Or they will be doing voice recording or video input. But doctors typically will write English.
00:46:21
Speaker
Okay, so this could have also become like a Quora, you know, how Quora is like a user generated content. So yeah, Quora, healthcare is a little different overall. So if there is a privacy issue, so people who are asking something about their period issue or some medical condition,
00:46:50
Speaker
don't want it to be in a public domain. Second, if you have a cut problem and a six-year-old kid has a cut problem, it's not that answer to your problem will directly apply to the answer of the other kid's problem.
00:47:14
Speaker
So and then third, people are not looking for some other person with experience to answer. Like in US, you will see people will build communities around cancer, and heart issues, and diabetes. And people will help each other out who have gone through it. So in the very, very initial days, our consultation was more like a community. But the users will only ask, doctors, are there any problem?
00:47:45
Speaker
So there was, like in India, the concept of community is not there in healthcare. People are looking for a doctor to respond. So healthcare is very specific. So you cannot have open consultations. You have to have privacy. You have to have one-to-one conversations. So you cannot use it for more, you cannot think of it as a UGC content.
00:48:13
Speaker
Yes, this can be used by, let's say, hospitals for training their medical colleges to train their students.
00:48:26
Speaker
It's not near core armaments. It's different from that. OK. So you had a good amount of traction that you saw of people asking medical questions. And then you started building the supply for it by paying doctors. So how did that morph into what you are doing today? So I think we took a lot of steps in the middle.
00:48:56
Speaker
you know, our mid last year, we basically said, you know, we have to monetize because nobody has really done any monetization in tier two, tier three space. And as such, our platform raised funding before that, right? So how did you raise funding without monetization strategy? Like, what was your pitch to investors?
00:49:24
Speaker
So for fundraise, so our seed round, essentially the story is what Rajat told you. So we said,
00:49:33
Speaker
Look, there is this huge population that's online. They are all looking for healthcare information. They're looking for healthcare services and they don't have it because physically it's not present because they're not in tier one cities and they don't have access to any information because they only consume content in their own mother town.
00:49:55
Speaker
So, if we can actually as a way of getting all these people on a platform, we can create this huge content platform.
00:50:05
Speaker
in Indian languages with very high quality, credible content. So there was some content which news websites are producing, so they'd say things like, cancer kailaj, memesay, or ejus pilotho, hojayi problem solved, like they're literally publishing this and this is your top news outlets. I really don't know what editorial checks they have, but it seems like as far as healthcare is concerned, they don't, they couldn't care less.
00:50:28
Speaker
So there was clearly this white space, there's room to do that. So the question really was, and you're fairly upfront, look, we don't actually have a monetization strategy right now. But once, initially we do this and we do this fast and we do this well, think of it like a land grab.
00:50:50
Speaker
the kind of old 2002 kind of a model, let's get all these eyeballs, then we'll figure out somewhere to monetize. It was literally like that because the Bharat user, in 2016 to us, they were exactly at the spot where the rest of us were in 2005 or so, or maybe even earlier, because the web was just, the internet was just starting out for them.
00:51:12
Speaker
So, and the same, unfortunately, the same services that you built for tier one didn't port over, which is also what Rajat was kind of alluding to earlier.
00:51:23
Speaker
Later on, so that hypothesis, of course, the questions we used to get were those days, yeah, Satyameha, these guys online, who's seen them, who's heard of them. So we used to give them proxy data, like Hindi news websites are much bigger than English news websites. So if you put them together, there are millions and millions and millions of people on those Hindi news websites, like Bhaskar, Dhanik Bhaskar, Dhanik Jagara, and Mathrabhumi, so on and so forth. So we're like, look, these people are online. They are reading.
00:51:52
Speaker
What else are you going to do on a news website? So video wasn't that big at the time.
00:51:59
Speaker
So it was a very, very difficult fund. I mean, I don't, I think, I guess every fundraiser is a little difficult, but I think we probably spoke with over 150 people before the first couple of people came on board. So the pitch to these people was that you're building a WebMD in local language. Like that was your pitch. Okay.
00:52:24
Speaker
kind of. And you're saying, look, it's in local languages. So there were questions like, you know, health care, and what if a WebMD comes in someday and decides to convert all its content into Hindi? So there were all those questions and you answer those to the best of your ability. But it really was hard to get angels on board initially.
00:52:45
Speaker
until the first three, so Alop Mittal, Rajanandan and Mohit Satyanand were the three who were the first three to back us. And then once these three guys were there, the round filled up very, very rapidly.
00:53:00
Speaker
So kind of, you know, like the standard leader follower kind of experience. So those 100, I mean, I kind of said it in, you know, in the passing, we spoke with 150 people before these three guys came on board. But, you know, that journey of that 150 conversations is filled with pain.
00:53:25
Speaker
It's a, it's when they want that the bara suffer. It's a fast conversations of hearing no. And for multiple reasons, you know, there is, there is this every entrepreneur who's been, who's heard no from an investor will lament that the investor doesn't quite understand this, that, but you know, I used to always say to that job.
00:54:01
Speaker
do you think they backed the idea or they backed the team?
00:54:06
Speaker
I think the first three backed the team. Please, if you do speak with them someday, do ask them. I guess we didn't ever ask them. But they backed the team. They loved the space that we were in, but they had faith in us is what I would, I mean, I'm trying to not sound like an arrogant prick, but I believe they thought that we were committed to what we were, the problem we were presenting to solving it.
00:54:33
Speaker
And they liked the space we were in. It was a huge space, wide space. It was a huge need. And we had the early mover advantage. So to them, it made sense. Even though we didn't know the exact monetizing solution, they kind of believed that we'll find a way. And when was the 18th round done? 2017. OK.
00:54:55
Speaker
And then pretty quickly you did your series A also. So by the time you were in series A, was it the same pitch like WebMD for Bharat? Yeah, the difference was that I think when we were raised our seed, I don't know very well, but I think we were doing 10,000 a day, our visitors. And I think by the time we were raising our series A, we were doing 300,000 a day within 10 months from the seed.
00:55:22
Speaker
So the graph was very, very positively pointing north and that hypothesis was bearing out, you know, and it seemed at that point that this is a huge opportunity to actually become the platform to seek healthcare for Bharat. So that was kind of the vision that we had and we shared with investors and some of them saw it similarly.
00:55:49
Speaker
How in WebMD make money? Do they serve ads or what is their monetization?
00:55:56
Speaker
Primarily ads, but less consumer facing more professionals. So they have a consumer facing product and then they have a professional one for medical professionals. So they kind of become like a digital MR and they make a lot of money through those. Of course, there are, there is a lot of, there's a lot of ad money in, in campaigns that they do for consumers as well. Like Johnson and Johnson will do a campaign to eat, for example. Right. So there is money there as well.
00:56:25
Speaker
Did you also experiment ads? Did you speak to pharma companies to see if that is a viable way to monetize?
00:56:35
Speaker
So we didn't do that initially because we were just like head down and focused on growing, growing, growing. Now we're beginning to do that, but you know, so the advertising and marketing, quote unquote, is not allowed for your prescription products. For OTC, it's allowed. OTC is your over the counter for which you don't need a prescription.
00:56:54
Speaker
So, your lozenges, for coughs it up, you can't send that to the site, but for lozenges you can, so on and so forth. So, we begin to do that now. Of course, the ad rates are less by a factor when you come from the US to India, and then when you go from English to Indian languages, they're again less by a big factor. So... What are you now? Are you still WebMD for Bharat? How would you describe yourself?
00:57:22
Speaker
No, no, no, we are, we are, we are like, so, so we've then evolved, like Rajat was beginning to say earlier. So then, you know, the
00:57:31
Speaker
Let me just take you through the steps that will become clear where we are and why we became that. So people began wanting to speak with the doctors who were creating that content with us. And by this point, millions of people were coming on our platform. And there was this almost desperation to speak with a doctor because there is a genuine lack of access to
00:57:58
Speaker
to doctors and medical infrastructure where our audience comes from. So we started connecting people with these doctors and soon there were thousands and thousands of these conversations coming in. So it was a very rudimentary product. At that point teleconsultation was still in the gray area. So neither we nor the doctors knew what the right approach here was legally. There was nothing in it. It wasn't illegal, but there wasn't anything which said this is okay to do.
00:58:27
Speaker
Right? Which is not the case now. So now there is this telemedicine practice guidelines which say it's absolutely kosher to do that. I mean, which is why you see a boost in telemedicine. But 2018 or early 2019, when you were doing this, it was like a WhatsApp kind of an interface where people would... That's exactly what it was.
00:58:48
Speaker
But this was free for the users. You were not monetizing. No, we weren't charging. And that thing has continued to scale as we, you know, traffic has continued to increase. So today about 25 million people come on our website, another 25 million people we reach on social media.
00:59:06
Speaker
So that's a monthly reach of about 50 million people. About a million of those people request us for a conversation with a doctor and because we were able to service about 100,000 a month.
00:59:23
Speaker
And so then, you know, the next question comes up. So, you know, Rajat went and did a couple of camps as well in rural areas just to see, you know, what, what life, what the medical experience there is, the health seeking, the health seeking behavior there is.
00:59:41
Speaker
A thing that we found there was that people were very happy to speak with doctors over the phone through video chat. But then the common, very common refrain was, but sir, I have medicine. I think Rajat can tell you more about those hands if you want to dig deeper into the experience there. Rajat, why don't you tell us how that evolution happened? So basically, we weren't actually aware of the
01:00:11
Speaker
problem related to medical supply chain or medicine supply chain in rural areas. So when we sat down with these people living in the villages, we said, so why don't you ask this chemist? He'll bring that medicine. He said, you know, the doctor here is a jholachar. And this chemist also, Adi Davoye, they are not legitimate. And
01:00:39
Speaker
This guy goes to the Sakari hospital and because his cha-cha works there, he gets the right medicine there. Otherwise, no one else is able to get the medicine from the Sakari hospital. Then we dug in deeper with a few of the chemists. And what we realized is that especially in UP, where I spent a lot of time, and we are also similar behavior.
01:01:05
Speaker
Every, you know, five, 10 villages, there is a different pharmaceutical company operating there. So somebody has partnered with the local doctors and the five, 10 chemists over there in those that cluster of villages per se. And they have gotten some medicine manufactured and we are very easy to do in India.
01:01:33
Speaker
And those medicines are very, very local. And they are enjoying like 50, 60, 70% margins, and they are generics in general, but quality is very, very poor. So to maximize the margin, they keep the quality extremely poor. And the problem in India is that
01:01:57
Speaker
we have become aware of the generics. But the problem is that we haven't really instituted a quality check on the generics. So same salt medicine, there are like 10,000 different brands, and their quality can be 1-200. And, you know, anything below 50, not even effective for the human body. And a bunch of those medicines that are out there in the market.
01:02:25
Speaker
So now the challenge was that how do you connect these patients with an online doctor while fulfilling the medicine requirements at the same time. So what we have done now, and it's been lots of back and forth. So earlier what we did was we'll give them a pacha with the salt name in it, and we'll encourage them to buy it locally wherever.
01:02:54
Speaker
at the chemist. That again had the same problem of effectiveness of medicine and all that. Then the second thing we did was we removed the salt flame and we said, why don't we supply you the medicine and we'll ship it from our local, from our warehouse in Delhi, in Noida. Now that works well for some portion of the customers and not the other portion of the customer.
01:03:22
Speaker
What happens is if you have a skin issue or a sexual issue or a, you know, something that is more long term or it can wait for a few days. People, the medicine will reach them in three, four, five days, depending on where they are. Typically in tier three city, it takes five days to get the product delivered via courier companies. So, but in case of acute, Kibachagi and Kannada are there.
01:03:51
Speaker
You can't wait five days. So what we have done now is for the earlier part of the problem, we continue to shift from our warehouse. And for the later type of medicines, we have started partnering with local chemists. And what we do is when we partner with a local chemist, we give them certain pin codes that they will deliver to.
01:04:17
Speaker
And at the same time, we asked them to carry roughly 100, 120 medicines that will be mostly prescribed in such acute cases. We already know what kind of issues come typically from that area, given that we have that data set. So we will give them those medicines to carry so that, A, the quality is guaranteed, B, the fulfillment is guaranteed.
01:04:45
Speaker
and see the customer knows where which particular chemist to go to, to get that medicine and if the chemist cannot deliver, otherwise chemist is delivering at home. And of course the medicine gets to the customer within a few hours versus five to seven days. So that is, it's still, you know, early days we have around, I think, 40-ish chemist partners across 30 cities, 25 cities.
01:05:15
Speaker
in UP and Delhi, NCR area. And these cities are like, you know, Lakhimpur, Sitapur, Gondar, Aligarh, Meerat, Hathras, tier two, tier three level cities. And the goal is to get to a rural level where, you know, every 15 kilometers there is some kind of shop where they can go and get the medicine.
01:05:44
Speaker
Once we solve for that, then we'll, of course, go ahead and try to replicate the model across India. And also on the lab side, we have done the similar types of partnerships with 35 different labs, which allows pickups in roughly 70 cities of similar tier 2, tier 3 nature. So that's what we are doing on that.
01:06:06
Speaker
So I can summarize my understanding of your business. So you have a consultation as a lead generation engine through which you have these people in tier three and lower areas who have problems. And you monetize the solution to those specific problems by offering lab tests or delivering medication.
01:06:38
Speaker
Yeah. So just that there's one step before that, which is that all the content, so we create a lot of healthcare content.
Monetizing Healthcare Services
01:06:44
Speaker
Remember we said the primary problem we started solving was the lack of awareness. So the content is the lead gen and then we take them into the consultation funnel. Okay. But consultation is also free. So that's, that's like a next step of the lead gen process in a way. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
01:07:03
Speaker
So what kind of conversion do you see? Like for every hundred people who go through a consultation, how many actually spend money? So roughly 20-25% of consultations lead to an order. We of course have the challenge of delivery because again, we don't have chemist partners across the board.
01:07:33
Speaker
So there's a big drop off there as well, which I don't want to get into in this particular conversation. But if you look at it from our last six month journey perspective, that same number has improved multiple fold. And part of the reason, I believe, is because of the trust we have developed with the customer.
01:08:05
Speaker
So earlier, when the customer used to consult and then get this prescription and will fulfill the order, the customer was like, these people take time to develop trust. But as they are getting consultation, they're getting medicines delivered, they're getting cured, they see local medicine. So they're like,
01:08:44
Speaker
And that's very hard for them to get away from. So slowly, the conversion rates used to be 2% from consultation to order. And now it's like more than 10x of that number.
01:09:02
Speaker
And we believe that the rest of the 75% of people who don't order will also order because they have a problem. That's why they were asking, right? Beyond Campus is a production of the podium.in powered by Career Launcher.
01:09:23
Speaker
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