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Reversing diabetes through community, content and coaching | Rohan Verma @ Breathe Well-being
165 Plays1 year ago
Discover the incredible journey of an engineer turned healthcare innovator- Rohan Verma's entrepreneurial drive led to the creation of Breathe Well-being, a groundbreaking diabetes reversal platform. He talks about his roller coaster journey of building a bootstrapped health-tech business, facing multiple near death circumstances despite getting into the YC program, and eventually sticking through it to reach where they are today.
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Read more about Breathe Well-being:-
1.Healthtech Startup Breathe Well-being Secures $6 Mn+ To Help People Reverse Diabetes
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi Akshay, I'm Rohan Verma, the co-founder, CEO at Breathe WellBe.
00:00:16
Speaker
Imagine a disease which kills one and a half million people each year for which there is no vaccine and no easy cure. You may have guessed it, we are talking about the lifestyle disease diabetes. In this remarkable episode of the Founder Thesis Podcast, you will get to hear how two engineers with no medical background ended up creating one of the most successful diabetes reversal solutions in the country.
00:00:38
Speaker
Rohan Varma started his venture while he was still in college and that entrepreneurial spirit is what propelled him to create Breathe Wellbeing, a diabetes reversal platform that is powered by content, coaching and community.
Mission and Approach to Diabetes Reversal
00:00:50
Speaker
Rohan shares his rollercoaster journey of building a bootstrapped health tech business, facing multiple near-death circumstances despite getting into the YC programme and eventually sticking through it to reach where they are today.
00:01:02
Speaker
Stay tuned for experiencing the ride of a lifetime with Rohan and subscribe to the Founder Thesis Podcast on any audio streaming app to hear from some of the most disruptive founders in the country.
00:01:20
Speaker
What's your elevator pitch for breathe well-being? We help people prevent, manage, reverse type 2 diabetes. That's what we do. And how we do that is we have a clinically proven digital program through which we help people with type 2 diabetes to lose weight, control their blood glucose. And here's the best part. We help them get off all medications completely.
00:01:41
Speaker
And how we go about that is we have built our verified protocols in diet, exercise and meditation. And we deliver the same verified protocols for a very unique four Cs approach. The pioneers of these three Cs or four Cs approach. So one of which is coaching. Second is community curriculum.
00:01:59
Speaker
and champions. It's been eight years we've been in this space we've grown almost 10x every single year of our existence this is completely direct to consumer and word of mouth and organic but when i started as an entrepreneur we were b2c then we became b2b for the longest time and then we came back to become direct to consumer so i'm a second time founder in the healthcare space previously built a profitable b2b well-being venture where we were
Entrepreneurial Journey and Lessons Learned
00:02:22
Speaker
creating these well-being programs and selling it to corporates across Asia. And my past life was an investment banker with Nomura and a strategy consultant in McKinsey & Company. And prior to that, I was an entrepreneur back in my college days where I built like an edtech startup and sold that off in Singapore. So that's been my journey in the last 11 years.
00:02:42
Speaker
Amazing. Let's start with the first venture. You built that edtech startup and you sold it in Singapore. What was that one about? It was a technology sale, very small and it was a location-based learning, right? And what we had built was like people could just instead of carrying
00:03:00
Speaker
large notebooks and books to classrooms so that we are like a huge university. So we would have to carry books and notebooks to classroom. And cloud was a very upcoming technology back then. AWS was really pushing it out in 2010-11. So what we did was we created these smart classrooms on top of each lecture theaters. A student need not carry notebooks or books inside a lecture theater. You can just walk into a
00:03:22
Speaker
a lecture data with an iPad and just download the notes from the cloud, scribble, take notes and just put them back onto the cloud and anyone could access them. So that's the, that was the kind of seeding idea, because in our college there was a dearth, you can't just walk into any lecture data because you're not registered for it, you won't have access to those notes or
00:03:42
Speaker
or books. But what I did was I kind of built something as a rebel in parallel. I know anyone could walk into any classroom. And college ended up banning it. And yeah, that's what happened. Amazing, amazing. OK, so this would be like what they say as a B2I, like sales to institutions, like a B2I business, right?
00:04:05
Speaker
So we found users for it. We couldn't monetize it. That's where the technology was working well. And we realized there were huge barriers to entry. And that's where it never took off, right? And the technology was there. And we just sold the technology off to someone who wanted to apply that in location-based advertisements. So that's what happened.
00:04:27
Speaker
OK, OK, plus selling to institutions is like an extremely long gestation period. And it would have taken you years to get significant traction on it. Institutions are very slow decision makers. But how did you get users for it? You didn't need an institution buy-in to make this life. So that was the biggest learning I think I had. It doesn't, like if there is a need that you've identified,
00:04:56
Speaker
You can just used to just stand outside some canteen and just tell people that
Career Path and Realizations
00:05:00
Speaker
this is what we have built. If you download this app, this is what you'll be able to do. And students liked the idea. They started downloading it. And we acquired the notes and all of that from people who were already registered for the class. So we married the supply and the demand.
00:05:14
Speaker
So that's what we did. That's how we acquired users in a very unstable way. Yeah. Okay. So I guess the seeds of entrepreneurship were born back then. So tell me the journey after that. So seeds of entrepreneurship were born. I'm from a middle-class family. My mom is just retired as a principal after 35 years in a school, died in the Navy, merchant Navy. So was traveling the world with them was very, very privileged and very, um,
00:05:41
Speaker
brought up in a family where education was really valued, very privileged, always getting access to the best sort of tuition centers, all of that. I did my second degree in entrepreneurship back in college days. That's where the seeds of this entrepreneurship got shown. One of this manifested in the form of this location-based learning. The other was launching an event where we made a lot of money, like just monetized TEDx as an event and started selling that organization first.
00:06:07
Speaker
after our TEDx event inside a nightclub in Singapore. So students really flocked the nightclub. And there was a TEDx happening over there. Instead of boring talks from businessmen, we actually brought in magicians, all sorts of different people to give talks. So we became really popular because of that. And that is something that kept on running in college. These were the early seeds that were sown. And when the ed tech thing was not flying, did not take off,
00:06:37
Speaker
came back to India to work in banking with that for all the more credible people in my badge, more established people in the badge who had higher GPA were doing so followed. Yeah, that's the B school dream is to join either investment banking or consulting.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, I was not in B school. I just did my undergrad over there, did my electronic engineering. So I'm not, I didn't go to B school. So I did my electronic engineering from NTU and side degree was in entrepreneurship and then came back to India to do investment bank banking because that's what all the cool people were doing that day. So I realized that maybe I'm not a startup guy. I should just do this cool things. And I realized that was the biggest mistake of my life, just following the herd mentality and locking myself in a huge company. And I was like, uh,
00:07:23
Speaker
kind of almost like a torture for me, like 10, 11 months working in Western banking, 14, 15 hours, meaningless work. And I quit that job without having another job in hand. My parent was super scared, like what this guy is up to. He came back to India and everyone goes to Singapore and take up a job. Then he comes back to India and quits the job because it didn't work out for me, man. And then was obviously feeling really low in life.
00:07:51
Speaker
startup didn't work out the way I wanted it, went into a high-flying job, I completely hated it. My boss completely hated me, like a love-hate relationship. And started doing some odd jobs, just became like, was looking, was preparing for my CFA level two back then, but also wanted, didn't want to come back home. I was in Bombay, the city that has just given me everything in life.
00:08:16
Speaker
just love Bombay didn't want to come back home to Delhi like a loser because I felt like a loser back home was interviewing for like insurance agents jobs you know so just did that for three four days selling insurance door to door because that's what I felt confident about if you give me something if I understand that product I can connect with others and make them see the benefits of it which is actually called as selling right did that
00:08:42
Speaker
tried some odd things as well, did some opening acts in stand-up. That wasn't anything back then, 2011-12. So did some opening acts like open mics where Tanmay Bhatt was travelling with them and like Bali Billi Taxi, sharing the cap bill. So 2011-12. And then
00:09:01
Speaker
Mackenzie decided to interview me. I thought it was just a fluke. And that's when I thought there was a new gear in life that I was given. So just one round after the other, like five, six rounds got in.
00:09:14
Speaker
simply thought that I'm going to be a back-end analyst, but there's no such thing over there, which I was interviewing for. And I was looking at the entire interview process as just an experience, but just got in. There was a roller coaster ride then. I had a fantastic time at McKinsey. I was in 23 countries in two years, worked across seven sectors.
00:09:34
Speaker
And just the kind of responsibility that was given, that gave me a lot of confidence as a 23, 24 year old, you're in boardrooms are expected to navigate tough situations and influence heads of verticals. So that really pushed the envelope of my learning and confidence levels.
00:09:55
Speaker
and the competency was anyways getting built where you're slogging for 15-16 hours a day. So that was like a turning point in my life. Two years working there, made great friends, learned a lot. But after the end of the two years, I think that's where the seed of the man search for meaning and man search for joy just came in again.
00:10:14
Speaker
So, and I was not deriving meaning after two years of, you know, just doing it, highly intellectual stuff, working with some brilliant minds. At the end of the day, when I'm building a slide at 1am, when I ask myself why I'm doing it, the only answer could be maybe I'm trying for a transfer to a New York office, or maybe I'm going to do this for a bonus or maybe a distinctive rating, but there's no why, you know, what's happening. So I think that
00:10:38
Speaker
The seeds were sown back in college, but then it just came to bite me. Like if the best bloody job in the planet is that's not giving me meaning and joy. And my only plan in life is not to just get out of McKinsey, do some two years of VC work, PE work to get into Stanford and the Harvard. Why do I want to do that? Because I want to do something of my own because that's the time I feel really alive. I feel that I'm in a joyful state. I feel I feel that I'm alive. I think that's why do I need to go through that?
00:11:10
Speaker
I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple of offers back then and then after that I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple of offers back then I had a couple
00:11:24
Speaker
night in 2015, 2am, I was just creating a deck for a real estate client and I just saw the next six years of my life play out in front of me, extremely predictable, exactly could predict what is happening when. I don't know why I'm doing this, why not do it now when I'm like a 26 year old guy and I've had zero savings but I still had four, five months left in McKinsey, I can still save something and do something of my own.
Startup Ventures and Challenges
00:11:54
Speaker
So I think that is where that.
00:11:57
Speaker
that seed got grown. And my school friend Aditya, who's a co-founder at Breathe Wellbeing with me, very, very lucky to have him in this journey. He was heading to B-School, Carnegie Mellon. And we ended up chatting for many months, exploring some weird ideas, right from dating apps to something like Urban Company, Urban Platt, or something like a housing.com, which was the N thing back then.
00:12:26
Speaker
We just, both of us were into sports, fitness, football, basketball, doing fitness. And that's the time when class pass and US was getting really popular. Payal Kadakhya was doing a fantastic job, just galvanizing the supply of fitness studios, enabling it on a marketplace model through a single pass. So we attempted doing something similar, and that's something that really
00:12:50
Speaker
At least we really liked the idea. We had that inclination towards it, disinterested obsession as Paul Graham says, you know, something towards that. It needs some real sweating when you call it as a fitness startup. That's what we started in 2015. It was called as class hop. And that was our start of an 80 year old adventure, which is continuing and just growing right now.
00:13:18
Speaker
Okay, so for people who don't know class pass, like the, in the US, there's this culture of yoga classes, pilates and whatever different like what cult is doing in India now that those short duration, high intensity workout classes.
00:13:33
Speaker
So ClassPass basically allowed you to go into any fitness studio and attend that one session instead of signing up for a year's membership. So it was like a very built for the millennials kind of a platform. And that is what you started with ClassHop? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And in 9 to 10 months of trying that out, where we are literally, and I can just into
00:14:01
Speaker
words I can sum up why that model didn't work for us. Firstly, it could only work in very small micro colonies where the supply was a lot and high quality supply was there. Only there, that's where it could work.
00:14:13
Speaker
And obviously, our toolkit as entrepreneurs was also not that great. We were trying to do some scalable stuff. When it really needed it, the model did not need a mobile app to make it work. To test it out, we could have done it on Excel. So anyone out there who's thinking that the only reason their idea is not working is because they don't have a mobile app or a website, please, please don't invest money in any such product before you actually do it and run it through an Excel sheet.
00:14:39
Speaker
That's all you need. And we wasted like nine, 10 months of our life. We were literally dancing at 6 a.m. in RWA colonies, trying to activate those colonies where literally you could have like multiple videos. You could find multiple videos of me and Aditya, 6 a.m., different colonies doing Zumba classes, trying to activate aunties, you know, why Zumba or fitness dance is the way to go or CrossFit is the way to go.
Corporate Wellness Insights and Limitations
00:15:02
Speaker
And you know what? You just experience all these three classes now, purchase our subscription.
00:15:06
Speaker
And you can do all of them together. But the behavior was they just wanted to just do one thing, right? So we realized very quickly. And the people who really love the class pass model.
00:15:18
Speaker
We will always incur losses on them because we still get calls from people who love some girls who love the product so much. They used to drive us into losses because we only made money if people eventually did not go. They just purchased subscription from us and they ended up not utilizing it. And it's a classic double whammy, right? Because if your super users are not making you money, then it's almost like an insurance sort of a product, right?
00:15:47
Speaker
are a flip side of a freemium model right the the peep the super users are the ones will drive you into losses so it's a it's a it's a it's a difficult model to execute but the real reason was supply was not you could have executed that at scale
00:16:02
Speaker
had you had supply across cities, which eventually ended up creating on their own. And that's where Ankit had spoken to us in 2017. And that's where I think those guys realized that they have to build their own supply. There's no other way. And that was the biggest learning. You have to control supply if you want to create a meaningful experience for any user. And that's what we pivoted into nine, 10 months from there, where we started creating our own well-being programs based on the requirements that were coming in from corporates.
00:16:32
Speaker
So that was the Breathe Wellbeing 1.0 as a brand where we were helping companies drive employee engagement, employee retention, employee health to a holistic well-being program. And that's where Aditya and I are. While we were doing this, we also started becoming experts. So I'm a CrossFit level two trainer, a mindfulness coach. Aditya is an A certified behavioral health coach.
00:16:54
Speaker
Because both of us have literally worked out at more than 150 gyms and studios in India. And by virtue of doing that, we just ended up saying, yeah, certification, because we just become like experts in this field. And we started creating our own programs that we started selling to corporates.
00:17:11
Speaker
This is, the pivot to corporate is around 2017, you said? 2016. 2016, okay. And we got into GSF then and we pitched our B2B, we started monetizing that. So what you were selling to corporates is like a service where you're saying we will send trainers to your campus to conduct these classes, like that was?
00:17:35
Speaker
combination of both the market at that point in time asked only for workshops because corporate welding workshops of whether it's yoga or Zumba or nutrition or doctor sessions all of that and I would say 70% of the market would still be there but while we were building these fitness communities offline
00:17:59
Speaker
understanding what drives adherence, we were becoming really good at building game design into online products. And we just started gaining some level of mastery, some level of expertise in how do you drive engagement on an online platform through game design.
00:18:15
Speaker
So that's something that we kept doing. And then when corporate saw the power, that whatever session that they did offline, which was very expensive for them, it used to at best activate only one to 2% of the employees. The online program that we did, we kind of mastered the art of marketing. How do you kind of activate employees into participating? And then how do you kind of make them
00:18:38
Speaker
make higher number of employees retain onto that. So we launched some challenges, whether it was steps challenges or fitness challenges or nutrition challenges or weight loss challenge. And we did that really, really well. So HR really loved that because they never experienced this sort of engagement from anyone. So literally we ended up having like accounts for paying us.
00:18:57
Speaker
literally from uh committed to paying a three and a half crores in like three years and which was like a huge deal so our seven member startup was literally profitable in no time before we had 2018 doing some uh two and a half three crores of revenue and uh
00:19:17
Speaker
having 50,000 subscribers were engaged. So I think that was it. And that was the time we realized we have something that's going for us. But the time was not that high. So I think while doing sales, we realized we had to influence the corporates to create budgets for such a thing.
Personal Growth and Business Realignment
00:19:35
Speaker
So that was another learning cave. If the client is already not spending on it, it's very difficult. It requires a influencing of another level of marketing appear of another level to influence them to create those budgets. And the budgets can only get created if you're helping a client directly increase revenue or directly decrease cost. There cannot be any hops involved. So that's why we realize that time is low and we are just kind of
00:20:03
Speaker
At least I as an entrepreneur was just realigning my internal expectations, going through some low times, some really, really low times back in 2018 and 19. Like you thought that this would never be more than a couple of million dollar real business. Yeah. So that's what was sinking into us while we were doing some business development that at best this is going to be like a three, four million sort of a business in five years.
00:20:30
Speaker
And it required a lot of push in. Only like a Fortune 500 company would be willing to invest in this for their employees. Most companies would just see this as a luxury spend, not really something there. Even for Fortune 500 companies, it's like a good to have sort of a thing, right? It's not part of their core competency or core business, right?
00:20:51
Speaker
So that realization, I think it took us a while to internalize that because the entire year of comfort, which was profitable the first year that we started drawing salaries. I think that just blinded us to quickly have that realization because this is, we're just kind of wasting our time probably, uh, because there are no, it's not gonna like thousand clients are not coming in and buy and doing like purchases, what 20, 30 lakhs a year.
00:21:20
Speaker
So I think that feeling started sinking in 2018 when after one year of BD, it was not much to show like 10, 15 clients.
00:21:29
Speaker
across Asia and those clients loved us and they still love us, they still call us. When are you launching Vidubhi? And we say no, we're not. But they still love us because we did that really, really well. We went really deep into it. It's just that expanding the contracts of the clients was a challenge for us. It eventually became like a contract renewal business and that's what Aditya and I
00:21:51
Speaker
stop deriving meaning out of it because if all we got to do is just keep some stakeholder happy in a company and that's all it takes to get a renewal, then somehow that just stopped itching the entrepreneurship kita in us. It was like we're not building something that the world needs.
00:22:09
Speaker
We're just doing it for a check mark because someone wants to look good in front of their CEO, which is all right, which is all good. But maybe we're not the best guys for that, right? Because we really want to solve a deep enough problem. And that was 2018. And I was going through a really rough and low patch seeking therapy. One quick question here. Can you describe what was the product that you were selling? It was like a combination of on-site workshops plus like a digital workshops.
00:22:39
Speaker
It was a short, short. So we had components of fitness, diet, and meditation. And we had built game design into driving engagement among employees towards all these offerings, whether it was getting consumed through coaching or curriculum, which was the main thing back then, or community, which we were driving through game design and challenges, something that I had learned during my time at CrossFit.
00:23:06
Speaker
that how game design actually activates anyone to kind of push themselves. So this is what we're selling and we used to take guarantee that if you don't see 80% of your organization participate, you don't pay us. And there was nobody able to kind of put the money where the mouth and HRs were just blown away. How can these people just come in and guarantee participation at something we are targeting for the last 10 years?
00:23:27
Speaker
Because we just knew how to drive engagement. We knew the messages that are going to work. We knew what employees would love to do on our platform. So that gave us the confidence to at least tell, if you don't see 50% of your employees on our platform, don't pay us anything. That literally was our promise to employees, and they were blown away by that.
00:23:46
Speaker
And the delivery was all online or you were like? All online, apart from workshops that used to happen, some of the corporate used to purchase workshops in parallel. There was an add-on separately priced. That was an add-on, but it used to have a good traction as well, almost like you were serving corporates in almost 150 plus thousand cities and used to see even more massive engagement in tier two and tier three. And this is exactly in this model where we had the insight
00:24:15
Speaker
So luckily for us, I got deeply into meditation back in 2017. Almost went for my third Vipashna course in 2018 at Toshita Meditation Center. You did the third, like a full 10-day course. Yeah, yeah. So I've done like five of them till late. And the third one was like the most game-changing because I was just cut off from my team, cut off from everyone. Just made a promise to myself, 2018 and end.
00:24:44
Speaker
Because both of them had just become very comfortable doing the previous thing. And the joy level was going down, the excitement was going down, and our opportunity cost was so high in life, right? And the business was not really going either going up or going... And it could not be killed, right? We built something that could not be killed because we had contracts for like three years.
00:25:04
Speaker
So I think one clear thing that I learned was that we got to build something for our own joy first.
Exploring Chronic Disease Management
00:25:11
Speaker
If it doesn't give us joy, then we won't last in whatever we are doing. So where can we harbor our disinterested obsession? So we still figure that we still love well-being as a space. We still love diet and exercise and meditation. We're just hopelessly in love with that field.
00:25:27
Speaker
And we were just hopelessly in love with what we do. But it's just unfortunate that the market is not there. So we just started asking ourselves, can we just upsell to corporates a bit more? Just create even a bigger promise, a 10x promise. And that's when we saw what Livongo Health was doing in US. And we got motivated and inspired by it. And we said, is there an opportunity? And then we looked at our data, all these 50,000 subscribers that we had in corporates.
00:25:55
Speaker
And we always thought that we're building those digital well-being programs from millennials. People were just like Aditya and me below the age of 35. But when we looked at our data, 50,000 subscribers, and you always get learning from watching what your super users do, because super users make your product. You never make your product. It's the super users who tell you what to do.
00:26:18
Speaker
I think thankfully for us, we had that insight back then. The 20% of the user base were our super users who were spending more than 30 minutes on our platform. We decided to just go deeper into that. Interestingly, more than 90% of our super users turned out they were not millennials. They were literally most of the super users were not millennials. And we thought something's wrong with the data. How can it be that 90% of them
00:26:45
Speaker
are above the age of 35. We built something so mobile app focused. This doesn't make sense. Something's wrong with the data. We decided to interview those people. And we realized those are the people within corporates who actually had a need for what we were doing. These are people who were suffering with type 2 diabetes. They were women who were suffering with PCOD. There were other men who were suffering with blood pressure or hypertension. And what they unanimously loved about us was
00:27:14
Speaker
The game design aspect, the community aspect, men with type 2 diabetes were actually teaming up with other men who had type 2 diabetes and they were sharing their blood glucose readings with each other. Women with PCOD, they were motivating each other to just get fit and just get rid of PCOD. That just gave us the insight, maybe this is what we need to focus on, chronic diseases.
00:27:34
Speaker
And the only way we can do that is now we should do a clinical study and pick up one therapy, do a clinical study and then we want to upsell to corporates. This is your 5,000 employees but did you know that 500 of them have diabetes or PCOD and we have boy, do we have a
00:27:51
Speaker
specific program for you and we can upsell. That was the whole thinking. And we decided to do a clinical study on type 2 diabetes. Why? Because my mother was a type 2 diabetic. Aditya's father was a type 2 diabetic. They're very much alive and healthy right now, but they're no longer a type 2 diabetic. And we made them part of the clinical study. We did that on 181 type 2 diabetic patients. There was a family doctor of ours who allowed us to run this on their own patients.
00:28:20
Speaker
and graciously accepted that we need to do this clinical study before we speak to anyone in the corporates. And interestingly, we were really stuck up because what we had solved for was how do you make patients adhere to lifestyle interventions? That was our USP. It was emerging as our USP. And within like two months of these doctors' patients being put in the program,
00:28:45
Speaker
They started coming with their friends and their relatives. And we used to say no to them. No. Our program is only meant for corporates. You're not the right sort of customers for us. Please go away. Because we want to do B2B. Because we will not know how to scale when you guys come in.
00:29:04
Speaker
And these people are bringing their relatives because they saw their insulin levels go down, the insulin that they were taking in as injections, the doctors were reducing their insulin units, the doctors were reducing their medications while they were part of this clinical study, and they were blown away. Sharmaji sitting in Rowini had never seen his 10-year-old medication go down. And he was delighted by this clinical study. And we thought, boy, we have something interesting. And we thought we should raise funds now, this 2019. And guess what?
00:29:34
Speaker
I had like 73 investors reject us, literally saying. One quick question before we come to the fundraise story. What were you charging corporate, like a per employee per month or a per employee per year kind of a? 100 rupees per employee per month. So, 1000 rupees per employee. But if they're taking it in bulk, it might come down to like 50 rupees per employee per month.
00:30:03
Speaker
What would you charge for the diabetes product extra? Initially, you wanted to sell that to companies, right?
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah. So the thinking was, if you're charging like a hundred rupees per employee per month, this can easily get charged like 10 X, like thousand rupees per employer, 500 rupees per employee, something we had not figured that pricing out. We had to try that out. Right. So, but definitely more than that, because the promise was if you have 20,000 employees, here is your 1000 diabetic people, which I have looked at your data. They are the ones causing that 80% of your claims, medical claims. So give us
00:30:37
Speaker
allow us to run a specific program for them and two years will show you like they will not cost you much. So this was becoming the pitch for corporate switch before that just things started changing for us in 2019. We never got to doing that. We just couldn't penetrate that because there was too much of stakeholder management. HR did not have that as their KPI. Someone else wanted to reduce cost. So it was just too much of stakeholder management because India
00:31:03
Speaker
As this model works really well in US, where it's in the interest of the employer, the insurance cost is so high, it's in their interest to actually reduce it. That's why they do self-insured. They have a self-insured model. Most of the employers have that. So they are kind of incurring a lot of cost. It's going out of the employer's pocket if the employee is sick or employee is kind of diabetic and is costing them a lot.
00:31:26
Speaker
Here, the interest is costing the insurance provider. The employer is paying for it. You have to show results to them, convince them so that they will kind of give a discount with the employer. So I think it's those frictions that we were kind of getting caught up in back then in 2019. I'm talking about that time. And this is like two such accounts. So my data is also limited to such large corporate accounts. So anyone looking to try this, the times could be completely different. They should feel free to try.
00:31:55
Speaker
Because showing ROI was not such an easy thing to do. It would take two years before an insurance company would actually give a reduced premium. I still believe this is possible, but I think timing could be becoming better in the next five years. Eventually, we will get there. Okay, so let's come to your fundraise journey. 2019, you decide, okay, let's build a B2C side of the business and raise funds. Then what happened?
00:32:21
Speaker
We never thought of raising B2C. We actually wanted to raise for a previous venture where we wanted to push the diabetes thing through pharmacies, through doctor clinics. That's what we had said and corporates. Every investor I met, they wanted to invest in the profitable company of ours because this was not proven. We want to sell it this at some 7,000 rupees for four months. Everyone thought nobody in India is going to pay for an online program.
00:32:46
Speaker
They just kicked me out of their office and nobody's going to pay for their online program. And while we were reading up what was happening in that clinical study, which was still running in parallel. Interesting thing. We launched it as a diabetes management thing, but people were getting into remission, diabetes remission. This is something that we learned while doing that clinical study. People were actually reversing the hyperdiabetes. And no doctor was willing to believe when we were telling them, we actually can reverse type 2 diabetes through online.
00:33:14
Speaker
So we were actually, the distribution guy will actually distribute our product. He wasn't ready to believe in the efficacy of the product program. Investors thought it's too risky. Like who's gonna pay for something like this? It's never been done before. So we were like, this is the lowest period of my life. Probably if a bunch of doctors had gone to investors, they might have had a different response.
00:33:43
Speaker
So how did you build subject matter expertise on diabetes to really deliver this result of diabetes remission? I think it started with why my mom and Aditya's father was part of this clinical study. And our minimum expectation was if nothing happens, the health of our parents
00:34:04
Speaker
I should if that improves we were just having a very low expectation in life. Then also it's something like better. That was the prime thing. I'm just by serving those patients sitting at the clinic.
00:34:20
Speaker
listening to them, reading up parallelly with nutritionists, just getting deeper and deeper into it, understanding the classes of drugs, how the drugs impact a diabetic patient, what will it take for us to help them reduce their dependency on drugs, what are the sort of
00:34:36
Speaker
diet protocols that are working best, what are the sort of exercise protocols that are working best, other than I used to create those exercise protocols on our own. How would we test that if we kind of coach 20 patients for a particular exercise protocol that we build that can be done in three minutes, five minutes.
00:34:52
Speaker
We'll watch all of their blood glucose readings immediately afterwards. Whichever showed the maximum delta, we said this seems like a good exercise protocol because it's consistently working across all. Everyone can do it. It's showing drop in the sugar level. That's how we were literally testing out our diet protocols and exercise protocols. That's how we're gaining mastery in our field. We just kept listening, kept talking to users.
00:35:17
Speaker
and just kept monitoring the results. And it was a feedback loop, right? They were telling us what is working, what is not working for them. Got it. Like diabetes as a field is like a field which has a lot of information on it already. What you did was productize it, did a lot of A-B testing to see what's giving better results. Yeah, a lot of lifestyle. I think there are lots of myths as well. What we created was really what we did was we understood the root cause of type 2 diabetes.
00:35:46
Speaker
So we understood that Dr. Roy Taylor had already done that study in 2012. So root cause of type 2 diabetes was insulin resistance. Okay. That's why, and how does type 2 diabetes happen, right? When you ask any diabetic patient, he'll tell you, I'm diabetic because my sugar levels are high. Everyone will tell you that, but that's a symptom. Your sugar levels are high. It's a symptom. It's like you having fever, me having fever, but what's, why is diabetes happening in the first place?
00:36:14
Speaker
95% of the market is type 2 diabetes, 5% of them have type 1. So type 1 is when your pancreas is not creating insulin from birth and that's when you have to inject yourself with insulin. In type 2, pancreas is creating insulin. So the way it works is, insulin, there are two sorts of soldiers or two sorts of hormones that pancreas can create.
00:36:36
Speaker
Insulin, the other is glucagon. So insulin is a glucose lowering hormone and glucagon is a glucose increasing hormone. That's what happens. So if Akshay and Rohan go for a run and body is in a deprived state now because we just ran like 3 kilometers in 15 minutes.
00:36:56
Speaker
Body needs glucose. So that's when pancreas comes to life. It releases glucagon. Glucagon goes to all the muscles of the body. There's a bell outside. It presses the bell ding nong and everyone listens to glucagon and they say, what's up?
00:37:12
Speaker
So the glucagon will tell all the organs, Akshay and Rohan have gone for a run and they really need glucose right now. All the organs will listen and they will break down the fat and release into the bloodstream in the form of glucose. So that's how glucagon functions. Similarly, the hormone that truly matters for type 2 diabetics is insulin.
00:37:29
Speaker
So, in Akshay and Rohan grab lunch today, sandwiches or coffee, that increases the glucose in the blood stream, right? Now, pancreas will come to life again. It will see the glucose has gone up. It will send the soldier called as insulin, which is the glucose lowering hormone. This hormone will go to all the organs.
00:37:49
Speaker
It will press a bell, ding dong, the door will get open, the horrible ask what's up insulin and insulin say Akshay and Rohan just met up for sandwiches and there's excessive glucose flowing in the bloodstream. Can you just absorb the excess glucose and
00:38:05
Speaker
The rule, the principle is once the door is open, the organ will listen to whatever these messenger hormones are telling them. It will store the excessive glucose and that's how the glucose gets moderated and that's why you and I will not die when we have sandwiches because insulin will be at work. Now what happens in a type 2 diabetic? Same thing happens, they will eat sandwiches, it will get converted to glucose.
00:38:30
Speaker
pancreas will create insulin, will travel all the body parts, it will press the bell, the ding dong will not happen, there will be no ding dong. Now this ding dong is insulin receptor and insulin is trying to press that bell and why is the insulin receptor not responding to insulin? Because you can think of it like
00:38:50
Speaker
There is some dust particles or there is some kachra that has gotten deposited which you can call as insulin resistance. Now, this is the root cause. Why? If the doors don't get open, the glucose keeps lying in the bloodstream and that's why when you measure it through glucometer, the glucose levels are high.
00:39:10
Speaker
And what the body will naturally do is the pancreas will be under severe stress and start creating more and more insulin. And more insulin is outgoing and trying to press the bell. But the body is becoming resistant with time. So this is what happens. The root causes insulin resistance. What we did was
00:39:29
Speaker
We just fundamentally understood the entire, we broke down that insulin resistance that we have identified eight factors that lead to that insulin resistance. Four are dieter-related. Three are exercise-related. One is stress-related. And we have built 500 plus such protocols that are addressing each of those eight factors that lead to insulin resistance. So that's the
00:39:50
Speaker
What are those eight factors if you can just spend a minute on that? So one of them is literally like your body being very acidic. The kind of food that you're eating is acidic. So how do you make that? So fundamentally, how do you kind of bring in more dietary protocols that make your body alkaline? The second could be refined carbs, the kind of carbs that you're consuming, it's just very refined, you know, it has saturated fat in it. So how do you kind of move away from that? So those are the two
00:40:18
Speaker
diet protocol that I just said for exercise protocols, think of it like the body's ability to absorb excessive glucose is going down because you're losing muscle mass. So we got to help. How do we help you build more muscles in the body? So that's kind of one because that's getting stagnated and the other is the stagnated lymph. So if the lymphatic system is getting stagnated, that means you
00:40:43
Speaker
the body is not able to absorb glucose again. How do you create more movement in your body that is activating that lymphatic system? So this is like two sorts of exercise protocols that are leading to insulin resistance. So now we have what is the lymphatic system? Sorry, I'm asking you a lot of beginner stuff, but I'm genuinely curious.
00:41:03
Speaker
So there are two kinds of systems like one is circulatory system that is carrying oxygenated blood to all the organs of the body. The other is lymphatic system that is carrying all the toxic elements that get created and other organs to back to the body. So in type of diametries, when you have sedentary lifestyle, you're moving less.
00:41:23
Speaker
The ability of the lymphatic system to just get that material back is just getting compromised. And that's why diabetic patients start having this neuropathy in their hand and their feet. They have numbness in their hand and their feet because their lymphatic system is not as robust as it used to be.
00:41:39
Speaker
Did that help? Did I answer your question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, coming back to the fundraiser, the 70 odd VC said no to you. Then what did you do next? Then you, then you go to the one who actually understands what you're truly doing. So, so that was our third attempt at getting into Y Combinator and
00:42:06
Speaker
And our chips were really down man. We just had like 2-3 months of runway left. It was a really stressful time. 2019.
00:42:14
Speaker
because you were not doing much effort on corporate sales. So that's why your runway had come down. Okay. We were a 10 member team. Initially only one person was doing that clinical study, but the gravity and the pull of that product market for it was so much that by within six months, nine out of 10 teamers are actually focusing on that. That was creating zero revenue and only one person, one analyst was just doing BD sales.
00:42:39
Speaker
and he was having a hard time retaining the clients because suddenly Roman and Aditya had vanished from all the client sites and they were just doing what was giving them a lot of joy, right? And we were just sitting outside in the inside that clinics of doctor clinics and doing, trying to push that model in different ways. So that was a really low time for us here. We were literally at crossroads back in July and I was having some health issues as well, just getting hospitalized because of my throat.
00:43:07
Speaker
Having our own mental health vertical in the company, I was seeking therapy as well. And I was just not getting time in my own counseling team, but I was just very, very open to that. I think that was one of the lowest periods because nobody was biting our story. Nobody believed in that diabetes model that this could actually be. And we were always given examples of how to healthify me.
00:43:31
Speaker
something of that sort, you know, nobody has done it before. Healthify me was on the same lines, like a online product to make you. Yeah. And back then, they were also kind of, you know, after five, six years, they were still yet to do like a 10 million era, nobody had heard that they were going. No, they're doing really well. So I think it was just becoming, you know, those sort of tough questions have never been done. How is it possible? I'm showing them data, it's happening. But
00:43:59
Speaker
I think people want to see momentum in the market rather than data of one, nobody's sort of an entrepreneur. So I think it just felt really, really low back then, 2019. And we just went all into our preparation for getting into YC. I think in spite of I feeling so low back in August, and that's when I actually met my life partner as well. So I think the best part that happened in my life was I met someone
00:44:27
Speaker
who just believed in me unconditionally and she told me later on she never thought this new model will work but she just loved my passion for it and she she was herself stuck in an investment banking job her name is Pooja and she just saw like a respite to her life that helping me just gave her a lot of joy
00:44:46
Speaker
And for me, someone is just helping me so much. Like, I better do a good job at this model that I'm trying. And the entire team of 10 people, we just galvanized behind that, truly believed. And we just, at YC, things just clicked there. We just prepared really hard for it, showed them traction. These are 300 people who truly love us. And we are acquiring them through all sorts of channels.
00:45:08
Speaker
I think that changed our game getting into Y Combinator and we were like the last offline batch that was working out of Paul Graham's large 2020 and we then we suddenly started getting a lot of interest from investors when he got into YC and then we kind of started saying no to a few investors can know. Yeah.
00:45:32
Speaker
And that's another story that that demo day never happened for us and it was like another heartbreak in four months. Oh, okay. So like the lockdown happened while your YC batch was still going on. And we got completely screwed, man. Sorry for the word. So we got really, really... Yeah, that's fine. So we... And that was like a even bigger... I think that's when I... There's ever been a time where I've actually... I've actually decided to give up. I think that was the time like when we...
00:46:01
Speaker
When that was looking like a silver bullet, everything was falling in place after going through a couple of pivots, two, three pivots. When demo didn't happen, we ended up literally raising like $0 after YC because there was no demo day and we couldn't convince anybody. How much runway did you have at that time? Six, seven months. Whatever YC gave us, that was the only money that we had. And we were at Crossroads again in April 2020, where other than I was just chatting and
00:46:32
Speaker
It was almost like, should we just go back to that B2B? At least that model doesn't die. This thing is very risky because we don't have any revenue generating arm. And I said, it will just work for our joy and meaning. And if it dies, it dies, man. Even till our last day, we should be enjoying what we are doing. By that time, all the corporates were shut. Pharmacies were shut.
00:47:00
Speaker
doctor clinics were shut so our entire pitch to YC was that we will get users from there and everything was shut because of the lockdown. We were completely screwed back then and looking at me, some of my wife right now and my girlfriend back then Pooja just got the guts to quit her job. She had moved to SS with me and
00:47:24
Speaker
I just gave her a channel to work out. Like, why don't you just create one slide for me? Here's 50,000 rupees. That's all you'll get. You're in the middle of jobs. Just intern with us and just take this 50,000 and just work Facebook and Google. And I just want to tell the world that this doesn't work. That was my goal. My hypothesis was a direct contribution will never work for us. So that if anyone asked me, I can show them this doesn't work.
00:47:46
Speaker
And all the channels were shut. So we're just figuring out what to do. And that's the beauty of beginner's mind, right? Had I done it, or anyone from the team would have done direct-to-consumer, because we all knew that moon working could have not worked. When Pooja did it, it started kind of working for us. And we started getting users from different parts of the country. And we were really obsessively focused on delivering outcomes. Because even if you are taking 1,000 rupees or guaranteeing them that we will reduce our blood glucose levels in 30 days,
00:48:16
Speaker
That's when we started building these cohorts.
00:48:46
Speaker
I was really, I'm education is that hard. Like having done the first at tech as well for me, like clearly healthcare takes people from zero to one and education takes people from one to a hundred and both the players are earlier.
00:49:04
Speaker
But that entire learning from education was already getting back. We were creating these groups in the form of classrooms where Sharma Ji will get bonded with Akshay Ji and Varma Ji in the same classroom and they will kind of share whatever they're doing. And we were doing because we did not trust our notification. We didn't realize we were using a community-led approach to outcomes. And that's what people who recognize us later in the day told us, that's exactly what you're doing. So we started creating these communities which were
00:49:32
Speaker
which where people who are getting results were kind of motivating others who are not and it started to coming into a flywheel.
00:49:39
Speaker
So they stepped out to raise again, again those tough questions. When did you step out again? This Facebook experiment was in 2020. 2020, March and April, May, word of mouth was happening in parallel because then patients were getting results. We were starting to get word of mouth. We were charging upfront. So it was no promises. How much were you charging? 1000 rupees a month. So we were doing some three months and six months thing at 4000 rupees AOV and 7000 rupees AOV, something like that.
00:50:09
Speaker
And that's when a fine gentleman called as Mr. Sandeep Singhal. He's the ex-MD of Nexus Venture Partners. I had met him in 2019 through Mumbai Angels.
00:50:21
Speaker
And I was not even planning to show up for the pitch to Nexus. There was Pratik Pradhar and Sandeep. I was like, you must say, why questions? And I said, Gary, you know, but thankfully, I think, again, my wife shared, I was like, and I was just unabashedly. And I was in that zone back in July, because we just had like three months of runway left.
00:50:50
Speaker
extreme low point by June and that's the only time I had mentally given up and thankfully
00:50:57
Speaker
That's when you need a co-founder. Aditya, my co-founder, motivated me, inspired me. There was a founding team member wherever. He's currently working at WL. He's been with us seven years in the journey. Because of these two people, they kind of kept me going. They said, you know what, Rohan? You know we are getting results. Our product is working. We are growing. Everything is right. The way YC has taught us, everything is just falling into place. We just need someone to write a small check to us to make this work.
00:51:26
Speaker
So that we get a long enough runway to give this a real shot. I said, okay, let's two months. I'll not expect anything to convert. I'll just go with a mind of, you know, zero expectations and.
00:51:39
Speaker
just meet 70 people. And this is one of those meetings that I just met and just narrated our story, what we are doing, the 3C's approach, show them our WhatsApp communities. We're building it on WhatsApp and our mobile app. And we're building our own coaching academy. So think of it like what White Hat was doing in education, we're doing it purely for healthcare, owning the supply, doing all the hard things.
00:52:03
Speaker
And I think that's where very few people were able to see through it that we were very different. And thanks to these people, I think the first check we got, which is the most special for me was by a guy called as Christian Ranta. He's an XYZ founder as well, running a mental health company in US. I think he's a Danish guy or a Netherlands guy, I forgot.
00:52:27
Speaker
When I reached out to him July again, he said, Rohan, I know you guys are struggling. I can't do much to help you. But do you think a small check of $10,000 would help? I just want to support you guys.
00:52:38
Speaker
believe me, having that check of $10,000 is just kind of, you know, that was like the, that was like, give us the, I really, really needed that, that validation that someone is willing to just give without any expecting anything.
00:52:57
Speaker
And he just said, just send me the safe note. I'm just going to sign it all this my support for you guys. That gave us the right dosage of confidence at the right time. And that's all I was able to get through the remaining kind of pictures.
00:53:10
Speaker
And the first check was written by Sohail Swami. When I was back in McKinsey, I forgot to share that. That was the first check. Second was GSF. And third was YC. All of them were like angel seats sort of things. And Sohail literally wrote a blank check to us. But when I was in McKinsey, he was my DGL. And my co-founder's mouth was literally open. Like someone literally can write a blank check to us. And it was Sohail's first angel check. And I think he's gone out to do some hundred angels after that.
00:53:38
Speaker
And that was our first. And this Christian's check was the one that we needed the most at the right time. And after that, it was Sandeep coming in. He kind of said, if the fund is not investing at Nexus, I'm doing my own personal check of $150,000 in them. That really helped us put together around. I think that was the point where things just changed for us. Yeah.
00:54:02
Speaker
So this was like your series A which you raised. This was a kind of a pre-series A back in 2020. Then there was no looking back here. Then we knew that we are creating this space and it's working. And then we also kind of retrospectively learned what exactly we are doing. We didn't have this nomenclature of three C's. We were doing coaching because we felt we needed it. We were doing community because we knew it is driving our engagement, just looking at our attention cohorts and nothing else.
00:54:31
Speaker
I think that is when really we never look back from there. Combination of both, I think, building a team, building a stronger tech team, investing in our product, investing in our coaching academy very deeply, and customer acquisition. So this is what we were doing, but majority of that was going into product and tech.
00:54:58
Speaker
and just getting the basics of growth in order. Yeah. So coaching academy is like you're hiring coaches in house who then work with the users. Yeah. Yeah. We said enough of relying on other people's supply. We'll just bring in fresh new freshness right out of college. We'll train them because what we saw was very clear, right?
00:55:20
Speaker
that beginners, straight out of college people were outperforming people who had expertise for three, four, five years because it took more time to make them unlearn what a lot of wrong convictions are there. How do you manage a type 2 diabetes? A lot of wrong convictions because our approach is very contrary to what sort of protocols will work and when they will work and how they will work. And you have tested out on thousands of people right now.
00:55:42
Speaker
So we thought that a nutritionist, someone who just has a passion in nutrition, just out of college, we just want to train that person, make them into a health coach. So one is our toolkit of the protocols, the content piece, the knowledge of diabetes reversals, the protocols. The second is the behavioral change aspect, converting them from a dietitian and a nutritionist into a health coach. So those are the two things that we teach them in our coaching academy.
00:56:06
Speaker
So a coach is like an all-round coach, or a person has multiple coaches, like one coach for diet or one for workout and so on. Like, how does it happen? The main coach is a health coach who's a specialist in diet and a basic in fitness. We have a fitness sort of life classes happening separately, a fitness academy separately, where once or twice a month you can take a fitness plan and then practice it through our classes. But basic is the health coaching. That's our main thing.
00:56:35
Speaker
These health coaches are in a way like your customer success team. It's their job to make sure that people...
00:56:44
Speaker
So think of it like in the healthcare that we're building, doctor is at the back end who's kind of titrating the medications. We have built our own proprietary medication down-titration grid. So doctors are kind of looking at the data that is resolved. So they're closely monitoring patients, looking at the engagement data through which their blood glucose levels are going down and then they're down-titrating the medications by consulting them.
00:57:10
Speaker
who is at the heart of the center is the athlete. We call him all the patients athletes in the program and the coach and the community of which the athlete is a part. So athlete is literally participating in the community in the community protocols and is interacting with the expert, which is a coach. So that's the heart of the program. Yeah.
00:57:27
Speaker
So you do the prescription also for the medication they need, like because you have doctors on there. But the goal is to eliminate. Yes, we do. Yes, we do that. We initially started by just asking athletes to go to their doctors, but we realized that was way more operationally intensive because if the
00:57:50
Speaker
There are two things in glucose. If it goes up, it's hypoglycemia. If it goes down, it's hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia is even more dangerous if your sugar ratings are going below 70. Because our protocols are so efficacious, and if it takes so much of ownership and driving adherence through our community protocols, the sugar level starts dropping very quickly. And that's where our medical intervention is needed quickly, because the person cannot get into hypoglycemia. And there cannot be an operational delay. So we built our own medical academy as well.
00:58:20
Speaker
The goal of course is to eventually not prescribe anything but the doctors are there for as long as prescription is needed. Exactly. You have to keep down titrating slowly and slowly. Remove that dependency.
00:58:32
Speaker
How do you, I mean, there's a large role of data here. You need a lot of data about like, say, step count or sugar level and stuff like that. So have you done some tech interventions there to gather more data effectively? By tech interventions, what do you mean? Like, I don't know, you could have an IoT device or like there's this company, Ultra Human, which has that patch. So like, you know, these kind of integrations and
00:58:59
Speaker
No, our approach is complete. We're the only, we have a very contrarian approach in healthcare. We are saying we're actually delivering the highest efficacy in the world right now and through a hardware agnostic. We're not distributors of Abbott or any such company out there. If you're a diabetic person, if I'm a diabetic person, whatever hardware you have, you're completely open with that. Almost every diabetic patient has a glucometer.
00:59:26
Speaker
And we are completely fine with that because they have no incentive to lie to our mobile app. They're feeding in because of the engagement. They feel they want to share the readings with the coach. So we don't we don't necessarily believe that you typically need an average patch of
00:59:42
Speaker
to get the kind of health outcome. We're delivering it through that. It perhaps could be a variant in future for us. We're not allergic to it. But the way we realize that is, should we be showing down additional 4,000 rupees of cost down an Indian customer's throat? And what this 4,000 rupees of cost is resulting into? What is the delta in efficacy that is it leading to? And if our efficacy is already like 2x, 3x, than that of any person using the hardware,
01:00:10
Speaker
then should we invest to get from an incremental points of 90 to 95% and make someone invest additional 4,000? The rich people will anyways do it, let them do it. So that's our approach and we don't need it basically. It's almost like if I have to coach you, I can't have my first requirement, you have to purchase an Apple watch boss, I can't coach you without that. I don't think you need this to be honest. Yeah. Okay. But you do integrate with like an Apple watch or all these fitness trackers.
01:00:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. We do, we do, we do, in doing the fitness tracker, they get the steps from the pedometer inside the mobile app or your Fitbit or Apple watch. We obviously integrate with all the APIs are integrated. So the hardware agnostic, my learning from a previous venture where when Fitbit was coming into India, the other hardware companies are coming into it. We realized that in Sakko, Anego API is open. We'll just link with their APIs. We can't play the hardware game. It's just too much of chasing the PMF otherwise. Yeah.
01:01:04
Speaker
Amazing, amazing. I love how focused you are in terms of sticking to the core. The habit equation doesn't come to us and say, I need a better device to track my glucose. Our reading is that's not the only value-add I can make to their life. Their main value-add is it's almost getting into ITJ, right? Again, I use a lot of education sort of thing. Reversing type 2 diabetes is similar to getting into ITJ.
01:01:31
Speaker
So when you have to get into IDJ, you need the right knowledge. Think of it like H.C. Vermaar, Asthankaradeer of the world. If you have the right knowledge, you need the right feedback.
01:01:43
Speaker
Knowledge, feedback and motivation. Those are the three things you need. Knowledge will come from books. H.C. Vermaar, Asne Harideh's feedback will come from experts or someone who's got into I.I.D.J. He will kind of tell me how to get into I.I.D.J. Third is motivation. You can't just give me books and you just can't give me an I.I.D.J. teacher and someone who's gone to I.I.D.J. and expect me to get into I.I.D.J. tomorrow. You have to practice those protocols in physics, chemistry, math for a period of time.
01:02:10
Speaker
to internalize it and get that sort of a learning outcome right same is true for diabetes you need the knowledge of the right protocol so we have like to create them the the
01:02:21
Speaker
the largest breadth of protocols that work on different body types. And then you need the feedback coming from a coach or the champions who have kind of reversed diabetes in Bilais. If I'm in Bilais or Bulan chair, I know someone who has reversed diabetes in Bilais and Bulan chair and he's kind of telling me what he did. I'm getting influenced by him. Or someone who's just a working professional as a startup founder, he's kind of sharing his insight. And the third is the motivation part where we use our game design.
01:02:50
Speaker
Its entire program is built in the form of a game. Okay, amazing. And how do you do your customer acquisition? How much of it comes from which channel? What channels work for you? Sure. So I think this is something we learned very early at YC as well. Business has to be built word of mouth and thankfully healthcare as an industry.
01:03:11
Speaker
The only businesses that can survive in healthcare are the ones who will get word of mouth. So our entire systems are designed to deliver results faster and faster and faster. That's how the incentives are aligned. That's how everything is aligned towards that. And so we acquire customers through word of mouth. We are the largest in our organic traffic
01:03:37
Speaker
in our category, we are like 5x more than all our competitors put together because we are the first ones to invest in content. So if you just go like, so more than like 60% of our customers are coming out of word of mouth or organic, the rest are directed to. And what content is like YouTube videos or what, like what do you do for content?
01:03:56
Speaker
No, these are blogs. We are actually going for the texts right now. We are yet to crack the video thing, but we just, we took a bet on blogs very early and that has resulted into massive traffic coming onto our website through content. And now we started minding that to get customers
01:04:15
Speaker
But you have to make those patient bets, because in the first one and a half two years, nothing was happening. So you have to start early in that. That's the only learning for any user watching this. Do you do something to incentivizing current users to bring in new users, like some sort of reward program or incentives or something? Yeah.
01:04:35
Speaker
Yes, we do that. We have incentivize inherent variety. But one key learning was nobody's, nobody's only doing it for incentivize. If they have not yet themselves received results, they will never refer.
01:04:47
Speaker
I will never refer a program if I'm not happy with it, I'm not seeing results to my friend, even if I'm getting money, because my reputation is way more important to me. That's something we learn. You can't just, you can't incentivize your way out of a bad product or not delivering outcomes in healthcare. Okay. What's your average order value or like what's the pricing today now? Sure.
01:05:11
Speaker
Six months MRP is 24,000 or 12 months MRP is 36,000 but after discounts six months is at 12,000 and currently right now and 12 months is at around 16, 17,000. So 12, 13,000 for six months and 16, 17,000 for 12 months. And like your initial hypothesis of selling through doctors, selling through pharmacies, has that progressed or is it like direct sales only?
01:05:36
Speaker
It's direct right now, but interestingly, there are lots of doctors who have undergone the program themselves for their diabetes. They are starting to refer it to their patients. We're starting to see that wave come in now in Delhi and Bangalore. That started happening. Is it like as lucrative for a doctor, like say, you know, you have that affiliate marketing program with e-commerce companies. So is it similar to that that a doctor can get a
01:06:01
Speaker
reasonable revenue stream. I think right now, it's not a commercial sort of arrangement with any of them. They're doing it because they feel their patients needed for their lifestyle intervention. And they've seen their other patients get benefit from it, or they themselves have undergone the program, either of the two things. But that could be an interesting model, right? Like an affiliate kind of a model for doctors. Could be an interesting. I think offline is like 90% of the market. It could be an interesting time for us to venture.
01:06:30
Speaker
We have only proven our clinical results by publishing our results with the ADA, American Diabetes Association, European Society of Endocrinology, American Association of Endocrinology. We've already published our results. And right now, when I'm meeting doctors, almost all doctors recognize that diabetes can get into remission for a certain section of diabetes that is possible if they are there. So now the awareness of the category is also built in the last four years. So it's a great time, actually. It just feels like that.
01:06:56
Speaker
Could be a good, could be an interesting time. I don't know. We've not tried it. So we don't know, but could be an interesting time. Let's see. And what about selling through corporates? Is that happening? No, we are like, this is too many channels right now. We're not. We just, our hands are full with our organic and our word of mouth and some paid channels. Yeah. Hands are full with that. Amazing. What's your ARR now? So we have reversed type two diabetes for like more than 50,000 people in our total lifespan.
01:07:26
Speaker
We are on track to get to our 1 million reversals by 2026. That's the one mission that binds all of us. But what's the era? What do you think this year you will end at revenue wise? Yeah, we will. So that's not a public information era.
01:07:48
Speaker
So we are on track to do like a 4x, 5x every single year from here on. And we have already doubled our unit economics in the last six months. Our repeats are really strong, probably the highest in the category by a very good margin, as far as the latest data we know, because people are renewing their membership with like a biggest sort of a surprise to everyone who hears about us. And why do they do that? Think of it like
01:08:14
Speaker
All these athletes were inside the hard jail. We got them out of the hard jail and they never want to go back there. They are so excited about being in the community that they renew their membership. So we have almost more than double the unit economics or LDB2CAC in the last six months. Just removing lower ROAS channels and just introducing higher ROAS channels, just starting to mine our organic
01:08:36
Speaker
more deeply. So that's how we kind of been doing it. And even with that, adding a Forex growth every single year from here is like on the cards for us. What's your LTV to CAC ratio?
01:08:51
Speaker
Here we have crossed a, we have crossed two, we have crossed two in that. Some indication of like a top line like maybe like a target you can say that by this year we want to hit this number or some range something like that just to help users get an idea. So I think next year the goal is to cross like a 10 million error.
01:09:12
Speaker
that's that's the goal somewhere middle of next year that's where we would want to cross that. So is this product also for other use cases like say obesity? The protocols can work very strongly for weight loss or obesity so we can so I think we have we will eventually once we kind of take this particular product line
01:09:35
Speaker
this vertical to like a 10 million era, we will be at an interesting crossroads. Whether do we become like the global powerhouse for diabetes reversal for the world? Because 30% of our organic traffic is also coming from outside India. Or since we would have already reversed type 2 diabetes for 100,000 people back till then,
01:09:56
Speaker
Should we just expand into the same households? Because India is a trust deficit country, right? If you have built trust in a household by reversing diabetes for one person, then you can then sell. The same company can sell salt. The same company can sell cars. The same company can sell software, right? So that means PCOD hypertension. We currently get almost 30% of our referrals for other therapies, which we turn down and reject because we're really obsessed about getting our diabetes right.
01:10:23
Speaker
the community right over there. We don't want to change that positioning right now. So you're currently selling outside India also, like you said, 30% of your traffic. Traffic is coming there. But we have some word of mouth coming in from outside India. But that's not significant as of now.
01:10:41
Speaker
That's out of focus. Current focus isn't here. So my last set of questions is around understanding the space. So this space, I believe, is called digital therapeutics. That could be the industry jargon for it. So who else is there in this space? Who are the other companies in this space?
01:11:01
Speaker
So the original pipe, original high shot, we complete the question. And like, you know, what's the difference in positioning for each of those? Like there would be some separate niche for each one, right? So just to understand that.
01:11:13
Speaker
Sure. So the original pioneer in this space is Freedom from Diabetes, Dr. Tripathi, who's been doing it since 2013-14, Residential Clinics. We really look up to them for what he's done for the space. We learn from them a lot. That's a digital product, Freedom from Diabetes. They came online in 2020 after COVID. Before that, they were running like residential clinics. They were offline. So we really respect them and learn from them a lot. And after that, our biggest competitor is Twin Health. It's backed by Sequoia.
01:11:42
Speaker
Um, so they're, they're like our direct biggest competitor right now. Uh, and then there are others in this play a place like fit a fly, dive a fly or subsidiary of cure fit. Who's also doing this. So sugar fit. Yeah. I think that's, that's, so these are the players in the space right now. These are like, these are what the space comprises of. When is this like our, like the biggest competitor and their approach is the one because we guys started at the same time, 2019, 20.
01:12:12
Speaker
their approach and our approach is like poles apart, they are more like a 70,000 rupees, 60,000 rupees program, a complete Western way of doing it that you need like a patch, you need like a fitness tracker, all those hardware devices have to be attached to your body and then they kind of create a
01:12:30
Speaker
create, like, gather data from your body through those devices. And then they kind of offer, like, very stringent keto diets. So that's what they've seen to work. Our community-led approach, we don't go with one diet, keto diet or anything. We kind of customize your existing protocols. So that's a difference in approach. And all of them, by the way, all are dependent on hardwares. Ours is the only hardware agnostic sort of approach.
01:12:56
Speaker
Okay. I would have thought Gokhi would have been your biggest competitor. Gokhi is also into this space of digital. No. Gokhi's are, I think, competitors and they are more into millennials, right? Lifestyle, intervention, digital weight loss, digital fitness for millennials. I think that's their position. Even though they... Well-being and obesity, possibly. They're more of a well-being. They're more of a well-being. Yeah. Yeah.
01:13:27
Speaker
And weight loss is a large market, like Altifami is doing a fantastic job. So do you need to raise more funds to hit that goal of 1 million people for whom you want to reverse diabetes? Yeah.
01:13:40
Speaker
From here, we are on track to achieve our EBITDA positive by next year, mid. That's why we are on track to do, we are on track to achieve that. After that, it will be a call whether we would want to, what's the pace of growth you'd want, right? If you want to deepen our investments,
01:13:58
Speaker
then probably we'll want then we'll choose we may choose to delay our a bit of positivity and just go deeper and deeper into launching other therapies or launching other markets that will be a call that we'll take next year but right now to achieve our goal where we what we have set out to do we don't need any external funds will be will be good with that we'll be just achieving our milestones through that
01:14:20
Speaker
The points that we just recently raised. Okay. I think your headcount is about 100, 150 odd as per LinkedIn. Tell me about org building. How do you build an organization which is aligned with the founder's vision and mission and some insights that you can share on that front? That is probably the toughest question you've ever asked me.
01:14:43
Speaker
I never knew. I never knew. We grew from a 10-member team to a 200-member team in almost one and a half, two years. And the founders, while we really scaled our ability to build a product or probably do growth, this org building is something where we actually could have done much better. And I realized that I think last year was a tough year for us, both in just changing the trajectory in terms of profitability very quickly.
01:15:13
Speaker
And that's when you really need people to be culturally ingrained and completely obsessed about the mission. You need missionaries for our category creation, I would say, because there'll be so many obstacles that come in your way. And that's when you need them.
Building Organizational Culture and Leadership
01:15:28
Speaker
How do you invest that proactively is something we've been doing for the last eight, nine months.
01:15:32
Speaker
just investing in culture first, investing in principles-driven decision-making first, what are the principles, making it explicitly known, sharing it with people. We just explicitly laid out our values last year in November, December, we did a leadership off-site. That was the best thing we did. People just loved it. 10 of our N-1s.
01:15:54
Speaker
just what are the values that resonate best with us and our users and how will we hold each other accountable towards those values and our actions like the values are another thing, right? Virtues, right? What are the virtues through which we exhibit those actions that will hold us accountable to the values that we are seeing that are hanging so beautifully in any wallpaper, right? So I think that every week and every month, how do you kind of institutionalize those virtues?
01:16:18
Speaker
that we do that through town halls and just making it part of every week reviews, decision making. I think still there is a lot of room to do better over there, but we are in a far better place where we were like a year back where we didn't work just solving this reactively.
01:16:35
Speaker
This is like a biggest learning curve for founders of building things. We've brought in leaders, exceptionally good leaders. Also because other than I realize that we have to really build this into a large business, like a $10 billion company, which we truly want to build this into. And that means like one million reversals and maybe like one million another therapy happening. We will need people, senior leaders who have done this.
01:17:02
Speaker
And how do you kind of build a culture that they would love to be part of? So you have to co-create that org with them. How do you open that up? How do you kind of, you know, not think of yourself as, you know, we are founders just mean that we are the first people here, nothing else here, nothing else and nothing more. There's just a tag and nothing else. How do you kind of create more voices in the room, more dissent in the room, more debates in the room? How do we encourage that?
01:17:27
Speaker
How do you kind of explicitly say that, you know, I'm wrong. My assumption was wrong. This is what I thought. I didn't have access to this data. How do you open it up? Because everyone should have a very strong voice. And then while that happens, the biggest challenge is everyone has a voice. Everyone's debating. We tend to become slow in decision making.
01:17:45
Speaker
That's what happens in corporates, right? Nobody wants to be slow. It's just that when everyone is having a voice, things tend to get slow. And so this is one thing that for org building, we have to ensure that we are co-creating the org at the same time. Also know that in the early stage, up to like a 50 crore sort of a revenue stage, a 10 million, 100 million crores, it's founders who kind of have to kind of lift all the verticals up, have to go to the 10th level of detail.
01:18:15
Speaker
So how do we balance the speed, the decision making, sometimes just saying that it's my call. I'm deciding and let's just go ahead with it with giving people enough voice that they are feeling at the school creation. I think these two are the balancing these two things is something that I'm also kind of learning. So fortunately or whatever, I think I've had the, uh, I've always felt that having a coach really helps because I'm a coach myself.
01:18:43
Speaker
I have a business coach in the morning, even though I'm a coach. So as a, and this, when you're building an org, you need a coach as well. That's been my learning. So I had a coach in my seat to series a journey, Rahul Chaudhary, who's the founder of three both these are currently at matrix. He's someone who baptized me into consulting.
01:19:01
Speaker
Amazing learning. Then I had like Rahul Bhargav in my series A to pre-series B journey. He's currently joining us as a founding team member. He's kind of moving in from Canada right now. And now I'm working with another person who's just kind of helping me with this. I think this is like the toughest thing that you've asked me about. Yeah.
01:19:19
Speaker
Amazing. You said that little nugget that it's best to hire dieticians fresh out of a nutritionist, fresh out of college. What have you discovered about hiring leaders? Is there any thesis that you found that this is the kind of leaders you should hire? Should you hire people with relevant experience from the industry, or should you hire people from, say, consulting companies and iBanks?
01:19:44
Speaker
I have had one learning while interviewing hundreds of product managers and can you believe it, out of eight years of our journey, this company had a product manager for only six months. It's just been me and Aditya, unlike many of our competitors or any other companies, because I think there's something I retrospectively learned after speaking to my peers from McKinsey. So I think
01:20:14
Speaker
Finding great product managers is all about going deeper with them in their problem finding skills. When given a chaotic problem, how do they prioritize data? How do they problem find? Classic case interviews is something that helps you find that. Give them an assignment to find.
01:20:31
Speaker
Like, are they spending 80, 90% of the time in structuring the problem, identifying the problem? I think any decent, half passionate person can solve the problem. I think it takes real competency and wisdom to problem find, invest time in problem finding. So biggest learning is, my observation is anyone who's saying like, I'm doing product management five years, four years, doesn't matter, man. They have to do like a first principles case.
01:20:55
Speaker
And if I don't see your problem finding skills, I think I just generally tend to pass on it. There's something which is validated by a couple of my peers from McKinsey who said they had seven product managers and six of them were like people from without any PM experience. They just brought in like consultants. Excellent consultants gave them problem and they were solving it better than the classic definition of product managers. Just like one learning in terms of one functional skill.
01:21:18
Speaker
And I think a similar of that can get applied to growth as well. People with first principles and people who can move faster will definitely improve things, especially for new categories. You need solid first principle thinker, but not for everything. Do not reinvent the wheel for HR. Do not reinvent the wheel for finance.
01:21:37
Speaker
These are solved problems. So don't try to innovate in HR and just learn from all the best cultures out there and create your own playbook. Like for us, we just read the Netflix culture code or Zappos culture code and kind of picked up whatever we could. And how do we build our coaching academy? It was all inspired by Tony says thinking for in Zappos, like all coaches just get kind of see some sort of promotion or some sort of
01:22:04
Speaker
uptake every six months, you know, all those sort of little things are built in the org structure. Org is like the biggest tool that our founder has at his disposal. For leaders, I think while competency is obviously essential, I think trades as well. Because if you're bringing in someone too senior,
01:22:25
Speaker
Are they able to roll up their sleeves and just go deeper? That's a trait for which you need to identify. Because someone who's just been part of 100 crore, 2000 crore journey, are you bringing them in 1 to 10 crores? It's going to be super hard. Is the person going to find super hard unless the person has traits and virtues that he will kind of, you know, go deeper. He's the first principal guy as well.
01:22:46
Speaker
Well, a lot of stuff will not work, but a lot of stuff will work. So half the stuff will work or half the stuff will not work. So how do you identify people who are able to manage these two things? I think this is when you need to keep in mind when you're hiring leaders and probably just bring in people who are just one stage ahead of the company, not two stages, not three stages ahead. That is another sort of a
01:23:08
Speaker
that is all sort of an observation and feeling that I have and they just find it easier to kind of assimilate or it just depends on the person right if they're willing like we recently brought in our leader in our revenue
01:23:20
Speaker
And he's like 10, 15 years elder to me. And initially, both the founders are having concerns whether we will do jail. Our team is of 22, 23, 24-year-olds. But would you believe it? He kind of gels much better with the 24-year-olds than both founders because he's out partying with them, out drinking with them. So you need someone to exhibit those sort of things.
01:23:48
Speaker
gel into the cultures, how cultural fit is very important there. First principles and cultural fit. I think these are the two things because they just give you like an unfair advantage. If someone is a very good cultural fit and a very good first principle problem solver, you'll always have an advantage when the situations change. Yeah. And the best way to judge first principles thinker is through a case study or like what are the ways it gives them a problem that they've not seen or seen before and do a case on that.
01:24:17
Speaker
how do they kind of break the problem open, whether they're seeking, you know, all sorts of classic McKinsey case solving sort of approach. So I think that's at least it gives you an idea how the person will think on ground right when an unknown problem erupts. Just take them into unknown territory and give them a problem. Let's see how they go about it. That's the way to judge first principle cultural is more like
01:24:39
Speaker
talking to doing some strong reference checks, just hanging out with them, bringing them for lunch, dinner, whatever you can, just to see the vibe, right? And your gut feeling will be there. It'll tell you whether you want to work with the person or not. Maybe organize like a three days out of a working sort of a thing, right? Just do a problem solving session. We've not explicitly done that, but I've heard companies do that to a really good extent.
01:25:02
Speaker
Just ensuring that both parties have a very good chance of understanding how they work with each other. It's always good to do that. And then ensuring you have a day 30 pit stop, day 60 pit stop once they're in. So you're giving them feedback on similar things.
01:25:16
Speaker
It's a hard thing to do. Pitched up is like a review meeting, like general feedback and how you. General, whether it's meeting their expectations, whether they're understanding their goals, what they need to do, and if there's any observation that you have that you want to share with them, equip them, those sort of soft things, they're important. I'm just still getting better at it, I would say. Not that great. Not that great at it, yeah.
01:25:44
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.