Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Building the medical safety net for corporate India | Kulin Shah @ Onsurity
21 Plays1 month ago
Inspired by his Gujarati family's business background, Kulin Shah of Onsurity, shares his entrepreneurial journey. His journey began during his college days, where he and a colleague attempted to start a business in exporting wedding cards and an EdTech platform, both unsuccessful.
In this episode he shares how he pivoted from the early business ventures and his roles at Aditya Birla group and Reliance, Free Charge and Acko to create Onsurity, a holistic platform for health and wellness, including mental wellness plans, gym memberships, and insurance options.
Kulin shares his key learnings that helped him to understand the financial realities and how he differentiated in a competitive market by adopting unique positioning strategies.
Listen to the episode to learn more about how Kulin built Onsurity.
Recommended
Transcript
Kulin Shah's Entrepreneurial Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
everyone this is colle shier i'm the co-founder on charity
00:00:15
Speaker
Hi everyone, this is Kulin Shah here. I'm the co-founder at Onshority. Kulin, you're operating in a very competitive space. I mean, globally, it's a very competitive space. And I really want to know how you scaled in such a difficult industry. But first, just take me through your journey of how did you become an entrepreneur? What was that journey of finding you want to be an entrepreneur, finding the idea, building the skills through your career which is possible right so I think answer is a little longish one why being an entrepreneur you know I come from a Gujati family you know the family has had a background of everyone doing their own business right and I think somewhere down the line that always stays with you that, okay, you know, you want to do something of your own. My first ever entrepreneurship, you know, a stint and not many people know this actually. And I think this is the first time actually going and public with it is that during my graduation days, a colleague of mine and I wanted to do something of our own.
00:01:24
Speaker
And we started in the exports business. We wanted to export wedding cards and CDs. And this talking about is 2002. So that time CDs were relevant. and kind it And we wanted to do something around wedding cards. ah Failed at it. um And then in one of the, you know, in one of the other summer vacations, we tried to build an edtech platform, ah which was just towards, you know, getting, you know, test papers and examination papers of board exams online. But, you you know, know, some some other other project project internally internally came came in, in. so So, abandoned I abandoned that that also. also. And And hence, hence, somewhere somewhere down down the the line, line, it it was was there there that, that, you know, I wanted to do off something of my own. After that, obviously, you know, followed the regular journey of, you know, doing my graduation in management studies. Then did my MBA.
Lessons from Vishburg and Free Charge
00:02:20
Speaker
I went on to join Arithya Birla Group as a management trainee. Spent close to about, you know, two, two and a half years out there. And being a management trainee, you know, got the opportunity to work across multiple businesses. Did some work in corporate strategy and then went on to join idea. And then after that, you know, got an opportunity to be a part of a VC fund. This was the CVC arm of Reliance ADAG. CVC is corporate venture capital. Yes, corporate venture capital. And interestingly, this is in the year of 2008. You know, I told people I'm joining a venture capital fund and believe me, no one knew what venture capital was. So they said, what will you do? I said, I will invest in small companies. And they said, oh, penny stocks. So what are you going to do? And I was like, no, no, these are companies which have not started, you know, or are not listed, right? These are very early stage companies. And people are like, okay, sure, you know, all the best in whatever you do. And that was my flush that's my first into the startup space. This is back in 2008. Obviously, 2008 was not the best time to enter, you know, any kind of ah investment, you know, entity, right? The whole recession in US. But I think that was those the formative years for me to kind of, you know, really have a firsthand look at entrepreneurship, you know, saw the real core of, you know, entrepreneurs. And believe me, that time, liquidity was not the way it is available today, right? That time, a seed round of $100,000 was a very big deal. Today, angels put in $100,000, right?
00:04:04
Speaker
So, you know, saw that very upfront, saw how, you know, entrepreneurs are actually building business fundamentally. And this was the time, you know, when companies were actually going behind the real core of the business, solving for that core, right? When entrepreneurs were there who are helping always each other out. And I think that was very, very inspirational, right? The reason I took up entrepreneurship was because I was sitting in a particular board meeting, right? And there's a seasoned entrepreneur close to what, 20, 25 years of experience. And during the Reliance CVC days during my Reliance yeah Reliance days right you're in a board meeting and you suddenly feel the urge to you know give your two cents on a business that an entrepreneur has seen for so long right the entrepreneur just smiled at my suggestion very very kind of very kind of and that's the time it hurt you know saying that like you know it's so easy to be on the other side but you know the joy of being on the opposite side you know seeing it day in and day out right was a time when I decided that yes you know that is something that I really want to kind of you know do in my life and that's when you know started with my first entrepreneurial journey this was a company called Vishburg this is when we kind of you know were trying to build a social bucket list and then see how we can help people to achieve their wishes ran that for three and a half years out of a small flat this was India focused this was no this was actually global focused and I think that is something that we could have done better. This was a truly global platform. We had people from close to about 8,900 odd countries, you know, rediscovering us through Google and all of those things and just kind of, you know, sharing their bucket list with us and ran for about three, three and a half years. A lot of, lot of learnings, a lot of things on saying that, oh, this is how you should not be doing business, right? We, in fact, we had raised a small amount of capital at that point of time from India Quotient. Then, you know, and at that point of time, got an opportunity to work with the India Quotient team to start, you know, sort of a mentorship program. And that's when I kind of, you know, got, again, another exposure of, you know, meeting now the who's who of the, you know, startup phase. Back then, you know, knowing Anand Chen of CleverTap or knowing Dipinder Kowal of Zomato or Kunal Shah at Free Charge, right? Was like, you know, yeah, we are part of the same ecosystem. Obviously, a lot of respect for what they were building, but, you know, all of us were part of the same ecosystem. And being with them and, you know, exchanging thoughts with them was really, really something that helped in the next phase of the journey where Free Charge got acquired by Kunal at Free Charge. What I want to whisper, you shut that down? Yeah, we failed. We shut that down. We were acquired by Kunal, right? Kunal was, yeah. So Kunal was building the next growth phase at Free Charge. And one before we start Free Charge. What were the learnings from Visper? It seems to me like Visper could have succeeded if you had not raised money because it could have been a lifestyle business. Maybe you would have been 500,000 to 1 billion year kind of small product. I mean, there are lots of these micro SaaS is what they call them these days. It could have been a micro SaaS, maybe monetization through ad revenue, stuff like that, but not a VC-grade business for sure. And I'm saying this purely based on is there a time, is there monetization? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I think in today's day and age, I think Vishbhuk could have been a fairly big, interesting platform to have. I think back in the days, we were slightly early, right? Is that part of time? I don't see the time. What do what's the, you, I mean, what do you see? So think about it this way that, you know, people are kind of, this is all before you had the Instagrams of the world, right? Where you could actually go, you know, say that, okay, this is what I want to do, right? A bucket list of sort, right? I'm putting these bucket lists out there. It was, it also morphed into a sort of a social networking platform, right? Where people could come and discover each other's bucket list, right? I could add something that you would like to my bucket list, right? We also experimented with, you know, things like group buying, right? Where, say, 25 people in the same city could actually come together, right? And get a great discount on, say, an iPhone, right? Or could get a great discount on a Tata Nexon, right? I think back then it was a little early because we are all web first, right? It was not mobile native. Penetration was not there. People were always asking, people are already asking at that point of time, so why do we need to be on Facebook? This is of 2011 I'm talking about. India internet had not seen that, you know, that juncture. Yeah, the geo effect or the 4G effect, right? Where everyone had a smartphone in their hand, right? So I think time is definitely there, right? Because today also, right now while you're talking to me, right? There are three things that you wish for, three things that you want to buy, right? Two of them could be aspirational. One could be like, I need to buy it, right? And today with the disposable income that is available, I think it was a great way for people to discover what next, right? And that's exactly what we do on these social network platforms, right? Oh, someone bought something new, I want to do it, right? So I think a lot of scope for a product like Amazon has this for donkey's years now, right? The wishlist product, Yes. Right? Yes. I don't know whether they've, whether they call it that, whether they've scaled it or not, but I think a product outside of that would have definitely scaled and look at the amount of commerce that is happening. Look at the number of brands that are there today. Right? Great way to monetize it. Great way. And like, like you rightly said, right? A great way to run an ad network. I know exactly what you want. Google still knows and search intent, but a platform like this would actually know what exactly you want. I can exactly give the contextual feed for it. So I think it was a great one. I could have a discussion, but why would people come again and again? If this seems like a one-time thing, why would you come? Exactly. I think the needed hooks were not there. Right. That has been one of the biggest learnings. I think at that point of time, the thought process was on growth, engagement, and not on gratification. Right? I think if you can get some of those levers right, where there is growth, there is engagement, and obviously a way to gratify. Small, small things like I want to lose weight. I put it up as a wish. People come, start engaging with me. In the middle, some say a trainer comes and says, hey, you know what? Let me help you. Right. I'm able to put photographs. Right. Creates a feed of my, you know, wish list and what I've achieved. Right. It's my way of telling the world what all I've achieved in life. Right. I think that's something that will definitely bring people back. Okay. Do you think it was the right call to raise VC money? Yeah, because you didn't have money, right, at that point of time. And especially for me, someone like me who comes from the VC space, right, knows that there is money that can be raised out there. Right? So, you definitely want to put your previous learnings into practice and say, hey, you know what? Yes, we can raise money. But you raised before your PMF, right? We raised it during getting our PMF. So, it was still in the early days for sure. But we had like a year's, you know, we did a years years journey and then we kind of raised money so yeah so Kunal sir did an ACQUI hire so he was looking at you for driving growth and recharge yes I think at that point of time they were looking at you know someone to start something as growth partnerships, right? And these growth partnerships were something that, you know, we really wanted to see if they could, you know, bring in organic growth, but through partnerships wherein you kind of leverage other people's platform. And, you know, how do you get the users from that particular platform to kind of, you know, transact on your platform, right? And that time, free charge was not that big as yet, right? So, you know, what we realized is that, hey, you know what, we could actually say, do a tie-up with someone like an Amazon, right? We could do a tie-up with, back then there was a company called Line Messenger, right in India. You know, there were like millions of users out there, right? And you actually held the currency of those users, which is Recharge, right? So if you were able to kind of give them the right, you know, offers and rewards for doing certain, you know, fulfilling certain objectives, right? I think it was a great, you know, way to kind of re-envision how to bring users at a very low cost, right? Because at that point of time also, I remember that the growth partnership channel, the one that I was leading, right, had the lowest amount of cost and that actually brought down our, you know, overall cost of marketing from our acquisitions perspective. And mind you, these are people who are digitally native. These are transacting users. These are users who are already used to doing a certain user journey on the mobile. And hence, when you get these kind of users, they are bound to be more sticky. They are bound to be people who, you know, are not looking at doing things like cash on delivery and stuff like that. So, yeah, very valuable users as an organization. So that was the thought process to kind of, you know, do something like this. And this was, you stayed after the acquisition with Snapdeal also with Access. Yeah. After Snapdeal, yes, I was there. So we joined Free Charge in 2014, mid-2014. And the Snapdeal acquisition actually happened sometime in April of 2015. And, you know, that's the time when, you know, being Snapdeal, right? They knew that there was a great opportunity for someone to do something in the payment space. They're already looking at doing something in payment space. And this is exactly what they thought that, you know, would give a big boost is a huge user base of Freecharge. Plus, you know, because Freecharge had no COD, which means it had only online paying customers. Right? And these customers are the ones who would actually use if you have your own wallet. So, at that point of time, wallet was very fancy. Right? Yeah. Everyone wanted a wallet. Right? Yes. Yes. So, Paytm, Wobiquake. Ola, by the way, had a wallet. Yes, I remember. I know I used to compete with Ola and I was like, boss, Ola has got a wallet. How are you going to compete against them? But surprisingly, we had a great, great team out there. The late Bovind Rajan, who was ex-Airtel and ex-HUL, you know, led the show of Recharge post the Snapdeal acquisition. So, and that was the time when we saw the massive point of inflection, right? We acquired close to about 1 lakh online merchants in less than 12 months. And that was a mandate that was given to me and my team. Right. And out of which close to what 150, 175 odd merchants were direct integrations. Right. Obviously you obviously work with other PGs and all, but, you know, having 150, 175 direct integrations was an amazing, amazing thing with, you know, the who's who brand of at that point of time, right? E-commerce brands, food delivery brands, right? Even ride hailing companies, right? So, that's a great inspection point. Like say, as a matter of if it tied up with free charge, then there would be an option to pay by free charge when you're checking out absolutely and I think these partnerships actually you know were good turning point for me personally because I realized that how you position yourself as a partner is very important right if I ever position myself as a payment company right I would actually be talking to only CFOs and the only thing that I would be talking about is what is the merchant rate that I need to give them, the MDR. And that's where all the conversations will fall. We realize that that's not the way we should take our wallet. We should actually talk about our wallet as a growth engine because WeChat had 50 million users at that point of time. Right? So we would go and tell brands that, do you want to work with a company which can drive 50 million users to your platform? Right? Which are contextually very relevant for you. Right? Our users are the ones who will obviously use our wallet. That means that reduces your share of COD. And by the way, COD was big out then. We didn't have our UPIs at that time. So I tell a lot of new entrepreneurs saying that if you can survive in a world where there is no UPI, right? That's the world that I doubt from. So true, so true. Right? And we built a platform at a time when, you know, Facebook was not the growth engine, right? So a lot of these things, you know, started feeling that how do you position your product, right? In a highly commoditized market, right? Is going to be the key of it. If you go and tell everyone, hey, I'm a wallet, I'm a payment platform, please use me. They'll say, boss, line, right? There are 10 people who also want to work with me. I'm not going to entertain you, right? And that's exactly what we're trying to do, right? So, moved gears and said, no, no platform. We'll invest in money to drive transactions. We'll be like an extended marketing arm where we'll do all of this talking about your platform, talking about the cool features and then drive transactions to our platform. So, in fact, I remember that we did a full page EP or a Times of India ad just with all the logos of partners who had been integrated with us and saying that you can transact anywhere and across these partners and we'll give a certain amount of, you know, either a discount or a cashback, right? And I think that was very well thought through, right? Seeing that was one single ad, I get my partners, you know, buy-in. Plus, I can go back to the consumer and say, trust me because I work with the best brands in India. Yes. And I think this is truly, truly a partnership model. And yeah, very, very interesting journey at Free Charge. Did the partnership as Growth Hack continue at
Entering the Insurance Sector with ACCO
00:20:33
Speaker
ACCO? So you joined ACCO next, right? Yeah, so there was demonetization in 2016. And that's the time when I left Free Charge because I wanted to personally take a small break because my wife was in US. So went ahead and took a sabbatical. I think everyone whom I knew was in the space said, you are making the biggest mistake of your career because who leaves doing demonetization in a company which is into wallet? Right? But I think it's okay. In the hindsight, it's all okay. I was in the US for close to about seven months. Great learnings out there. Getting to a completely different side of, you know, the industry. You know, how people think about growth, how people think about engagement, how people think about business out there. Right? Got a first-hand experience. When I came back to India, yes, I had a few offers in hand, but there was this one company which was really standing out at that point of time, it was ACO. And that's how I kind of joined them as an early team member. I remember when I signed my offer letter in September 2017, they didn't have the official license from the IRDA. They were just in the process of receiving it. And I was one of the early team members out there. And I was like, you know, why am I even joining an insurance company, right? Like, although for my dad, it was a big thing because he's like, least you should buy some insurance from the recharge. So my dad was a complete disbeliever of the startup ecosystem. He first said you're starting your own company does not make profit. Why should someone invest in you? Then he said you're the recharge. What are you really doing? You are getting tired. The one who scratches the card and gives you a recharge. What are you doing? And I actually showed him a press release of a free charge to tell him that no, this company is stable. And now suddenly I'm joining a company which is completely new into insurance. He said, you haven't sold insurance. And I never owned a car. So I didn't even know about motor insurance. Right? So he said, what do you do there? I said, let's figure it out. Right? So when I was talking to the Aiko guys, right? I think the one thing that they really kind of saw was the potential of creating contextual products, creating micro products. And that's because that's what's the key at free charge, right? How do you create offers and rewards which are small in nature, but kind of had a higher perception value, right? And I think that's what something that we were kind of looking at ACCO to do, kind of completely disrupt how people looked at insurance. And I think one of the biggest learning at Recharge was you need to give some reward to remove friction when you're buying a product. And especially when you're trying a new product. ACCO, right? We had to remove the friction for someone to trust the brand. And I think partnership was going to be that one thing where you could actually partner, again, big brands, right? Large companies with large bases, right? And put a contextually, you know, product out there which didn't hurt the wallet. Somebody's booking an Uber trip and you insured accident insurance for two rupees or something like that. I'm assuming that's... And that was actually the first product, right? Like you mentioned, right? It was actually with Ola, right? We actually provided, I think, if not India's possibly, if not the globe, so at least India's first ever one rupee insurance, you know, out there, right? See, embedded insurance was not new, right? People were already embedding it, right? China was doing it, US in some shape and format was doing it. I think travel insurance also has always been an embedded product. Buy tickets and this. Correct. Right. So I think embedded insurance was not new because people were attaching insurance and this is like since 2012, 2014. Right. But I think how you go about doing it was something that, you to kind of do it differently. Creating a complete online journey for claims, ensuring that people and that's where my colleague at ACCO, who's my now co-founder, Yogesh, how to kind of look at risk how to look at data right and and then how to kind of you know create models around that so something that was very interesting we did that ACCO I think when I left ACCO in 2020 we had as in my portfolio had insured close to about 40 million unique users and we had a book of close to about 100 crores in gross return premium or GWP. Right? So, yeah, very interesting. What is this term, gross return premium? So, the revenue that an insurance company gets is, it's the premium that you pay for an insurance. Right. So that is the and then gross return premium is the upfront amount that you take from a particular user. Okay. Right. And then comes the next term called earned premium which is actually divided by the exposure period. So for example, if you're buying a car insurance for say 1200 rupees, you pay upfront that is 1200 rupees. That is the GWP. And then when you divide it by 12 for that month, right? It is basically 100 rupees. That is the earned premium for that month. So yes,, that's crossed it. Okay. Got it. And I think in the last one or two decades, there have only been two new companies, ACCO and Digital. So, actually, there have been new companies. There was Aditya Birla, which launched their health insurance company in 2016, if I'm not mistaken. Right? Then there were the Edelweiss of the Worlds who had launched. But I think digitally, people who are digital native, Digit and Echo got the license around the same time. I think there's a difference of one day basically between the licenses getting issued. So, yeah. I think they've always been called as the digital native insurance companies. Right? Why is this? Why hasn't there been an explosion here? Is it that the license is hard to get or what is? I think the regulators have been fairly, fairly cautious of whom they want to give the insurance to, right? It's a very, very specialized business. And if you see, it's very similar to even the recent, from an RBI perspective, from the banking license perspective, right? They've really not given it to too many people, right? I think there are two things. One, that not too many people actually qualify for even starting these kind of companies. And even if you qualify, at the end of the day, it's not just any other business. You're actually talking about the money of the end user. And in this case, the policyholder's money. The policyholder, imagine, has given you 100 rupees, hoping that someday in their need, you'll give them 1000 rupees, right? If a company does not do well, or, you know, you just kind of dole out licenses, right? And the company does not do well, right? At the time of the need, right? I have not only lost my 100 rupees, but the time of the need, I'm also not getting the 1,000 rupees that I'm supposed to get. I think it's a cautious move, but if you see the recent news, the now chairman, Devashish Pandaji, you see under his regime, a lot of new licenses have come. A lot of new players have got licenses at this point of time, right? Right from Digit and ACCO getting life insurance licenses to a company called Shema, who's got a general insurance license to Narayana Health, who's got a health insurance license, right? And all of this in the last, you know, 12 to 16 months, right? So, yeah, I think the regulator has now kind of seen the, you know, the potential of the country, right, of now, because we have been a completely, completely underpenetrated country when it comes to insurance. So, the term that people normally say is, you know, insurance penetration. It's basically the, you know, the spends in insurance versus your GDP, right? Okay. Globally, and I think I was reading this number somewhere that globally, US has got close to about 8.6% penetration when it comes to, you know, non-life insurance. India is at 1%. Right? And that's the scope that we have today. Right. China is close to possibly about 2 or 2.5. Right. So emerging economies, right, have traditionally seen very low penetration of insurance. And hence the only penetration of insurance, you know, back in the days was only motor insurance because that was regulated, right? So motor used to be the largest book from an insurance perspective. And I think that's what ACCO wanted to and continues to do is kind of focus on motor insurance, right? And I think the partnership business that we brought on board, right, would possibly become a funnel to creating that brand awareness, telling people that, hey, you already trusted us, you know, now trust us and there's possibly more business, right? So I think that's what embedded insurance does worldwide is that, you know, you get in contextually, you create a brand awareness. If there's a claim, you bring in that trust element. And I have seen one thing that any new brand always uses partnership as a model to kind of see a growth spurt. Because no one will trust you, and rightly so. But when you are kind of working with a favorite brand of mine and they trust you I have a reason to say hey you know what they've done their business right of you know checking you out possibly like we yeah that's the rub off effect right that's the I call it the goodwill that kind of you know you get it's the shared goodwill that you start getting out of there right so what you're saying is that one rupee accident insurance is not a revenue leader, but it's a funnel item. It's a way to build a funnel. It allows you to further cross into them a car insurance, you know, other such products. I would slightly disagree because whenever you think about partnership models, you also look at high volume while the value is low, but you see at high volume use cases, right? Yeah, there's a lack of Uber rides every day. Correct, correct, right? So I think, I think I'm not sure, but if my memory serves me right, I think the partnership business that, you know, at Aco that we are running contributed close to about 25% of its overall revenue. Right? Okay. So, I would not say necessarily that it was not a, you know, revenue leader. In fact, partnership business had a lot of stability to it, had a lot of predictability to it. Because you're not spending on customer acquisition. Exactly, right. In some sense, I always used to tell myself, this is a great business because customers are actually paying you to become a customer. Right? That's true. true. One One of of those those guys guys doing doing performance performance marketing. marketing. That's Yeah, that's true. It's good to understand this. So then how did the onshore idea come to you?
Founding Onshority and Its Mission
00:33:20
Speaker
So I had tasted blood of sabbatical. Okay. I knew that at first. The first time I've heard someone say that they tasted the blood of sabbatical. Oh, by the way, I'm very proud of it. And I tell everyone that they should take a sabbatical at least once in seven or eight years. I think it does wonders to you. The kind of exposure that you get is unparalleled, right? And I'm going to digress a little. I remember this one conversation in a fintech meet in New York where I met someone and said, so what are you doing in New York? I said, I'm doing a sabbatical. He said, I've worked for 25 years and I've never taken a sabbatical in my life. I don't understand your generation, Right? And here I'm telling people take a sabbatical. That's what it does to you. So the last time my wife was in New York and this time around my sister was in New York, I said my sister is elder to me and there's no reason why a younger brother should not mooch off his sister and take some pocket money and be in her New York apartment and enjoy that little knowing that after putting down your papers in January COVID is going to come in March oh shucks did you manage to land with New York or you couldn't fly out lean? I couldn't fly out itself. Okay. So, and around the time that I left, you know, Yogesh was kind of, you know, dribbling with the idea of doing something in the healthcare for SMEs, right? Saying that, you know, he's seen SMEs firsthand and, you know, he was sharing some, you know, some anecdotes saying that, dude, you know, a guy in my office met with an accident and now I have to pay this guy, right? And he used to run a consulting firm that time. He said, I'm trying to hire people and from like, and see, Yogesh's background comes from insurance, right? 13 years in insurance, you know, and he's an actuary, right? And he's like, dude, I can't get a product for my consulting company, which is 15 people, right? I'm having to justify to outside, you know, in insurance facing that why they should give me a product. He's like, I'm not liking this. And that's the time, you know, we said, hey, you know what, let's do something for the SMEs. And, you know, but what is that thing that we can do for SMEs, right? SMEs tend to kind of, you know, want to do something for their employees, either to retain them or to, you know, hire them, right? And especially white collar SMEs at that point of time were always on the back foot because one, I can match salaries, but I can't give the perks and benefits of a Google or a big four or a highly accomplished manufacturing company. I can match salaries because I know that I can get those margins. That's why I'm hiring. People wouldn't join you because one, they're taking a risk, right? Second, you're not even getting the same perks and benefits, right? And I don't know what's going to happen to my next paycheck, right? So, only the, as I say that, you know, only the brave can, you know, go to for a startup journey, right? And because they don't have any of these things, right? We said, let's do something out here, right? So we said, let's do something for SMEs. Let's do something for their employees because, you know, that would be a great way to kind of get into an SME business. And health was something that was completely underpenetrated. So just to throw a few numbers, there are close to about 63 to 65 million SMEs in India. These SMEs hire close to about 150 odd full-time employees. And if you add the contractual gig, it comes down to about 330 million people. Now, these 330 million people, if you include their dependents, right, it's close to about 650 odd million Indians, right? Now, we said, what is it that they don't have, right? They have salaries, but you know, they don't have any other benefits out there. At the same time, if you look at, so we create a triangle and we said, the top of the pyramid is all your corporate H&Is, people, and they are like, the companies give them health insurance. Then you have the bottom of the pyramid, which the government is looking at, right? Through, you know, Ayesha and Bharat. These are below the poverty line, farmers, right? And, but no one's doing anything for the middle, right? He said, boss, this is the missing middle of India when it comes to healthcare, right? Only 5% of the employers were giving some kind of insurance because either it is mandated to them via one of the, you know, back-to-back contracts or, you know, these are people who have come from outside and figured out somehow to provide a product, right? He said, but why is that no one else is buying out here, right? Are we going after a market which does not want to take this product? So we started talking to SME owners, right? Some in Bombay, some in Suraj, some back in Bangalore, right? Some in the north part of the country, right? Everyone said a very interesting thing. They said, you know, all these things are fancy things. They are not meant for us. They are meant for larger companies. And you know what? We can't spend so much of money at the outset. We need smaller products. We need smaller payments. And those guys are very big people. They have four people who are only handling insurance and insurance claims. Everything will come onto my head. Adding people,laims are there, so, you know, I don't even have someone who's going to look at the claims, right? Just too much of hassle for, right? So we said, if we are able to solve these things, so everyone laughed and said, ah, if you can solve these things, then why should we not buy it, right? And I think that was the genesis where we said, hey, personal experience is there that we need it. Market is saying that there is a need for a product like this. And then added, you know, tailwinds came from the fact that COVID happened, right? So people were looking at some kind of a financial protection, something to kind of keep them, you know, make sure that they are staying healthy, right? And at that point of time, we realized that, hey, you know, we should do something out here, right? So let's do something that drives ROI. Because see, health insurance as a financial product, if you look at it, and there's enough empirical evidence and it's a smoothened curve now, right? 8% of the people kind of go ahead and take insurance, health insurance, right? So if 100 people are buying insurance, 8% claim the product, right? That means if there are 100 people, only 8 people of them will claim in a single year, right? So if we go back and tell an SME that, you know, we are giving this product to you, the SME will now start thinking, what is ROI? Right? Then if only eight people are going to take, then why am I taking this? Right? And then, and mind you, by the way, SME owners, right, have all taken some kind of a life insurance product. And if, and if their uncles are smart enough, they would have sold the endowment product only to them. They would have never sold the term insurance. Right? You have an endowment product, I'm sure, at some point of time. I can't hear you. Sorry. Okay, sorry. This endowment is the same as ULIP, right?
00:41:28
Speaker
is separate endowment is when you know someone would have told you in your 20s that when you grow when you grow old at 50 you know you'll get bulk of the money like you know 5 lakh rupees 7 lakh rupees right not knowing that that was the worst investment product right so so all of these SMEs know that, you know, okay, at some point of time, I should get the money back, right? But health insurance doesn't work that way. So we had to give them something, right? Which was something more useful for everyone. And that's why we thought about, you know, coming up with a product focused at SMEs. Something that was not built thinking of large companies in mind, but actually thinking grassroots or people who are actually contributing to 30% of your GDP, they don't have a product today. Right? So he said, let's go behind that market. And then let's start thinking SME first. Let's start focusing on SME first experience. Right? Let's get in everything that they need as the basic thing. Let's not get distracted saying that if you go after that one 5,000 people company, amazing. We had to push ourselves and say make it operationally efficient. Make it capital efficient. Ensure that there is experience. Ensure that there is engagement. Right? And ensure that people see the value so it is sustainable. Right? It shouldn't be a one-year product and saying, let's discount. Right? So we said that SME focused. From a capital perspective, we said, you know, rather do that capital, we said, what should the product be looking like? We said, let's not just give health insurance. Actually, let's give them health and wellness also, right? And at that point of time, teleconsultations, at-home checkups, you know, discounted medicines, right? All of these are great value drivers for an SME because, you know, employees, if you give them like a 60% discount on a lab test, give them almost like a 20% discount on medicines, right? It's a big, big savings for them, right? Which means that, oh, you know, an SME now says that the employees are coming back and saying, sir, great, you know, great incentive you've given me. It is saving my money. I really appreciate what you've given me today, right? And in that 8% use case, if someone kind of, you know, has a claim, right? The SME earlier was giving these claims from their balance sheet, right? Because it's like a moral beauty that, you know, he was traveling for work, met with an accident, right? I need to pay that 75-80,000 rupees to the family for their hospital bills right and the SME always knew one thing I pay for one guy's bill I have to pay for everyone's bill and now I have to start doing a lending work because now someone will come and say sir I have given the hospital, there's a wedding in my house. Right? I'll give advance. Right? So the SMU is getting trapped in these kind of cycles. Right? So, and at that point of time, we also, you know, noticed one thing that any kind of a medical bill that came during COVID, right, actually pushed, I think, what was it? 1% or 2% of the people below the poverty line. And that too on a denominator like ours in a country, right? That's a very large number. So we said, this is possibly the product that we need to make. We combine health, wellness, and insurance. Make it modular in nature. So if someone wanted only health and wellness, they could take that. Someone wanted it along with insurance, we could bundle that. So we said we'll create India's first ever health and wellness kind of a subscription model. SMEs would not pay upfront. So we said we'll make it on a monthly basis. And hence kind of relaxing capital flow that would come out. It's now a monthly kind of a product. And this is where all the learnings of the partnership came in saying that, hey, if you want people to change behavior, if you want people to adopt a product, reduce the friction of
Onshority's Innovative Solutions and Impact
00:45:34
Speaker
coming in. So a monthly product versus an annual product made all the difference because now I have predictability of cash flows. So an SME was also happy saying that, great, I'm happy to pay on a month-on-month basis. I always pay my electricity bill. I always pay my utility bills, which is on a monthly basis. For a startup, I always pay their AWS bill on a monthly basis. So all of this monthly kind of thing really resonated well with the SMEs. The second second one one was obviously tech. You know, contrary to a lot of people's belief, right. Even in a Gupta Ji's mom and pop store, Gupta Ji uses technology, right. He files GST, right. He takes orders online. He delivers things online, right. He sells online. Right., Gupta Ji is not a guy who's like the 1960s or 1970s or 1980s Gupta Ji. Gupta Ji has a mobile phone, has done online transactions, is paying money through net banking. So, we said, for Gupta Ji, right, we will ensure that we create easy to use dashboards, right? Where an SME owner or a single HR member can, right, really use these dashboards to completely streamline their operational journey, right? So, we created these dashboards. We realized that the purchase journey for even large corporate takes about 60 to, I don't know, 60 to 75 days for getting a health insurance plan on board. Onsurity made that a five-minute journey, right? People can actually come online. They can select, you know, they can select their plan, give a monthly mandate and get out and use the dashboards to add their team members and delete their team members, right? We are the only platform today which kind of provides this kind of OTT and that's our favorite example, right? An OTT platform where you you come select your plan and just get out and then every month it keeps deducting, right? If I can use this format in your podcast is at this point of time, I want a lot of the podcast listeners or viewers to actually think about it and say, when is the time when they actually took their first Netflix subscription or their first AWS subscription or their first electricity subscription, right? No one remembers, right? No one really remembers that. So, and that's the power of, you know, monthly products. And believe me, we are a sachet economy, right? If you want to launch a new shampoo, you need to have a sachet. Yeah. Right? And that's the learning that we took when we went to our SMEs, right? So, like I mentioned, capital efficiency is sorted for operational efficiency is sorted because of our entire, you know, dashboards. When it comes to employees, we created an entire app where you could right from seeing your digital healthcare cards to seeing which hospitals you can go to, you know, getting online services of teleconsultations, getting online, you know, booking of medicines, lab tests, so on and so forth. So we are able to also drive engagement out here with the users. So the mobile app was a great way to even reduce operational inefficiencies at our end. And from the experience perspective, we realized that in insurance, everything is a paper till the claim comes. And if you can vow the person at the moment of truth, the person stays back. Then the person is like, let's not move the business from there. And I think all of us go through that journey in some format or the other. In your case, even if a new milkman comes, you say, no, dude, that guy delivers on time. Packets is fresh. Don't have to do too much of this. Why move my vendor? So we said if we can really crack claims, we'll be able to create two things. Great experience and sustainability. And two very important elements for onshorety at least and for any business I think it should be. We created a first of its kind a claims concierge team of doctors. So these are doctors who has done some work on claims in the past. And we realized that claims is a broken experience not just in India but globally. If there is one thing that people don't like about insurance, it's claims. And it's the same reason why they want to take insurance. And this is what we completely, completely disrupted. We created a team which would handhold you from at the time of pre-authorization, admission, discharge. We became the single layer where we facilitated claims with our insurance partner. We told our insurance partner, hey, let us create the experience layer. We know that you already have a challenge. And as a platform, we want to really scale. And if we start scaling and you don't use technology at your end, it means that we will never be able to scale. And we build the right layers, right? Right from, you know, letting people know which hospitals they can go to, which is the nearest hospital that they can go to, right? Where is their healthcare card? Because in most of the companies that I have worked in, right, a healthcare card was a physical card. Believe me, no one knows where they keep it. Yeah, true. And by the way, that card actually takes you about 60 days to come to you, right? After joining a new company. And here is a company like OnShorty, which is giving it on a real-time basis, right? So a lot of these things actually help to streamline the experience for our users, especially when it came to reimbursement. The reimbursement journey is broken. You have to download forms. You have to attach paperwork. Paperwork needs to be sent to either a partner or insurance company or a TPA. Once these papers go, they will look at it and then they'll ask for more papers. It takes like 60 days. And here we are in an economy where we are expecting everything to come in 10 minutes at my house. Right. And I'm looking at payments coming in the next minute, right, with the UPI. Right. For one earth, are you going to justify that your claims will take 60 days, right? So we said, hey, we're going to do completely away with paperwork. We were the first ones to kind of have a health insurance completely digital native. No requirement of adding anything which is, you know, paper driven, right? So no attachment, something. Just take photographs, send it to us, and we have back-to-back integration with our partners, right? Then we kind of start facilitating these claims, right? And this team in the middle, right, would start thinking, saying that, hey, you know what? We anticipate these gaps. We anticipate these shortfalls, So even before it goes for an investigation or adjudication, we start telling these people that these are the possible gap areas. You might want to be ready and give this to us so that we can facilitate this whole process faster. We have now time of about 24 to 48 hours. If all the documents are in place, we can pass a claim in 24 to 48 hours today along with our insurance partner. Because now our insurance partner really depends on us saying that, hey, you know what? If you can facilitate all of this, I will adjudicate first. I'll make the payments first. But But do do make sure that, you know, you get all of these documents and all of this in place and even better if it comes digitally to us, right? And there has been a sea change in how insurance companies have started looking at platforms like Onshority, right? They want to enhance their experience, right? And hence, they are okay of letting go of some amount of control, right? And saying, hey, you know what? You facilitated this for us. You built this for us and we will reciprocate with a better experience for your users. And today, by the way, CC for the entire world means credit card, but it's a nightmare in the insurance space because CC means cancelled check. Get any 24-year-old or a 26-year-old in the room and say cancelled check. They say cancelled, what's the first thing that they'll say? I said, you know that booklet in which you write and said, no, I do UPI. I don't need check. I said, no, that means check to give you money. I said, I don't know how to get that. So we've even done some of those kind of processes, right? Using the current payment stack that is developing in India, right? We've done away with those kind of things also. And hence, now think about it, you know, four years later. So we started in 2020. Four years later, we have close to about 70% of customers,
00:55:07
Speaker
you know, who've been on board with us from day one, still with us. We have a year-on-year retention ratio of close to about 80% plus, right? We now have not only SMEs working with us, but we also have inbound queries from larger organizations saying that, you know, why don't you work with us? Because we want to provide this kind of an experience to our, you know, to our employees, right? I'll not name this company because there's a confidentiality clause, but this company, it was one of our larger clients, 3,000 odd employees came to us and said, we want to work with on charity. And we said, you know, but we don't serve large companies. And they took it on themselves and said, what do you mean by you'll not serve large companies? Like, you know, who are you guys who are saying no to such a large business? And the HR made a comment saying that you are a Gujarati, how can you say no to business? Right? And I'm giving you. So I went to and told Yogesh, Yogesh, you know, you are a Marwadi, I'm a Gujarati. You know, people are actually talking about this, but we take pride of serving SMEs. Because we realized and we told these, because we expected that large companies would have, you know, this thing of, you know, we will make a phone call and we want someone to talk to us. And we said, listen, none of our customers even talk to us. They just send in an email or they just request, create a request on our app. Right? And suddenly it was a refreshing experience for large companies because now people are not rushing to HRs and saying, hey, you know what? Solve our claims query because it's already there on your app. You know, you have a real-time tracking of your claims. Right? You're not going back and saying, I can't find my card, get me a new card. You don't need to do that. It's there on the app, right? And now an SME client proudly tells a larger company saying that, guys, what you don't have, I have an access to that kind of a tech. I can't have an access to that kind of a platform. And that's the kind of experience that my, get and possibly you might not be getting that. So we feel very, very satisfied at the end of the day that empowered an SME who can now onboard a talent from a large company without having to think that will I be able to meet their expectations or not because on short, we can provide a product like that. We are able to retain key, especially in startups and places like that. They can actually retain their employees saying that, hey, you know what? All the big things that you get in larger e-commerce companies or something, we can give it to you. But stay back with with us us. Right. We are not saying, yeah. You have a health and wellness element in that. What, what is that? Like that? Yeah. Charged extra? No, no. So that is our core product. By the way, that is our core product. Right. Health and wellness is our core product. Right. Because we realized that that has got more engagement than just selling insurance. Right. So, is it like doctors concerned or doctor non-department? Yeah, absolutely. So at any given point of time, you want to talk to a doctor. Right? Across all specialties. Right? You can talk to them. Second one is you can, you know, being at home. Right? You can order for a lab test. Right? You get discounts on medicines. Right? You don't have to go to three different apps to do all of these things. At the same time, you know that Onshort is a company which has been validated by your employer whom you trust so much, right? And hence the whole, you know, the rub-off effect, right? We are actually taking the goodwill of the company, of an employer and telling the employees that, hey, you know what, this is available. I think what we solve for is access and affordability. We give the access to SMEs to provide a product like this. We give them the affordable means to provide a product like this. And we went on top of that and said, listen, SMEs might not be able to give you a plan which is meant for their entire family right so can we create plans which a person can purchase for their family members right let's give them an access even if the SME cannot afford it let's give it the access to the employee so that the employee can create an inclusive environment at home. Right? And again, being monthly, the employee does not have to think that I'll take my father, my mother, my brother. And they leave the child, what's the matter? They're still small. Right? We just wanted to move completely out of that. We wanted to create an inclusive platform. And hence, we provided all of these things under a single offering. So, yes, today we also provide things like mental wellness plans, right? We are able to kind of provide gym memberships, right? For more evolved companies or more evolved employees who want to do that. So, everything under health and wellness under a single platform, right? And those companies who want to provide insurance, we can also enable that. So yeah, that's the way we work. What is the pricing for this health and wellness thing? So you're saying this is like the core thing which you said and that people can also choose to buy insurance, like companies can choose to buy insurance also. Correct, correct. So what is the pricing? Pricing starts at 49 rupees per employee per month. Right? Interesting anecdote out here. When we were building our office, right? We had a carpenter who came in. He had a team of about 8 or 10 people. So, we told him that, you, in review, give something like this. So he said, all these are all big fancy companies. You know, I need to make sure that I'm giving them their salaries. So he said, what if we give you a product which is, you know, less than 100 rupees on a monthly basis you need to pay for them. He started smiling and laughing and said, sir, there are no such products only. He said, we have a product. This is exactly the office that you're building for. He said, I'm more than happy to buy this because I spent close to what 400, 450 rupees only on the chai and nasha, that is tea and snacks for the whole month. Right. And you're giving me a healthcare and wellness product, which has, you know value right at less than rupees 100 right and in fact if he in fact went for an upgraded version of our health and wellness plan where he said sir you can include insurance also right and that starts at about 145 rupees per employee per month right so yeah so So that's. that's how we kind of really, really created a micro health and wellness subscription product for SMEs. What is your revenue split between insurance free subscription for SMEs? Yeah. So from a revenue perspective, obviously, you know, insurance is a large part of it. But over the last few years, right, we started seeing a huge steep curve in our health and wellness because people are using more of teleconsultations. People are kind of, you know, using more of these products, right? As and when the awareness starts increasing, right? We have seen close to about 30 to 40% growth on the health and wellness business here and year now in terms of adoption. In fact, this is in line with the industry also. One of the hospital chains which recently published their quarterly results. I think their EBITDA has increased 33% year on year basis, only on their health and wellness part. I'm not talking about the hospital business, I'm talking about the business which is outside of that. And I think this country is now seeing that health and wellness revolution, right? One of the recent papers that CII published, it mentioned that 72% of the workforce is asking for health and wellness products, right? They are saying that we want products which are, you know, customized to our needs, right? Or to our age group, right? And we're seeing that as a big, big uptake today, right? Across the, you know, working population, right? People are investing, investing on you know being fit, on making sure that they're taking prevention and not just going for a cure at the end of hour. People are taking more care of their physical appearance. People are moving away from becoming Google doctors to actually going to a doctor and saying, these are my symptoms. Right? So I think that kind of a moment we're seeing. Oh, by the way, there's an entire book on how that is going to come up. So that's for a different discussion between you and me on a later date. But there's an entire book that is actually trying to say that, you know, that will also come through ChatGPT. But give me like, is it like 25% of your revenue is from health and wellness or more or less? It's more than 30% today. Okay. Got it. Which is indecisible. Yeah. A premium will always be a bigger amount. Correct. Okay. So, you know, the product and how you have differentiated it is, so it's a differentiated product when you compare with legacy players. Like if you were to try and buy insurance through one of the legacy players, but now you have competitors in there are four or five other companies who have rings. I think maybe you've raised more than them, but they're neck-to-neck. It's not the house money they have also raised. The pitch is similar. Digital experience, complete self-service, hassle-free. So what is the right to win for insurance within this cohort of startups who are doing group health insurance? Right. So one, we never positioned ourselves as a group health insurance company, right? We always positioned ourselves as a health and wellness company, which also obviously can, you know, extend it to insurance. I think we are one of the few players who have stuck to our ground and have, you know, focused on SMEs, right? I think most of the folks that we know of have now either moved from SMEs to mid-market or large corporates. And I think the reason why we were able to kind of, you know, have that, you know, ability to stick to the ground, right? So we work with close to about 6,000 organizations today and we have served close to about 1.2, 1.3 million customers, right? And I think we are one of the fastest growing in the space today. I think the reason is because we, and as cliched it might sound, right, we really, really leverage technology, right, in the right way, right? For example, most of the folks in the space, right, they work with about 8 to 10 insurance companies. Okay. On sure, at the other hand, when I work with 8 to 10 insurance companies, I cannot, you know, standardize any of my processes, right? Right from a PSU to a private to a more, you know, digital friendly private. There is a spectrum of players today in this space. Each one of them having a separate way of looking at business, right? Different way, different system, different technology, different processes. Some are manual, some are digitized and possibly known as digital, right. And I think that's where we kind of said, listen, till we don't play the most important role in the consumer experience. Right. We don't think that, you know, others, you know, our back-to-back providers will be able to kind of help us scale. Right. And that's where we kind of, to SMEs, because we were able to, say, work only with one or two, you know, companies. But at the same time, ensure that we own the entire customer experience. Right. At every stage, right at the time of purchase, right, we told them, you're buying an onshorety subscription. Right? Yes, it does come with an insurance from other player, but we as on-shorty will take the onus of the customer experience. We will ensure that we are the pathway between you and the insurance company. You don't have to go to, because for another organization, you are just one single atomic unit. But in my fabric, possibly the most important stitch, that if I don't deliver my experience to you, my entire garment might just fall. So I think that has actually helped us differentiate and that has actually helped us to kind of keep our customers engaged. For example, we were the first ones in the space to have a mobile app, right? We are the first ones to kind of ensure that we have a digital journey and not a digitized journey, right? I know of so many players who ask you to fill up forms online, but they actually take out printouts and send it to you. Okay. Right? But these are not scalable solutions as an organization. Right? And one is the demand part of it. And I'm telling you one thing that in India, there is no lack of demand. Right? But how do you sort out your supply is the most important thing. Right. And my favorite example is that e-commerce companies are not e-commerce companies. They are logistics companies. Right. They are operations companies. Right. It's true. They are not demand generation. They are supply chain optimization organizations. Right. And that's the way we look at it. We know that there is enough and more demand out there. But the person who does not use the right stack, the right thought process, the right philosophy, will never be able to crack some of these things. There was no reason for Onsurity to come into this business at all. Because you already have close to about 34 34-od odd insurance companies which are your general insurance companies. Give and take a few of them. And then you have close to about five or seven now, you know, health insurance companies. Right? Standalone health insurance as we call them. Sahih companies. Right? They were already there. They should have met this demand of SMEs. Right? There was no reason for a non-shorty to be won. But we are there. We are catering to 6,000 odd organizations today. Right. So, yeah. Would this not increase your cost of acquiring customers? I was assuming a company with 300 people and a company with 3,000 people will take as much time to convince because this is not a decision for which you add to cart and buy now. That won't happen with a product like this. So you will need a sales team to drive conversion. It will cost you the same when a 300 people company or 3,000 people company. Will it cost on charity the same for a 3,000 company or 300 member company or a 30 member company? It'll cost me more for a 3,000 company. I'll tell you the reason why. Because a 3,000 company still wants offline things. They still want a manual intervention. They still want someone to talk to. They still want someone who will not be digital. And SME wants to stay away from this. The SME wants to tell his or her employees that, hey, there is an app. Just look at the app. You will get get your your money. money. Look Look at at the the app. app. Everything Everything is is out out there there at at the the click click of of a a button. button. Right? Or Or just just raise raise a a ticket. ticket. Just Just chat chat with with them them on on WhatsApp WhatsApp and and you'll your query will get resolved. Right? I can actually build operational efficiencies out there. Right? By the way, the smallest teams at Onshority is the business teams, by the way.
01:11:44
Speaker
Right? We are close to about 320 odd people. Our business teams added together would be close to about 40 odd people. What do you mean business team means like sales? Yeah. So we have like teams which specialize in each segment. So for example, we have a team which specialize only in micro segment. We have a team which looks at small and mid market. And then we have a team which looks at partnerships. Obviously, the DNA of partnership does not go away. So for example, we work with the likes of Porter and Zepto today for their last mile contractors. Gig workers. We've created programs for companies like Gulf for their influencers and their driver partners. And in fact, that was one which was covered really, really well across media. So we work with neobanks for all their salary account holders where we kind of bundle in our health and wellness packages. Okay. So, yeah. So from our perspective, the more tech we've been able to use, the lower our cost of acquisition has been, right? And because we have standardized our products, see, a large company wants end number of customizations, right? And SME is very happy with saying, hey, give me a standard product. And the most standardization that I create at my end, right? Lesser amount of efforts are required to, you know, serve that customer. So contrary, right? We love our small businesses. We love our micro businesses, right? Obviously, the odd large businesses that come and work with us, we ensure that we standardize them also, right? And yeah, so, you know, the economics have worked out very differently from us. In fact, we've always been economics, unit economics positive from day one in our business. Your sales approach is B2C or B2B? Like, you know, a B2B approach would be like, say, cold emails, cold outtree, build a funnel like that. Or a B2C approach would be like, say, performance marketing, people launch website, stuff like that. So what is your... It's a hybrid one, honestly, We started off with inorganic traffic where we've kind of done performance marketing. We've done our share of spends on digital marketing, creating us, making sure that we are there, ranking well, making sure that if someone is looking for a certain kind of product, we kind of, you know, pop up for them. But what we've realized is that there is a fair share of, you know, outbound efforts also that our team puts in, right? But what we've seen is that because of our entire approach, right? We didn't always have to, we focused on the middle and the bottom of the funnel. And hence, it relieved us of the pressure of creating a very large top of the funnel. When do you need a top of the funnel? When your product is commoditized. If I was any other intermediary, I needed to have a very large top of the funnel. But because I focus on the experience, because I focus on my differentiators, on my USBs, we are able to now say that, hey, you know what, with the same top of the funnel, focusing on the conversions across the rest of the funnel, we don't need to be that aggressive. So that's how it has played out well for us, which has now obviously reduced our cost of acquisition, which has optimized our future funnels also. So yes, that has worked for us. And I think in the recent past, the one thing that anyone who does the SME business relies upon is the word of mouth. Because every other channel is not going to be that effective. There's a cost associated. So I think two word of mouth have worked for us. One word of mouth is business bring to our business. A very interesting word of mouth that happened for us is the SMEs went to a larger partner of theirs, an MNC and said you know what we work with Onshority and we provide these products so if any of your partners who are like us they wanted you should refer Onshority to them right we are very proud today we work with an organization like Tally right where we are kind of empaneled for all their distributors, right? And we see such a progressive nature of a company like Tally, right? Because if I talk about Tally, most of the people will think that, hey, it's an old age software company, right? And I'm telling you that. Yeah, but it is India's first SaaS. And because it is India's first SaaS, it is still not a legacy company. Right? The kind of progressive thinking that we see, right? Like, and I would love to name Tejas out here, but the kind of vision that Tejas has for the company, it is amazing. They are the first ones to think about it and say that, hey, what can we do for our distributors? How can we provide them these kind of avenues? And they have got a partner like Onshorety, who is now kind of interacting with their distributors and getting them and their employees onboarded. So yeah, I think this kind of a B2B strategy, both referral and a hybrid of marketing, online digital marketing spends has really worked for us okay can you share some strategies to improve the funnel don't sell don't sell solve problems right we've been we've been always going back in the funnel and asking people their problem statements. We have never told them that, you know, so when we say once a contact has been made, right, the biggest problem is, you know, how do you do engagement further, right? And that is one of my, you know, my very, very deep belief that if you sell to people, no one wants to buy. If you solve problems, right, 10 more people will come to you. Right? I'm going to take a little bit of, I know this can be controversial, but in any religion, if you try to sell their text, no one wants to buy it because they feel they're getting converted. But if you go and tell them that, but if you go and tell them, hey, you know what, you're facing this issue in life. This is a philosophy that, you know, we preach. See if this helps you. And that's the time you have a deep belief in the company. Similarly, right, taking a pace on that example, go and solve people's problems. In our middle of the funnel, we tell people, hey, are you facing problems of engagement? Are you facing problems of experience? Are you stuck in a problem which is so deep for you on the insurance side? No, just talk to us. We'll help you solve it. And you know what? We don't want your money. People have come back and said, hey, can you solve this problem for us? We solved the problem for them. And our next year's journey, we just got elevated from a vendor to a partner. So anything that we do at Onshority, as soon as a customer calls us a vendor, I know that my team says, sir, I'm not the right partner for you because you'll treat me as a vendor and I will never have the right to give you the right advice. How did you build salespeople who are problem servers? Most salespeople are, I mean, you know, there is a very standard way of doing sales and you're driven by targets and so on and so forth. Maybe you follow a very scripted approach. It just sounds very hard to build a team of salespeople who are problem solvers. When you build salespeople from the industry, they want to sell. When you build a sales team where no one has got any experience, right? To achieve their numbers, they have to figure out, boss, what's the problem? Because honestly, I cannot stand in front of a 40-year-old veteran who has only sold insurance and say, boss, I know insurance better than them. I don't. Like who am I kidding? I'm kidding. But if I stand out there and I tell them, give me a fair shot at solving your problem, I have people's ears. Right? And this again, if you remember, right? In an earlier discussion, if I was a payment partner, I'm going to the CFO and discussing, you know, rates. But I will be a growth partner, go to a completely different person, right? And I'm discussing growth and I'm getting a seat on the table saying that, hey, this guy's aligning to my problem statement. Right? So, we've hired everyone in the team. Right? And especially our initial team, we had no one from insurance. We had no one from healthcare and wellness. We got people on board who understand SME, who sold to an SME. It could be any product. It could be an HRMS product. It could be a banking product. Right? It could be any product, but they should know how an SME behaves.
01:21:25
Speaker
They should understand the pain points of an SME. Empathy basically. Absolutely. the we but What's the error now? Confidential. have that isn't We don't disclose that number. Sorry. But kind what is revenue for you? The premium that you collect counted as revenue. So we never collect premiums because premiums are collected by insurance companies. Right. Our model is slightly differentiated because everything is bundled. What we collect is membership fees. Right. um Today, I can say that, you know, at an average, a user would pay close to, close to what, anywhere between, you know, 250 to 600 rupees to onshore. From our perspective. Right? And yeah. In this, maybe some 50 to 70% would be going to HRS company. Not necessarily. Not necessarily.
Reflections on Business and Entrepreneurship
01:22:31
Speaker
Because there are a lot of ah companies who take only wellness plans. Then discussed it earlier, right? 30% of our business is basically health and wellness. So, yes. That's right. Okay. Go ahead. Have you, like, is it between 50 to 100 CR, 100 plus? like Very broad. Yeah, we crossed our 100 CR milestone last year. So, we've crossed that milestone. So, let me end with this question. What's your advice to founders who are starting off and what will then be like 100 CR plus ARR for business? What's your advice to them? My first advice is don't start up. Right? Because people are starting up for all the wrong reasons, right? Some people are starting up because, you know, if that product can do well, you know, I'll disrupt that product, right? Someone is starting because, you know, I want to, you know, I want my company to be a unicorn, right? I have no idea about my product, but I know my company wants to become a unicorn, right? Yeah, unicorn is like the standard reason to start it to build a unicorn. Yeah, right. Like, oh, I want to sit at the table of the unicorn table. No one understands what goes behind the unicorn table. All right. I think the biggest advice is um please, please solve a problem. All right. Many problems out there. Don't don't start a business because it will give you access to massive amount of capital along in fact if you don't raise the capital that is possibly a great thing to do right like I think I would be like the millionth person to say that you know founders like Nikhil and Nitin Kamath right who is a business without a dime coming from outside great businesses yeah. yeah right absolutely Great businesses. Paras Chopra, who people out I've not heard of, but Wingify. Built a business completely without that. Unicorn. Like Zoho has been built without external capital. and yeah But these people all have succeeded because they solved the right problem. right They were ready to grind. right Don't solve because oh I will call the shots. Believe me, that's a myth. You never call the shots. right If anything else, your DA will go in conflict management. Your DA will go in you know the smallest things that are not falling in place. And if you have your own office, you will be solving for the AC temperature also, right? And at the say and the next minute, you'll be talking to an investor also, right? And you'll have people coming and saying, sir, this seat is not okay, I want to leave the company. And you're like, seriously? For the chair? So I think, ah believe me, in today's day and age, ah um ah if you have if you know that you're going to be building a business fundamentally, you know, on a first principles basis, right? You're thinking profitability, you're thinking sustainability, right? Then those are the reasons that you should be building a business for. For everything else, ah don't do it, right? There are a lot of companies who are looking for, um you know, who are ready to kind of give you the capital and, you know, ah create a, you know, sort of a startup within their environment. Those are also equally great opportunities, right? ah It's not necessary that you have to have your own ah company all the time. I think there are so many companies who are looking to kind of disrupt, right? Join one of those. And entrepreneurship is not a title. It is a state of mind. And hence, if you want to be an entrepreneur, go join a startup, which is doing zero to one. If you can survive that, and if you can survive at least one function in that particular company, right? It's one milestone that you've achieved to say that, yeah, possibly I can do more. So, yes. And if you're looking and being a health and wellness company, I shouldn't be saying this. I know that very contradictory, but a startup will not be able to offer you ah the best, you know, work-life balance. It's not going to be an easy journey. but You'll have to be mentally strong. right You cannot just hear one feedback and say, ah yeah I'm mentally disturbed because the first thing that as an entrepreneur that you need to do is grow a thick skin.
01:26:57
Speaker
and yes you need to have a thick skin you need to say you know what any anything that comes i have to fight it because i have no plan b right if you go into an entrepreneurbu journey with a plan b planning is never going to work um ja that's so true so true yeah thank you for your time cool it was a real pleasure thank you so much a for having me