The Story of the Infallibles

HealthifyMe
HealthifyMe
Published in
18 min readJul 5, 2018

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All great dramas in life start small and they have humble beginnings. They include generous servings of “aha moments” when the protagonists involved in the play tap their toes, jump up in joy and reach for the proverbial cloud nine. They also encompass more than your regular servings of soul wrenching moments of dark, deep depression.

The story we are about to narrate is one such. This is the untold story of the infallibles from India’s startup community. The story of a fledgling company from Bangalore looking to do the unthinkable — Of getting Indians to adopt digital health & fitness products. This is a story of a company that punched above its weight and refused to fold up and die when no one gave it a chance.

PROLOGUE

From Riches to Rags

Two Indians graduate from a couple of elite American institutions — University of Pennsylvania (Upenn) and MIT. After graduation they follow the predictable path of climbing life’s ladder practised by most successful professionals. The Upenn grad becomes an investment banker and the Indian from MIT opts to become a tech ninja.

As serendipity would have it, both of them are called back to India through a sense of deep-rooted patriotism and join Mr. Nandan Nilekani’s UID project, better known as the Aadhaar project in 2007. They help orchestrate Aadhaar from concept to launch and over the course of this exercise, become close friends. The young men are struck by the rampant poverty driven malnutrition surrounding them all across the country.

That moment of epiphany, back in 2009 makes them start a unique exercise of actually trying to understand what an average Indian goes through. They calculate that India’s Mean National Income was Rs. 4,500 a month, or Rs. 150 a day. Globally people spent about a third of their incomes on rent.

So, excluding rent, our two “NRIs” decide to live on a budget of Rs. 100/ day.

Their exercise goes viral, gets picked up by the media and noticed by the government too. The experience brings about their first “aha” moment when they realize that getting an accurate calorie count for most Indian foods was a nightmarish experience since it was completely non-existent.

That spawns the birth of their entrepreneurial journey with Tushar Vashisht, the Upenn graduate joining hands with Mathew Cherian, the MIT grad in a mission to bring digital nutrition and fitness services to a billion Indians.

HealthifyMe was born.

1 — Babyhood

Tentative First Steps

HealthifyMe’s journey began in 2011, in a quiet Delhi farmhouse with our young founders getting computer science interns to come and work for them, mostly for just drinks and food. Tushar & Matt spent more time pitching their business idea to the parents of the interns in order to convince them to let their kids join the crazy health startup than to prospective investors. The young founders went all out to serenade the parents to the extent of touching their feet to get their blessings.

The other tough stakeholder they had to convince were skeptical doctors who usually scratched their heads and said no after listening to an hour long pitch. Calorie counting and food tracking were ideas that were still way ahead of their time.

Sheer desperation drove Tushar to pay and book consultations with diabetologists. The icebreaker conversations there went something like this -

“You seem to be a healthy young man, are you sure you have Diabetes?”

“No, doctor, I actually don’t, I came here to talk to you about a great new business idea.”

There was this one time when Tushar did an “Urinator” pitch to a senior Diabetologist at a large hospital in the toilet!

To be fair, in the early days, HealthifyMe was still in embryonic stage and taking shape. There was no real business model in place. But Tushar & Matt made up for this through pure passion.

Hustle, hustle, hustle was their initial mantra. In a lot of ways, it still is…

HealthifyMe back then was blessed with the support of Kunal Bajaj an ex-entrepreneur and business leader who served as their first CPFPGO — Chief Product Friend Philosopher Guide Officer. Kunal served as a bulwark helping guide the young company during this embryonic phase and beyond.

In Feb 2012, Caeruz ventures was registered. The name was based on Kyros, the Greek god of luck.

But there was a problem — No one could pronounce, leave alone understand the name.

They then decided to come up with a brand name that was more relatable. 1clickhealth, navihealth, menumash.com, eatroute.com were some of the name options thrown around before the team fixed on HealthifyMe.

HealthifyMe was officially christened.

By late 2012, the company moved southward to Bangalore.

HealthifyMe had raised a 1Cr angel fund from angels introduced via the Microsoft accelerator and anchored by Tushar’s mentor from Aadhar days Raj Mashruwala and Cofounder of AppLabs Sashi Reddi — both Raj and Sashi after their entrepreneurial successes in the US were now investing and mentoring startups in India. Microsoft Accelerator required them to be in Bangalore, India’s very own silicon valley.

The experience at the Microsoft accelerator was to result in another major fork in the road for the still nascent company. It was there, that Tushar met Sachin, who became his new founding partner.

Sachin was the founder of another cloud based B2B startup but his heart throbbed for B2C. Tushar was looking for a tech founding partner who could fill the giant shoes of Matt who had headed back to the US around this time for personal reasons.

One thing led to another and after a few months of deliberation, Sachin decided to join Tushar. He came on board as the co-founder and head of engineering.

Sachin (with the camera) comes on board

“What a load of crap!” — This was Sachin’s first reaction after seeing HealthifyMe’s codebase and he rewrote a year of engineering effort in a month.

Sachin’s more important, lasting contribution was how he brought about a fundamental, baseline shift in the maturity levels & quality benchmarks of the technology team. This would go on to eventually define the “product first” and “engineering first” culture of the company in the years to come.

“Are you guys freaking, kidding me? 3 Days for a Django version upgrade? Step aside right now!”

The young HealthifyMe team, Tushar included sat in the audience and watched with their mouths agape as their new head of engineering gave them a not to be soon forgotten masterclass on engineering excellence.

Sachin wrapped up the entire version upgrade in under an hour.

HealthifyMe had taken it’s first baby step out of babyhood….

2 — Boyhood

Young & Stupid

“Excuse me sir, are you the person who did the Rs. 100/ day experiment?” — The bespectacled young boy with barely forming facial hair made no effort to hide his excitement.

“Yes I am.” — Tushar did his best to conceal a touch of amusement.

“Oh wow, my name is Rohan, I am from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. I heard that you have started a health company, can I come work for you?”

“Hmm, come along for an interview and we’ll see! By the way do you have Rs 100 for me to eat something?.” Tushar wasn’t carrying cash and taking that money ensured that Rohan would show up to collect it back!

Tushar hired 2 interns in early 2013 — Rohan and Sudha with the gauntlet thrown in that only one of them would become a confirmed employee after 3 months.

Rohan made the cut but was soon presented with the bad news that the entire company would have to take a 30% salary cut to make ends meet!

Rohan, having fun at work

The 1 Crore from the angel investors was fast running out and the team was doing its best to raise fresh funds while keep cash burn low. With the HealthifyMe website going nowhere, the team decided to pivot and focus on an app-based strategy. They built out their first android app version.

In Jun 2013, they meet their knight in shining armour who would eventually go on to become their best engineer.

“Tushar, I just finished interviewing a kid named Mukund. I am gonna reject him.”

“Are you serious, Sachin? I think the boy will be an asset, his attitude, appetite for hard work and coding skills are a great combination.”

Sachin frowned in his usual inimitable style — “I don’t agree with you, but I am going to hire him anyway, just to prove a point. You will realize your mistake in a month.”

July 2013 — Mukund takes to HealthifyMe like a fish to water and pushes upgrade after successful upgrade on the android app to production. HealthifyMe had released Mukund from his parents and Mukund released the Android app for HealthifyMe.

Sachin was graceful enough to admit his mistake and still respects “Tushar’s ability to spot the x-factor in a candidate going beyond just regular technical expertise.”

Mukund in action

By Feb 2014, the team had grown to 20 passionate individuals and close to 50,000 thousand users. But the absence of a strong monetization playbook was rearing its ugly head.

Tushar & Sachin as a last hurray of sorts decided to attend a OCCUCON corporate wellness conference in Goa. The trip proved to be a sobering one when the founders realized that they were unable to afford the conference accomodation offered at the resort, Cidade De Goa. They opted to stay in a budget accommodation elsewhere and did their best to make the most of the conference. To their pleasant surprise they discovered a number of passionate advocates of the HealthifyMe product at the conference and people started to address them as “Dr.”

Tushar & Sachin at the Cidade De Goa, Unilever Conference

That validation from a random set of strangers served as a huge pat on the back for the two founders as they headed back to Bangalore with renewed vigour.

In June 2014, HealthifyMe moved to a new office and over the next few months made some of their best hires. They brought on board Nikhil who joined as an intern after his previous fitness startup had shut down. He started by doing “all things business” but went on to lead B2C sales and marketing. They also brought Roshini, a mother of three with an ACE fitness certification and part CA qualification (as curious a combination as any) who would go on to set up their entire services machinery.

Around this time, the powers of the universe conspired to make a certain Santosh’s (Santa) bike to break down right next to the HealthifyMe office and a headhunter to call him right at that instant. He walked in for an interview and started the HealthifyMe iOS development team.

The new workplace was fondly referred to as the “Hoffice” with the employees using it almost like a home often spending multiple days & nights there at a stretch. But more importantly, the people working there, gave it the love and attention of a home. Nikhil & Rosh (as Roshini was called) often tag-teamed to clean the office themselves. Funnily enough, Tushar’s desk was right at the entrance of the office and the then clean shaven, cherubic looking young man was often mistaken to be the receptionist.

Despite a passionate team, the Company always had a “Product First” background and failed to build a meaningful monetization layer. As a result, they were unable to raise funds and soon Tushar’s worst fears soon came true.

In July 2014, HealthifyMe completely ran out of money.

3. The Depths of Pre-Adolescent Depression

Quo Vadis?

“We are completely out of money guys, and you are all here on your own volition now. I can’t pay anyone’s salaries. Anyone who wants to leave is free to do so, but I promise you that I would be here at 9 AM sharp tomorrow morning, raring to face another day and I hope to see you with me.”

For an entire 3 months, the company paid no salaries to its 30 odd employees, but not a single soul left the company. These were the heydays of 2014, when the Indian startup boom was at its peak and good jobs were a dime a dozen. Yet, not a single employee deserted the HealthifyMe ship for greener pastures or calmer seas.

During that period, the founders and the senior management started dipping into their personal savings to run the company, with Sachin unable to pay for his child’s school fees at one point. Tushar stepped in then, borrowing from friends, family and mentors like Raj Mashruwala, Bala Parthasarathy, Gopal Srinivasan to keep the ship afloat.

Team HealthifyMe that stood through thin and thin

The pressure of having no money actually forced Tushar to put #businessfirst over #productfirst which had always been their philosophy. And they experimented rapidly to see what customers were willing to pay for. The answer, they discovered, lay in nutritionist and trainer services. The Nikhil-Rosh combination let the company put in place a strong sales & service machinery and they got to a 3L/ month topline in fall of 2014.

Besides the tough times, the company still had fun. They had super Saturday parties and dartboard games to decide the “Customer support exec” for the day.

Those 3 months would go on to define the company’s future in the years to come. The 3 months ended up adding some much needed steel into HealthifyMe’s character.

This ability to monetize in a completely nascent category made a few HNIs sit up and take notice. Tushar was able to raise INR 4 Cr via them finally, anchored and coordinated again by Sashi Reddi and Raj Mashruwala. With their new found confidence and financial horsepower, the company launched its IOS app in Jan 2015. In March 2015, Micromax invested an undisclosed sum and HealthifyMe announced their first corporate partnership with Philips 4 months later. Sachin, who had always wanted HealthifyMe to be a B2C first company was against the partnership, but eventually relented when he saw the market potential.

HealthifyMe had gained muscle and reached puberty …

Tushar with the Micromax CEO

4. Adolescence

Muscle Up

The continuous rigor coupled with the focus on sales and service excellence showed through with revenues consistently increasing month on month for the whole of 2015.

It was during this time that Swati joined HealthifyMe as a product manager and doubled coach efficiency in a matter of months by making significant, focussed enhancements to the coach facing product lines. She also managed to elevate the Nutrilab product which was the engine that churned out the micro-nutrient mapping for any Indian food on the planet. Swati would also go on to eventually play a pivotal role in the company’s AI plays in the coming year.

By the end of the year, they had clocked INR 20L in monthly revenues and in Jan 2016, HealthifyMe raised a USD 6 million Series A round from Inventus Capital, IDG Ventures and Blume Ventures.

The three new partners had been tracking HealthifyMe and Tushar for several quarters and the young company’s fast improving monetization playbook eventually gave them enough conviction to make the investment. Rutvik Doshi, Karan Mohla , Karthik Reddy joined and constituted HealthifyMe’s formal board alongside Raj Mashruwala, Kunal Bajaj and Bala Parthasarathy.

The same year, the fast maturing company received another shot in the arm through an additional USD 1 million funding. The investment was made by the Dubai based investor Neelesh Bhatnagar from NB Ventures.

HealthifyMe had finally broken out of the shadows and turned a corner.

Possibly reflecting his own growing maturity as an individual, Tushar then began his first experiments with growing a beard.

The chocolate boy had turned a corner too…

Team HealthifyMe, celebrating Series A

Over the rest of 2016, with the additional money in the kitty HealthifyMe began to double down into execution and continued to raise the bar. Niveditha joined the company around this time and helped provide some much needed sophistication into their B2B efforts — an effort subsequently taken over by another founder — Anish Basu Roy — who joined the team after having built Shotang earlier (a Series A funded company). Another significant hire during the latter part of the year was Mehul who managed to bring in structure and optimization to their digital customer acquisition efforts.

But Mehul’s larger contribution would come later in 2017 when he mapped out the “cohortized” behaviour of free users who converted into paying customers over a period of time, thereby calculating customer lifetime value (LTV). The model that he built eventually helped the company during its Series B fund raise efforts.

While all this was happening, Rohan and Mukund now armed with a passionate, full stack product team were quietly chipping away, elevating the overall user experience on the app. HealthifyMe had gone through 6 versions before settling on a stable ground, and its latest avatar was not just growing, but generating enormous amounts of authentic goodwill from users that was showing through in their Playstore reviews and ratings. Google awarded the young startup from Bangalore the “Best app award” in the Health & fitness category for 3 years running from 2015 to 2017. During this time, HealthifyMe also became the highest rated app in India across categories with a 4.6 star rating.

2016–17 was a time of change, this was also the year when another ex founder named “Umamaheswaran Bhojarajan “Anjan” came on board as a product manager. “Anjan The Engine” as he was fondly called conceptualized and created a new “bot led” product funnel that qualified users based on a whole host of parameters and funnelled them into the hands of the coaches and sales teams to convert into paying customers. The new channel was aptly named the “Roshbot” after Roshini. Anjan would go on to head Product and Growth for the company.

A particular episode to highlight here would be the “orbit change” the company did in late 2016.

January had always been a month of tremendous growth for the Company as people take new year resolutions. Tushar decided to leverage that period and set an “impossible” target of doubling B2C revenue sales in January 2017, powered by the newly created accomplished leadership and better understanding of how the business worked.

Sales, marketing, product, engineering, design teams worked as one in meeting tough deadlines focussed on helping millions of consumers make their new year fitness resolutions on the HealthifyMe app. Late nights and long days merged into one as the Company worked through Christmas and New years to launch its new social features, tasks and hired an inside sales team to deliver the uphill task.

The “orbit change” was to go on to become an annual feature in the company.

In early 2017, HealthifyMe was doing 1 Cr in monthly revenues but with new funding options hard to come by without a clear line of sight towards profitability, Tushar decided to look inward and with Sachin’s help brought back the #productfirst approach that had helped them during their formative days.

In May 2017, Tushar and Sachin took key team members to a “secret” meeting at the Royal Orchid hotel in Bangalore and decided to embark on Project “Amadeus” — whose purpose would be utilise the Company’s own data and nascent AI abilities in creating tools that help shift the burden and cost of sales and service from human resources to technology.

The newly formed Amadeus team worked hard over months and would go on to build “Ria” And “Jarvis” — consumer facing AI nutritionist and coach facing AI assistant — both aimed at enhancing the productivity of their 200+ coaches.

Ria’s evolution was championed by Punita, HealthifyMe’s Director of Data Sciences who had come on board a year earlier as the company’s first Data Science hire. Punita, often fondly referred to as “Ria ki mummy” had managed to uplift what was essentially a summer project idea to stratospheric levels within a span of 6 months.

Team HealthifyMe — Brainstorming on Ria

In April 2017, HealthifyMe dipped into it’s data gold mine of more than 100 million food and workout logs to release two comprehensive reports titled — “India’s year of nutrition” and “India’s year of fitness”. The reports were big hits with both the media and the government, especially the Niti Aayog who sat up and took notice. Tushar travelled to Delhi and presented the findings to the head of Niti Aayog Mr. Amitabh Kant and the prime minister, Mr. Narendra Modi for policy action.

It was a proud moment for HealthifyMe and a sure sign of greater things to come.

In October 2017, the company organized the second edition of their annual event — “Ignite”. The event was a roaring success and announced their coming of age to the world. It was also the first time, Ria was unveiled to the public in a grand, gala event covered by the media. Tushar, the great public speaker that he was, wowed the audience with jaw dropping displays of Ria’s powers of artificial intelligence. There was a point where he demonstrated Ria’s superiority over the Google virtual assistant in the domain of nutrition sciences that had the crowd in raptures.

Tushar in action — Ignite, October 2017

In Nov, Dec 2017, the whole Company hunkered down for its “Orbit Change” efforts and in Jan 2018, crossed a million MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and 4 million lifetime users. It was also the month when the company reached the epochal 2 Cr monthly revenue milestone in consumer business and nearly 2.5 Cr overall.

It represented a 60 fold increase in topline between 2014 and 2018.

This time they resolved to recommit to the paranoid customer focus that got them off the ground in the early days and Tushar put in place a process for each leadership member to handle three customer conversations each week.

As 2017 drew to a close, the birth of Ria, coupled with their newfound perspective of customer lifetime value, resulted in the Series B round of USD 12 Million from Sistema Asia Fund, Samsung NEXT, Atlas Ventures and Japan’s Dream Incubator. NEXT was Samsung’s AI focussed fund and HealthifyMe represented their first ever investment in India.

The series B fund raise also signified a huge vote of continued confidence from the early stage investors — Inventus Capital, IDG Ventures and Blume Ventures who extended their commitment to HealthifyMe’s long term mission by participating full pro rata and super pro rata in the round.

After the new round, Kunal Bajaj who had played such a pivotal role in the HealthifyMe journey over the years, stepped down from the board after a long, epic stint. Kirill Kozhevnikov from Sistema joined the board with Amit Garg and Maxim joining as observers from Samsung and Atlas respectively.

The HealthifyMe team at their 2018 offsite

Post the funding and the orbit change, Tushar & Sachin took the entire HealthifyMe organization, now over 400 employees strong to Goa for an offsite. Irony abounded as the whole company got to stay at the Cidade De Goa, the exact same resort where 4 years ago the two founders could not afford to stay for a single night.

The circle was complete.

EPILOGUE

Adulthood beckons (July 2018)

With 3 Cr+ each month, over 5 million users and nearly 20% of them coming from international geographies such as MENA, SEA, LATAM, HealthifyMe now plans to go truly global and is eyeing strategic entries into a few markets.

The business now has a clear runway visibility towards profitability, the elusive mirage for Indian startups now seems within reach.

As the brand now enters adulthood and eyes its future with confidence, one wonders what the future holds…

Will it be littered with as many if not more trials and tribulations as the first 6 years of its existence or will it represent a period of exponential, unhindered growth?

Adulthood truly beckons…

In Goa, Tushar shared this email he had written a long time ago during the dark depression of 2014 to serve as a guiding light in times of trouble. It’s worth sharing again:

Some companies exist because they can. Others get lucky. Yet others defy all odds and exist even when there is no reason to exist. We fall in the latter.

We will change the way the world thinks about nutrition/fitness and they way the world engages with coaches fundamentally. Not because it was easy, but because we decided, determined to make it happen.

While all question our size of market, or our execution ability or even our vision, we refused to believe in the naysayers. When they questioned whether India will buy a digital nutritionist, or that we can make a difference in lives of millions of others, we made it happen. We changed lives for the better and for good.

And we were able to do it while building a great business and employing the best of India and giving them chance to work with respect.

We almost foolishly, but boldly walked agains the tide and made the impossible happen. It requires hard work, it requires guts, but most importantly, it requires resilience.

Here’s to the infallibles.

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HealthifyMe is Asia’s largest & most loved health and wellness app. Available on Android & iOS.