The Neon Show

According to WHO, obesity has doubled since the turn of the century, and almost 40% of all adults globally, i.e. 2 billion people - are overweight or obese, resulting in 4 million deaths per year.

HealthifyMe an AI driven health and fitness app startup, took up this problem statement 10 years back and has been building and solving for individuals to curate and track a healthier diet.

The company crossed 25 million downloads recently and is on track to hit $50 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the next six months.

In today’s episode we’ve brought Tushar Vashisht, CEO and Co-founder of HealthifyMe, to talk about the journey of creating a monetizable healthcare & fitness platform in India. 

They’ve recently raised $75M in Series C round led by LeapFrog and Khosla Ventures, with which it plans to further expand into India and South East Asia markets besides making inroads into North America. Currently, it generates around 25 percent of its revenues from overseas markets.

During the episode, Tushar talks about the casual and unexpected moments when he got several breakthrough ideas, why they consider minor consistent pivots essential for thriving in the long-term and much more.

Notes - 

02:29 - Roller coaster moments in HealthifyMe’s journey

06:02 - Strengths as a founder

08:21 - Essence of assembling a team for experienced mentors as board members

13:11 - Experiencing living like an average Indian

15:17 - Early concerns with HealthifyMe’s model during initial funding

20:52 - Advice for entrepreneurs: When to pivot vs when to be persistent?

26:19 - Myth: Indians don’t pay for digital healthcare services

28:05 - Growth hacks like VaccinateMe

29:25 - Getting the first 1000 customers

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Personal branding is something that’s drawing a lot of attention from people across all domains. 

And the only proven way, to create a personal brand for yourself, is by becoming a consistent and quality content creator. 

With over 200+ speeches in 26+ countries on wealth & personal growth, the guest of our today’s episode, Raj Shamani describes his journey from 0 to a million+ followers and building a strong personal brand.

Other than that, being - 

# One of the youngest Indians to represent India at the United Nations

# Featured amongst Top 10 Young Entrepreneurs in India - Asian Age

# Featured amongst Top 5 Young Influencers in India - YourStory

# Featured amongst Top 10 Business Podcasts in India - Itunes

Are just some of the feathers in his cap, during his personal brand building journey.

During the episode, Raj talks about starting small with consistency, importance of building a team and much more.

Notes - 

02:29 - Becoming a speaker at small scale

04:43 - Strengths from 0 to 100k followers

05:21 - Getting 900k+ followers organically in just over a year

10:23 - Expanding team over time

13:38 - Monetizing multiple channels over multiple platforms

18:50 - Recommendation to first time content creators

21:19 - Journey as an investor

*Sponsors*

-This episode is brought to you by Prime Venture Partners, an early-stage VC fund led by Amit Somani, Shripati Acharya, and Sanjay Swamy. Prime is often the first institutional investor in category-creating tech startups in fintech, SaaS, Healthcare, and Education such as MoneyTap, Happay & Mfine. To know more about Prime visit primevp.in

-This episode is also brought to you by Red Bull Basement. Red Bull Basement is back to empower the next generation of young innovators like you! Present your unique idea in a simple video of up to 60 seconds and the most impactful and creative ideas will stand a chance to represent your country at the Global Finals in Turkey! 

Last date of Registrations: October 25th, 2021 
Register here: https://basement.redbull.com/en

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India is becoming the world's fastest-growing startup ecosystem with over 60+ Unicorn Startups, out of which 25+ have gained their Unicorn status in 2021 itself. 

One of the youngest amongst them is headed by the guest of our today’s episode, Amrit Acharya, Co-founder & CEO, Zetwerk. 

Zetwerk started in 2018, with the idea to help manufacturing managers with managing several suppliers with ease using a dashboard, as previously the role had been very “manual and prone to errors”. 

The product was great, but when they reached out to potential customers, they didn’t get a very optimistic response. Instead these customers wanted a marketplace solution where they could discover and connect with new suppliers. And that’s what led to Zetwerk's pivot within 6 months of starting up.

Currently Zetwerk helps its customers reduce costs, optimize suppliers and execute production faster. 

Some stats relating to its current scale - 

# 15+ Countries - North American, Indo-Pacific & Middle Eastern regions

# 25+ Industries - Oil & Gas, Aerospace, Automotive, Construction, Mining & more

# 100+ Retained happy customers

# 1000+ projects

During the episode, Amrit talks in-depth about the nitty-gritty of the manufacturing sector, what are some of the key focus points for customers and much more.

Notes - 

01:29 - Revenue and scale at Zetwerk

04:26 - Solving for market access & capital expenditures for small manufactures

05:31 - Zetwerk’s revenue model

10:15 - Time v/s Quality in manufacturing

18:30 - Nature of retained customers

20:47 - Order size from $1000 to $30 Mn

24:32 - Creating a catalogue for the uncatalogued market

36:15 - Approach as an entrepreneur during fundraising

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Normally for the most of us our buying focus is around products like - 

# Which smartphone to buy? 

# Which laptop to buy? 

# Which car to buy? And so on. 

But have you ever thought for a bit about which mattress should I buy? Probably No, right. 

This is the reason why, in almost the last 10-15 years, prior to 2015-16, we’ve barely seen any innovation in mattresses or competitive pricing amongst brands? 

But a lot of that has changed in the last 3-4 years, with companies like Sleepyhead, The Sleep Company, Wakefit and a few other D2C mattress brands coming up.

In today’s episode we’ve brought Ankit Garg, Director and Co-founder of Wakefit, to talk about the journey of the brand and how he and his Co-founder, Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, won the hearts of several customers in this segment. 

Founded in 2016, in current financial year, Wakefit recorded 2X growth, clocking Rs 410 crore revenue. The year earlier, it registered a turnover of Rs 197 crore. 

They manufacture all their products in-house across nine factories in Bengaluru, Jodhpur, and Delhi. 

While they only sell online and drive most of their sales from Amazon (i.e. mostly by new customers) and their own website (i.e. mostly by returning customers), they also have over 22 experience centres — six in metros and nine in smaller towns. 

During the episode, Ankit talks about focusing on making their customers happy, understanding simple yet viral strategies to continue driving up their revenue and much more.

Notes - 

02:58 - Getting a taste of failure early-on

09:05 - Working on your idea part-time during the early phase

12:25 - Building a D2C vs B2B company

15:17 - Initial pricing experiment of selling mattresses on Amazon

18:16 - Core habit of talking to customers

22:10 - Focus on NPS & customer happiness

25:23 - Removing inefficiencies in the product to offer better prices

26:17 - Revenue growth over the years

32:09 - Approach while reaching out to investors

36:13 - Wakefit’s 100 Nights Trial campaign

48:01 - Wakefit’s sleep campaign

50:30 - Advice for D2C founders

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Have you heard about “Programmatic Advertising”?

Well for those of you who haven’t, Programmatic Advertising, also known as programmatic display advertising, is an automatic process of planning, buying and selling ad inventory.

Before advertising was programmatic, it was done manually, which included being in touch with a sales team, and included requesting for proposals, bidding, quotation, and human negotiation. And as you can imagine, this was a very time intensive task.

With Programmatic Advertising the system automates all of this for this, and as a cherry on the cake, it provides actionable data in planning and determining what Ad content is relevant to a particular user.

For instance, a user is scanning some blog related to “baby food”. The Ad tech system evaluates the user and displays an Ad related to “offers on baby food items” or “baby food pouches”.

The guest of our today’s episode Kshitij Jain, with his company Joveo, enables recruiters with one of the most advanced Programmatic Job Advertising Platform. 

Their clients include - Wells Fargo, Barclays, Rolls-Royce, Sony, HCL and several other Fortune 500 companies.

Their system claims to be driving up to 2X more relevant applicants, 40% higher click to apply conversions, at 20-50% lower Cost per Hire.

Kshitij who has spent over 20+ years in the online recruitment and hiring industry, is a second time founder with Joveo. His first company, MoBolt was acquired by Indeed in 2014, just under 2 years of being operational.

During the episode, he talks about his experience in the industry over the year, how did he and his team made MoBolt a big success within such a short-time, his learnings from his traditional-family background in India and much more.

Notes - 

00:50 - What does Joveo stands for?

02:17 - Insights related to online Jobs & Hiring industry

09:47 - Motivation behind spending 20+ years in this industry 

13:03 - Difference between Sales & Selling

17:16 - Magic recipe behind Mobolt

19:35 - How to focus on what the customer needs and not what the customer wants?

25:27 - “Everybody who wants to be an entrepreneur needs to know how to cold call.”

27:58 - Key milestones in Joveo’s journey

30:22 - Learnings coming from Marwari family background

39:41 - “I’m the business of the unfinished business.”

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How often and sincerely do you help someone for free? 

Moreover when it's related to building/growing their business?

Only some of us can confidently say yes to the above questions. However today we have Manish Pandey, who heads Culture and Brand at Josh Talks. 

Coming from Silvassa (i.e. headquarters of the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu), Manish had very humble beginnings. 

He’s been featured on Josh Talks series - #RagsToRiches and Ranveer Allahbadia’s #TheRanveerShow, Ranveer also referred to Manish as his mentor for career and spirituality and also credits him for helping to build and grow Beerbiceps and Monk entertainment.

Similarly, Manish has selflessly helped several solopreneurs and founders in building and scaling their brands for free.

During the episode, Manish shares with us what drives him to help other entrepreneurs grow, his recommendations for building a personal brand and more. 

Notes - 

02:50 - Helping Entrepreneurs and Content Creators

07:49 - Introspecting life backwards to 5th standard

16:04 - Meeting Ranveer Allahbadia

21:12 - Advice to 100xEntrepreneur to build its Social Media Brand

23:44 - Putting out one’s vulnerability 

26:08 - Manish on Spirituality

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In whichever industry or ecosystem you are, there are some people you just can’t not know about, because they are the ones who have either - 

# had a major role in shaping the industry as it is today 

# or achieved something at such a massive scale that no one can miss to notice it

The guest of our today’s episode Vani Kola, founder and managing director of Kalaari Capital, is one such person. She was listed as one of the most powerful women in Indian business by Fortune India in 2014.

She started her career in the silicon valley, as a serial entrepreneur and spent close to 22 years. While in silicon valley, she founded an e-procurement company RightWorks, which was later sold for $657 million.

After returning to India in 2006, she founded Indo-US Venture Partners (IUVP) in 2006, which was later rebranded as Kalaari Capital.

Some stats around Kalaari Capital -

# 188+ Investments; popular portfolio companies are Dream11, Myntra, Cure.fit, and Snapdeal
# 23+ Exits; most notable exits include Workday, Milkbasket, and Simplilearn

During the podcast, Vani shares with us how she approaches any new investment, how she suggests the founder to treat any failure, how yoga and meditation have positively impacted her life and more. 

Notes - 

02:50 - “What you can’t dream, you can’t achieve.”

10:32 - “What didn’t work can give you an actionable insight.”

18:09 - Assessing a founder’s potential vs pedigree

23:12 - Having a depth of clarity rather than just being a good storyteller

38:54 - Balance to life: Meditation & Yoga

41:05 - CXXO Initiative: $10 million fund for women founders

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Did you used to get pocket money before the age of 18 to manage your expenses? I personally used to get a fixed & tiny pocket money after 10th, thanks to my parents.

When I was in college, I stayed away from my hometown, in a PG with a roommate, unlike me, he didn’t had a fixed or tiny pocket money, he used to get an X amount from his father whenever the previous X amount got over. 

I was always a bit envious, as to why he has a free flowing pocket money, whereas I have to manage everything (Travel, Accommodation & Misc expenses) in a fixed amount. 

Fast forward 7 years, I’m a lot thankful to my parents for both -

# giving me pocket money, and 

# keeping it fixed (mostly) on a monthly basis.

This helped me in learning how to manage my finances better, which definitely helped, once I got into a job. 

Btw this is exactly what Sambhav Jain, guest of our today’s episode is trying to do with his company Fampay. 

Fampay, being a virtual card prepaid card for teenagers, enables them to do online transactions and manage their finances, eventually educating them to be more financially aware down the line as grown-ups. 

Recently after adding 2 million+ registered users on platform Fampay raised USD 38 million in funding from Elevation Capital and others.

During the podcast, Sambhav shares with us how he came across the idea behind Fampay, what were the initial challenges when they approached several banks with this concept and more. 

Notes - 

02:02 - Graduating from IIT Roorkee and working in Product roles

06:28 - Concept of pocket money in western countries

09:14 - Problem statement of financial literacy among kids in India

16:25 - Initial discussion with Elevation Capital & achieving PMF 

20:05 - Driving hyper-growth with campus ambassadors 

28:14 - Building the product like a community rather than a transactional app

30:02 - Initial response from traditional banks

32:53 - Working of a Fampay wallet

34:48 - Adoption of technology among teenagers

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Data access for App development for startups and enterprise is very complex and has a lot of security concerns. It gets even worse when you plan to scale the product.

This has vastly changed since Hasura came into existence. Founded by the guest of our today’s episode, Tanmai Gopal, Hasura provides an open-source engine for developers to streamline data access in a secure and scalable way to make app developments easier.

Started in 2018, it has seen adoption from thousands of developers across fast-growing startups and Fortune 500 companies.

During the podcast, Tanmai shares with us how they ideated Hasura as an open-source engine, and when did they realize the right opportunity to monetize it by launching a commercial model. 

Notes - 

01:22 - Hasura in layman’s term

03:56 - Early childhood and graduating from IIT Madras

10:21 - “Until you build a product and take it to market, you actually don’t know anything.”

13:11 - Launching Hasura as an open-source engine; 2 Mn+ downloads in first year & 100 Mn+ downloads in the second year

14:34 - Changing perspective from being bootstrapped to raising VC funding

21:23 - Shifting from free open-source to a commercial model

25:38 - Milestone around Mission Critical Adoption

34:02 - GTM strategy - Free adoption followed by commercial conversion

38:50 - Hiring for the Non-dev team

41:33 - His advice to entrepreneurs building open-source products

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Venture Capital or Angel investments aren’t a must have, to make your startup successful. This has been demonstrated again and again by several bootstrapped startups which have been very successful, namely - GrabOn, Zoho, Zerodha, Wingify & others.

The guest of our today’s episode Rajdip Gupta, CEO & Founder, Route Mobile, similarly has an exquisite journey of taking his company from being completely bootstrapped to getting listed in the share market and growing to a market share of Rs.11,000 crore+. 

Just to understand the faith amongst retail investors in Route Mobile's strong growth potential, you must know that in September 2020 its Rs 600-crore IPO was oversubscribed 74 times. It made a stellar debut with a 105% rise on day one of listing.

As a niche player operating in an extremely dynamic, high-growth segment of the cloud-communications space and catering to the digital user engagement needs of enterprises, Route Mobile has a limited number of competitors and no publicly listed rivals. 

During the podcast, Rajdip shares with us, what are the various offerings Route Mobile has for its enterprise customers, where it stands against its Indian competitors and how he personally tackles things to bring a work-life balance in his daily life. 

Notes - 

01:53 - Creating a story & value from India

04:17 - Solutions for enterprise customers

10:02 - Scale & revenue breakup across geographies

12:25 - Benchmarking against Indian competitors

16:07 - Challenges during the early phase of building Route Mobile

22:19 - Work-life balance and unavoidable circumstances in a startup journey

36:11 - Future plans for Route Mobile

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