Making a healthy
startup: The story of KarmaSpark and LeanScience
Two CMOs who quit their well-settled jobs to launch start-ups in the health and wellness space. Their journey.
Idi Srinivas Murthy, 42
CEO/Co-founder, KarmaSpark
(ex-CMO, Snapdeal)
For Idi the idea was more out of a personal belief since in the last five years in his corporate life, he’d seen an epidemic of back surgeries, diabetes, heart disease, clinical depression and other chronic diseases - that too among younger colleagues. Something really needed to be done, was his belief. And yoga seemed to be the answer, but with a twist. He admits it was the big revelation to him that - across the world, the scientifically most recommended regime for preventing and curing these lifestyle diseases is yoga. Thus he co-founded KarmaSpark along with Dr Runvijay (Yoga & Naturopathy). Incidentally his first tryst with yoga happened while he was on a GSK assignment in South Africa.
Starting-point
A brand, whether small or big, must have a very sharp ‘worldview’. For example, Red Bull believes in an adventurous life, while Coca-Cola embraces universal optimism in cynical modern times. Everything from the product to packaging to organization culture is driven by that ‘worldview’. Our worldview is that yoga is an ultra-advanced technology that needs to be practiced, not theorised. Most Indians, with all due respect, put yoga in a museum.
Interestingly, while there is an increasing tribe of globally-connected Indian youth, who want to practice yoga, the infrastructure support is missing: convenient time, place or facility. That’s where we come in with KarmaSpark as their modern yoga solution – great yoga teachers, available all the time, at a cool modern facility. It has been made very consumption-friendly.
The Big Consumer Insight
A museum gets respect but only an annual visit. A store / studio needs modern appeal to get frequent visits. This insight is the inspiration behind making KarmaSpark the modern yoga solution for urban India. Clichéd as it may sound, successful young urban working professionals are hitting brick walls when they are forced to realise ‘success’ is incomplete without the wellness and fitness to enjoy it. The other learning is: if you have a great product or service, then trials are the best form of advertising.
Deploying Data
True marketing is no longer about designing push communication. It’s more about improving product / service attributes or engaging with consumers.
The Scale-up
Four months into launching, it’s a relief that the concept has been accepted really well - we’ve got over 400 regular yoga lovers, and a fast-growing clinical therapy practice. We’ve also successfully engaged with many corporates based in Gurugram. The plan is to scale up by adding studios in more corporate locations, and a few residential locations for clinical therapy. Expand in NCR, then Bangalore, Mumbai. Too early to talk turnover numbers! For now the company is self-funded and by some angel-investors.
Challenges
Dealing with ‘fake yoga’. People who’ve done a few random asanas while watching some YouTube video, and then complaining about yoga not working for them.
Sudarshan Gangrade, 36
Co-Founder, LeanScience
(ex-CMO, Ola)
With clients from Facebook, Amazon, and Adobe amongst others, within the first month of formal launch, the former CMO of Ola seems to be on to something good with his start-up that uses diet-management to fix the body’s energy-systems. The Bengaluru-headquartered company is already having a waiting period of 3 months. Gangarde admits candidly that a few years back he hadn’t really thought of it as a career choice, but when he took the break from Ola (in 2016), he began to seriously work on this space. Being high on sports and activities and having hit the 30s helped a large degree in the decision.
Starting-point
The key focus is on making the art and science of weight-loss accessible even while going beyond the oft-held view of kgs/inches as the measure of health. It is all about teaching the body to maximise its ability to burn fat, while simultaneously also minimising its ability to store fat. When we started out, we knew we were entering a cluttered space, but we also knew our product worked since the methodology has been developed and perfected by the co-founder Ameet Bagwe over the years. A considerable amount of time was thus spent understanding the way brands market themselves in this space, and we thus arrived at the entire brand blue-print: right from the brand name, logo, personality, language and tonality. Our entire launch and content derived from this.
The Big Consumer Insight
People’s motivation for weight loss has two very strong emotional anchors for the consumers: vanity and fear. While the former is across all ages and is fairly well understood, it is the latter which provides a more nuanced opportunity. At the age band of clients that we typically have (>35), the invincibility of youth has broken down, both physically and mentally and clients are unsure about their health. To add to that the annual health check-ups throw up a whole new set of parameters. We realised that a brand that can address health in these emerging need-gaps could thus be well-differentiated.
Deploying Data
We have been very RoI-led in our marketing campaigns and the acquisition cost so far has been less than 4%! The other thing we strongly believe is that AI / Machine learning is just not the solution for our business, at the stage it is at currently.
The Scale-up
People love what we are doing. There is a waiting period of three months, but we don’t want to make the mistake of scaling up too fast.
Challenges
The mental aspect is the toughest about being an entrepreneur which includes maintaining sanity, focus and belief. Also clients, and this industry, is so used to be spoon-fed and given ‘meal plan and charts’, that it is an effort to push clients to spend time to learn science!
http://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/business-of-brands/making-a-healthy-startup-the-story-of-karmaspark-and-leanscience/59766141
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