Ritika and Abhineet, founders of RocketHealth, and sibling duo, talk about learnings on their journey of working together as siblings, to leveraging strengths of each other and how they have found a mission that aligns them both together.
Ritika and Abhineet, founders of RocketHealth, and sibling duo, talk about learnings on their journey of working together as siblings, to leveraging strengths of each other and how they have found a mission that aligns them both together.
I really think work translates into life and life translates into work. There's nothing like work-life balance — it's about finding fluidity between the two.
Taking up responsibility is something I've recently discovered about myself. I used to shy away from it, but now I feel like I'm the person people can rely on.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Kahran. And this is... Thinking. I'm thinking.
Hey guys, I'm Ratika, doctor and founder of RocketHealth. And we're building healthcare brand for millennials and gen Z's. Starting with mental health and sexual health. I've always been into health and this is the first time I'm venturing into entrepreneurship and it's an interesting ride.
Give us feedback on what we can improve if you've ever tested out our product. And you can always reach us at our Instagram, which is Rocket.Health. I think the way I would describe myself is I love two things. I love sports and I love startups. I have been into startups since I was 19.
This is my probably second company, third company I would say. Like I've also done a pharma business before. I've recently discovered this about me that I love taking up responsibility. I used to shy away from things like, I have a dog right now and I take care of her. Like in 25, I was probably not that guy.
I feel like I'm that guy now. You can rely on me like that. Yeah, like so I've become that too. So I think I'm that guy people can rely on here. Yeah, which is just going to take it slow and build it from there.
Lots of responsibilities obviously there. So yeah, that means like, oh, when you run a startup, you feel like all you devote your time is to like your startup. But I think trying to figure out that right balance. I mean, there's nothing like work-life balance, but still if I can like figure out some kind of fluidity between work and life. I think I managed to do that a little bit this year.
So yeah, hopefully. I mean, I mean, Ritika would be the judge of that. I mean, for me, like I thrive when I don't switch off for her, like she likes when she switches off, I think. So for her, like it's so much easier to segregate for me, like everything's the same. Like, you know, I really think work translates into life and life translates into work.
So I'm a firm believer of that and probably picked it up on my way, like because I was into startups way early. And I also like, you know, obviously I've heard this time and again from other people also. For example, I think Jeff Bezos, like, you know, his code is pretty similar to what I'm saying. Like actually, because I've definitely listened to him a lot. It was like, there's no work-life balance.
Work translates into life and life translates into work. Like you have to switch off at the right times. Of course, like you have to take your breaks. But I mean, as an entrepreneur, it's not a job. So you can't think, oh, I'm going to take a two day break.
Like that's not how it works. Like you have to be active and available all seven days to your teammates. And sometimes like, for example, for Ritika, obviously it gets a little more strenuous. I think because she has a more of an operating role these days than me because she tries to look at the day to day ops much more in detail than me. So how do you guys divide the responsibilities between the two of you?
So I look at the operation side of things like the care team, the healthcare hiring, what's up with the revenue side, the growth side. He mostly looks into, I would say, marketing and like probably fundraising if you're actively looking into it. So my role is, you know, I'm the CEO and she's the CEO. So like we try to like segregate in a way that I'm more strategic and she's more day to day. To sum it up, I'm the one who's like building systems.
He's the one who keeps on motivating the team. I think we require more. Yeah, but more than that, I feel like day to day ops is extremely important. If we ignore it, like if none of us located, then we're going to fail as a company. So that's the most important aspect of what we're trying to do at Rocket Health, right?
Because every customer or every user who comes to us, they should have a delightful experience. And a lot of times they don't also, right? Because it's a consumer facing company. You might have resolutions to make. So someone has to go knee deep and really fix those issues on a daily basis.
Someone has to say, Hey, this system is breaking. It's it worked from zero to one. Does it work from one to 10? So like her role is like that, like collaborating with everyone more daily. Like mine is more like I try to like catch up with the team, like maybe once or twice a week. And I try to like be very random than her.
Like how is this very planned, her calendar? I'm more like, Hey, what's up? Like do you have 20 minutes? Let's chat what's going on in your team, right? So I like to look things from a macro perspective and see where the gaps are. I think I'm a very keen eye for that now because because of like doing like this kind of work before also.
So I think like, I know I can tell you where it can go wrong instantly. So like that's what I focus on, like more of the large scale stuff. Like nowadays we're trying to do more newer initiatives. So I might like double down on that more, whereas she would go, you know, focus on growing mental health care and taking it to the next level because mental health care has become a big business for us. So somebody has to be like the go to person for that.
It's interesting. Like recently I've been working on a film and it's interesting to just see the switch from tech industry to media because this director who had the inspiration and then who wrote the script is also the person who's looking at each and every scene of the entire movie and being like, Oh, this particular tree, it needs to be like, you know, half a centimeter to the left. And I'm like, that is exhausting work to go from vision to like the minute execution and then he's going to do the sales also. That's a lot of work.
Yeah, it's a lot crazy. It's crazy. But you know, Divya would have noticed is some of the best entrepreneurs are able to do everything. Like, you know, like, that's the beauty. Like, I mean, this person you're talking about like going full stack.
And in a lean setup, that's what you have to do. Luckily for us, I think we both have built that working style where we know like, okay, if she is the one responsible for payroll reaching people at the end of the month, I can count on her and I don't have to check in like, Hey, what's up. And if like, you know, she understands that, you know, when we are looking at data analytics, I would be the one hopefully like, you know, if I'm able to grasp certain insights and like push the team on like newer product launches and really like taking another deeper look, look at certain products which are not working out. Like, you know, more of these strategic stuff, like I try to pick up like more early because I have the luxury of time on that. Like, she also has because she is deeply involved.
But like sometimes when you are behind the scenes, you can like look at 10 different things together. But no, I think whenever you start, you have to kind of go needy been to each function to understand what each function is. I'm really happy that that director is also like, you know, getting along with like other things. So that he'll also get an understanding of how it's actually going to be tomorrow. And I'm sure he'll take help, but he'll know how to execute that properly or what exactly he wants from that stuff.
So we also do the same. Like if you're having another new function, we kind of do it ourselves and then only hand it over to someone else. I mean, everything we built from scratch. So like we would do so many things manually like before the first year, we did everything manually, then we realized, okay, we can automate certain steps. So like then we build systems, then those systems kept on improving.
So like now two and a half years in, they are at like somewhat of an optimal level so that like, you know, some things are on autopilot. Some things require auditing. Some things are like driven every day. So like that. Interesting.
So I have always been curious. I've seen a lot of engineers, no shade on us engineers, but like I've seen a lot of engineers go into entrepreneurship. Not that many doctors. Like I feel like doctors have a very different sort of like, you know, education and like understanding. And it's very like, you know, rigorous, but deep kind of learning that they get while engineers are like, huh, just go do whatever, like, you know, just, just pass.
Do something, get some grades. Yeah, tomorrow you'll figure out. Yeah. So like how did you sort of like make that a switch? Because I'm sure even the entrepreneurs you meet, they might be from like, you know, more humanity side or they might be from engineering side, but very few come from medicine as a background.
Yeah, true. I think I know like only I can count it on my hand like two, three founders who are also doctors. We both started as actually helping out people during COVID. So what happened was during second wave of COVID, we were back at home. I was preparing for my post-proud, which is like specialization and I beneath it just come back from US.
So he was also figuring out what to do next and he was actually working on something else. But during second wave of COVID, if you remember the situation is so bad, right? Like every hospital bed was full. And we also our parents are doctors. So we also have a small nursing home there and we had like oxygen cylinders back then and we could see the pressure even at 4am we're receiving calls that hey, we really need the cylinder.
And we did not have enough supply, right? So we could see the pressure the hospital system was having. So we thought, okay, because I examined our postpones. I knew a lot of doctors who were just sitting idle and they could have helped these people at least in triaging or at least with home consultation so that that burden towards hospital won't really go in. So we just shipped out a Wix website called is rockadel.app to help our people and we used to connect to them via call.
But the situation was so bad at that time that a lot of people shared it. A lot of WhatsApp forwards, a lot of celebrities, a lot of news channels. And fortunately, like we were able to help out almost 5000 people in a span of just three weeks. So it was massive. But I mean, we were tired, exhausted, but we loved doing what we were doing.
So that was kind of like a glimpse of, okay, you know, this is what it can look like a very tiny niche. I would say, but still we were managing the ops. Everything was very manual, but it was fun to kind of help out people. And earlier, I would say, like, you know, we were not believing in telehealth as such. We thought, like, okay, there's practice, there's, I'm fine.
There are a lot of telehealth players and as a doctor, you know, people did not really believe in telehealth as such. But post COVID, we saw like a drastic shift there. People were actually openly coming up, taking help. Even in a small town in Gaya, our mother was a gynecologist, we're seeing patients online at that time, which is not really like a possibility in a gynecobstetrician, especially when you're pregnant.
So even then people were open to doing that. So that showed us like a shift and we brainstormed a little on like how exactly do we want to, you know, evolve it? Do I actually want to leave and not do post grad and move into it? And it was a very easy decision for me to make. I feel like, you know, I've always been into medicine.
I've always gone through the whole process with my full heart. Like I've been very passionate about it. I've seen my dad operate and I've always wanted to operate and be a surgeon. But this kind of excited me. So I was like, okay, why not?
And I feel, I feel more and more doctors should do this because especially if you're turning into health tech, because if not us, then who? Because I feel a lot of non-doctor entrepreneurs actually build it and they build it in a very wrong, or I would say in a very, I mean, they're trying to push things, sell things which are actually not required, you know. So from a clinical perspective, I think someone should be on the team, especially your building health.
Yeah. I mean, I meet a lot of potential health tech founders who want to start companies. And the first thing I tell them is that you should get a clinical co-founder. Like, you know, without that, I don't think it's the right approach to build. Like, you know, if I'm building like in a specialty, like I should really like partner with someone who has that expertise. So yeah, in that way, like we got lucky like from day one that we both decided to double down.
And it helped because we have also like seen healthcare, not just when, you know, she was studying medicine because we grew up in a hospital, right? So we have seen the angst in the healthcare ecosystem. We've seen the gaps and seeing it in a smaller town like teaches you even much more, I feel, because we understand the depth of like the healthcare infrastructure, not just in like tier three towns, but also like what happens in villages. So like that awareness like where healthcare is today and where it can be, let's say 20, 30 years,
it allows us to like think about our approach in a different way. Like how do we build this? And obviously things like patient centricity, things like, you know, being very doctor driven, those things come to us very naturally because that's how we grew up. That's how like, you know, our parents have been like, that's how we have seen and luckily that's how like with the guy as a doctor. So like we always think about everything clinically. We don't think, oh, we'll launch something and you know, we'll be selling a product or a supplement and that'll fix your that's not how it works.
So life like does not work like that. Plus I feel when I was in a hospital, it always used to be like an age that was so many things can be like fixed or processes can be like made easier. If you bring in some tech into it, like I feel crypto is doing amazing AI is doing amazing. There are a lot of advances happening there, but in health tech, they're not like a lot of advances happening. And I think we should focus a little bit.
It's not like a very formal driven industry. So people don't, you know, people just forget to focus on that, but it's it's a long term industry. Like it's going to be there. You're going to focus on your health every day. Yeah, I also think that doctors can be amazing entrepreneurs.
I think Ritika said this on like some podcast she went like a few months ago and I heard that clip basically, I think to summarize, she was trying to say that a lot of doctors have to do so much context switching in their work in the hospital, you know, dealing with like different kinds of stuff, teams, right? You're dealing with patients, the attendance, then you're like actually like treating people, then you're like, you know, there's OPD, there's like, you know, operations. And so I think like your context switching and like we've seen our dad and our mom like do both of that while managing and running a hospital. And they're like kind of the OG entrepreneur examples for us like back at home.
And so I think like it's doable and like some of the best doctors can do it like I think so and we need more doctors, as she said. So yeah, luckily, my dad's very excited. Mom's was not like that excited when Ritika wanted to do this. Still wants her to like go back. And I feel like that feeling will always be there because that's how parents are.
But but I think like we took the right step at the right time. And that's why I think like two and a half years later, we're still kind of like, you know, floating around and swimming around. So we'll see what happens. I mean, I mean, there's a lot to do. But as a young doctor, I was not really resonating with any brand or anything.
Healthcare, which was already happening in the ecosystem. So for us, it was more like, you know, we need something for like young people there in mental health tomorrow and something else, which actually these people kind of require. So from that perspective, we were like very excited that okay, like let's build for millennials and Gen Z's. Yeah. So how did you guys like sort of hone in on mental health because you said that your start was with like COVID care, right?
I would say that that's much more like, you know, hardcore. I mean, even the most experienced hospitals were struggling with it. And like, you know, while mental health is also healthcare, but it's like slightly different because at least I personally feel like in India, the perspective is not one of urgency when it comes to mental health. Like most people are like, yeah, man, I've been depressed for six months. Yeah, sure, whatever.
Like, you know, I don't feel like eating or sleeping or whatever. But like, you know, someday, maybe if I've continued to feel this way two months later, then I'll like, you know, talk to a therapist. When we were doing the COVID pilot, that was a volunteer effort, right? We never wanted to do our business in healthcare because we've seen the challenges that lie like in running a hospital. And from a tech perspective or from a consumer tech perspective, I had seen a lot of digital health companies go bankrupt trying to build this, right?
Like and not being able to build it successfully. It's a really tough business to build digital first. So we like, you know, felt that the space is saturated and it's not a great space to be in, to be very honest. But when we did the COVID pilot amongst us, 5000 people, a majority of them were asking for mental health care. They were asking if we had psychologists or psychiatric help, which we did not at that time.
And then, you know, obviously coming from a small town, like we knew that, you know, oh, everyone of us, we were feeling low during COVID. And if we wanted to take like somewhat of a mental health care assistance, there's no one we can really go to. Like there were probably like a couple of psychiatrists we knew in the town and we come from our doctor family. What about therapists? We clearly saw that gap and we felt like in India, there's no, you know, national brand out there where Gen Z millennials were more eager to take mental health care support than any other generation.
And post COVID, that is the right time like where people were opening up and being vulnerable about mental health. Where would they go? Like, you know, who is that brand or platform or health care provider be? And that's where we felt okay, like mental health care could be like the right segue. We had no clue whether it'll work or not, to be honest, because that was a leap of faith in, I mean, we did our math. We were like, okay, if we do this, we'll have like the full stack, you know, we'll have like a pharmacy, we'll have like diagnostics tomorrow.
We'll have psychiatry therapy, everything. We thought of the vision. But when we launched, like, you know, we just did it with like, you know, one psychiatrist, one therapist, we were not sure like it'll work out, right? And we weren't even sure that will be like, you know, a success to this degree. Like even now, like we are surprised because I mean, people from tier two, tier three towns are like, you know, accessing therapy from their rooftops at midnight. And that's very powerful to see because I feel like everyone writes off tier two, tier three India in terms of, hey, like they don't want to spend.
Actually, it's not the case. They do want to spend. They just need to spend on the right things and they're not getting access to that. So luckily, like, you know, we took it upon us and I'm sure other people are trying to build the infrastructure along with us. And so yeah, I think that's how we discovered mental health and we launched it. Yeah. I think I mean, that situation is also there during COVID that everyone was going through shared trauma and everyone was talking about it openly, like social media influencers or celebrities are also opening up like people like Virat Boli, Deepika Padukone and that helps, you know, that escalates down, trickles down to other people.
They start opening up about it and we can see it. People think that okay, mental health, a lot of stigma, people don't really reach out, but we can see it transforming actually very slowly. But like a major shift, especially in the younger audience, they'll come for therapy, like especially Gen Z's, they see their friends taking therapy, they're like, okay, let me try. And they will also bring in their parents to try in therapy because they're like, oh, generational trauma. I think we should fix it at the root cause. So you know, they're very open to it now.
Yeah. It's dinner table conversation now. Like in 2024, like people I hear talk about their therapist at weddings. They're like, Hey, have you tried therapy? If not, I'm happy to refer my therapist or you can reach out to Rocket Health. Those conversations have become so popular. In fact, we've been to events like, you know, I went to my sister's engagement, my cousin's engagement in Delhi and we met a power user.
And like that was all said, endpicious because he was like, Oh, these guys are Rocket Health founders. And so I take therapy from them. And we have met actually like probably more than 50 people like that over the last like, you know, 24 months. Just said, endpiciously that I've actually tried your brand. I still take therapy. And that is very satisfying because when you're not seeking to meet someone and you meet them, that means okay, fine.
It's reaching the right places. Yeah. And in fact, we also know that people talk about it because almost 25% of the people who come to us are coming by word of mouth, like probably a innate telling or like someone who's a user telling another user that he tried. So it's coming by word of mouth referrals.
So I do feel like people have started talking about it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can imagine it like I have also met a couple of people who are like, Oh yeah, Rocket Health, you had a video of them also. I take therapy from them and I'm like, Yeah, it's my friend who's building it. And then they're like, Oh, it's really nice.
It's tough. Like I feel like, you know, cracking healthcare because we have to do a lot of things on the back end. You have to maintain like the quality of the care which we're giving and we kind of, you know, again, I'm building it very holistically. So we get in like all kinds of professionals like I've been itself, you know, pharmacy also lab investigations also. So just tackling all aspects we're still building more even in mental health.
Yeah, try to build more. That's also interesting. Like oftentimes when I have seen like people build in health tech, a lot of these formal institutions, they end up being very hard to navigate like pharmacy or psychiatry or like, you know, stuff like that, especially in terms of regulation. And when you're a small like, you know, business, which is just a starting like how do you how have you guys like navigated it?
Maybe now you're like, you know, much bigger from the get go. How did you navigate it? Now I think we are 100 people. So we have grown across India. But when we started was just with the can I and we moved to Bangalore to build this.
We did not have any connections in Bangalore. So we had to start from scratch here. One thing that helped us was obviously leveraging her network to reach out to, let's say the psychiatry community. We could do that. You know, like when we had to reach out to psychologists, we had to do like anyone else.
We had to publish online, tell our story, what we're trying to build. And we had to really see if we vibe with them and attract people the way most people should actually build their early startup team. And we got really lucky. I remember when we posted for our psychologist hire the first time, we didn't even know if we were going to hire psychologists. What did we part time freelance full time?
We had no clue. We just like published job posting, right? And we met our one of our lead psychologist right now, Kalyani, who has been with us since inception, right? We met her and I think she started freelance or part time. I don't even recall that well right now.
Full time. She started here and that was a bet. We were like, oh, we like this person so much. Like, let's take a bet. And she took a bet on us too, because she was like, these guys want to build something.
But, you know, like they just do people. It's not a company. It's a startup and like most startups, you know, you dream, but you don't know how you're going to execute. You figure it out. So yeah, we took our sweet little time.
It does help that we have grown up in a healthcare environment. So we think very fundamental healthcare that helps. Like we don't get carried away with the superficial stuff. Like, oh, we'll make this cutting edge technology and this will solve everyones problems. Sure, like technology is a big enabler in our industry and we, you know, be empowered through technology.
But at the core, we are building healthcare. And so, you know, having grown up in a healthcare ecosystem and Ritika's contacts, her expertise, all of that allowed us to like, you know, really launch our first product the right way. Like for example, from a regulatory point of view, I remember like, I think the government had allowed telehealth consultations in psychiatry also post COVID. Just before COVID, I think like they had started doing it.
So stuff also started changing on the regulatory landscape. More said guidelines came in, right? And from a clinical point of view, like obviously the advantage was I could bring the consumer psychology of like what a user would want. But like she knew like both sides, like both the consumer psychology and the clinical psychology, which is extremely important to, you know, launch a successful healthcare product.
But also to add to that, I feel like, you know, healthcare is a space where you can't stick to one nation. Just do that. We have to, you know, go broader and horizontally expand into one thing and cater to it like holistically, I would say. We have to go a little deeper, I think in terms of helping other users because, you know, one person can't solve everything in health for a patient. Or for a user.
I feel you need like a few people or you need to tackle a few different aspects to actually help them out holistically. You might start with one, but tomorrow you'll end up doing all. And that's the way to go, especially for consumer health. I feel it's not like software, we're building that, okay, we stick to one nation. We kind of develop it.
It's more like consumers we're getting. And maybe a psychologist is helping out a user. But what if, you know, there's more clinical help required and I require a psychiatrist. What if the vitamins are so low that they actually require help there? Like how is going to do the blood test?
Who's going to tell them? I feel in the ecosystem, there are so many individual stakeholders that we need to combine them and also build a holistic healthcare so that better experience and better treatment is also happening in terms of mental health, tomorrow in terms of anything else I would say. Like women's health, for example, in PCOS, right, you can't just give medicines. You also have to figure out like a lifestyle solution around it or in diabetes.
Similar, like you take medicines, but you also figure out lifestyle solutions around it. So I think same goes for mental health. I think like it's very holistic and I think we should always see it from that lens. Yeah. The other thing I think we did right from our point of view is we took the right value choice, meaning when we decided to build this company, we said we will not build a marketplace for the sake of building a marketplace and looking like a big company.
Because if I had to go raise investment in a marketplace, it's very different. Then, you know, when we have to go raise investment, like building a full stack healthcare company where you really work closely with your healthcare providers, you're contracted them as employees. You're building a hospital on cloud. Nobody wants to do that. Because it's not the easy thing to do.
The easy thing to do right now is to like be like, hey, we're a platform. I'll build supply and you guys can do, you know, whatever you want to do, but there's no quality check. You know, we don't ensure that each provider is standardized like to a certain degree. Right. So like then sure the quality takes a hit.
Patient experience is really poor. It's easier to scale, but actually it's not a successful model. At least if I look at it. So we took that hard value choice. We were like, no, we are going to build healthcare, right?
To build healthcare, you'll have to work hard at it. Like it's not a one year problem or a two year problem. You have to be patient. Yeah. We're not just doing it like for the next two years.
Yeah. I think it's like a decade long problem. Yeah. More than that. That's one of the first things we said, Hey, listen, if we, if you want to take a leap of faith, be ready.
This is a 10 year thing. If I'm leaving medicine, it better be like long term. The other thing which I think particularly I had experienced was because, you know, I had done companies before where like, you know, I eventually in retrospect, I look back and I was like, Oh, what if I had survived doing that for five more years? Right. You know, if I had probably stayed in the game for longer, like that could have been a different outcome than what it was back then.
So I had that perspective. I realized that when I was 22, 23, so much startup talk was about FOMO. This time around I was like not 22, 23, and I had seen the, you know, the going up of the cycle and coming down of the cycle, right? The hype days and the bus days. So I was like, listen, we have to stick to the fundamentals.
I'm not going to build for the hype. Bad days are going to come regardless. So you have to build a company and you have to focus on customers, not investors. That was another thing which we focused. Like, luckily we got some amazing investors early on when we were starting up, but was that it's not been easy to like attract investment?
Even if like we are a successful company, we're probably like, you know, in the top one percentile of startups in terms of our financials, in terms of traction, customer retention, revenue, we're profitable in two and a half years. But I'm still letting this know like on record because I see a lot of healthcare VCs out there masquerading as healthcare VCs, but they really don't want to invest in healthcare because we are seeing like, you know, we're trying to build actual healthcare and the ecosystem is not enabling. Like they're like, hey, why don't you follow the easy path? Many investors told us, why don't you make a meditation app?
Why are you making this? That's not what we're trying to do though. Someone needs to solve the hard issues also. And we're just trying to do that while doing that very sustainably, like we're not dependent on anyone. We try not to be dependent.
Yeah, it's also very interesting that you say that because like I don't think that most VCs have a 10 year vision. They are like five years. I want my money back. Yeah, I think that's our learning. Like, you know, I've tried raising capital before also with Rocket food, like my first company.
And then like now also, and I think what I've understood is there are very few venture capitalists out there in Bangalore, in India who truly say what they believe, who truly put capital into like their true beliefs. Most of the VCs I see they're building in formal and that is so sad to see because these are people who have studied from some of the most elite institutions globally. They come back, there is a few hundred million dollars and then they end up choosing the easier problems to invest in because they can get another series be series done and they can like exit out, make their carry live a cushy life and then complain that there's no healthcare infrastructure in the country. You know, but that's not what good investors are. Good investors know how to create impact and create companies which go on to change lives.
And that's very sad because I think India in 2024 I came back from the US and I could have chosen other easier problems like building a meditation app. Sure, I would do that right and I can do that choosing to do a tougher problem because I think some of the best talented people in this country should focus on the tougher problems. Only then India as a country would go on and become a leading country like we all aspire us to be. It's not that easy path. Yeah, it's the same thing as like you know when people are like, oh, this kid in IIT got a one-corror package and this other kid got like two-corror package and it's like really is that what education is about?
How much package you're getting? The same thing, oh, this company raised 10 million, this founder raised this much. Like it's just like, okay, your priorities are all off, man. Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, long term is the way.
My dad always tells this to me. He's like, let anyone raise 100 mil. Like who's going to beat the person who survives 10 years? You have to really survive in this market and keep on delivering the right quality of service. If you do that, your customers do reward you.
That's something we're experiencing at Rocket Health now, two and a half years in. And I think a lot of companies who are customer centric do see this. I learned this at Amazon too. They were like, don't think about anything else. Like just do product initiatives which are actually creating a difference in your customer's life.
Is it customer centric? If yes, create, do it. Otherwise nothing else matters. Everything else is noise, right? There are companies who have raised like 30, 40 mil, I know who are in the same space.
They don't even exist right now. Like if the economics doesn't work, then it's not going to run. One of the things that I really, really, really love about you guys from the get go is like your marketing. It's so on point. Like it has the right amount of heart and the right amount of hook.
It's not like too trying to be memorable, but it is very memorable. But at the same time, it's so honest as well. So like, I just want you guys to like talk about it. How do you like continue to do it? Because once or twice is fine.
It can be a fluke. But like you guys have been persistent at it for like a long time now. Thanks, thanks a lot for that. I think from the beginning, our philosophy has never been to sell anything to anyone, not just like from our ads I'm talking about, like more from user communication.
It's just been to be around people, you know, like you said earlier in the conversation that mental health is not something where they'll require urgent help. They might like think through again and again that, hey, do I require help and then take that step maybe six months down the line. We feel that as a company, we just want to be there around them in the next six months. And whenever they feel like they are ready to take the step, we'll just be there. So that's been our marketing philosophy or user communication philosophy.
Never like, okay, you took one session, you take another session. We're like, okay, if you want, you can take another session. We'll just check in with you and see how you're doing. So our philosophy has been more around that. Yeah, to be an authentic brand in the healthcare space, you have to obviously like first of all get a solid product.
So it has to be healthcare. It cannot be fluff. It cannot be like buy Ashwagandha supplements to fix your mental health problems. Right. Like it has to be true actual healthcare. Like I would go out in the real world to get, I should get it online.
So that's first. So our marketing does start from our product. But at the end of the day, if you look at everything we chose, for example, Rocket Health, I think we got lucky that we chose the name Rocket. We came up with this in like 10 minutes, search the domain and just got the website.
So, and we didn't get a dot com, right? We got a dot app, but we were okay with it. So we think the name was very apt because people relate to the name and that's what they remember. So like if any new entrepreneur is trying to think marketing, I think for brand perspective, the name does matter. You have to be memorable from the get go.
And then obviously when you talk about content, you know, let's say like look at socials, which is the go to market strategy of marketing for most young companies like ours, right? Like, you know, our philosophy is not sell the product. Like, you know how you see brands like Red Bull, they never tell you to drink Red Bull, you know, like they sell you the dreams of adventure. So for example, for us, like, you know, if you look at our content strategy, we try to really be out there taking, you know, walks,
pops where people open up their heart about different issues, right? They talk about adulting, they talk about relationships, friendships, because these are the things you, me, Ritika, we all go through in our lives. And so like that makes our brand more relatable where we're not trying to like do too much product marketing around therapy or psychiatry. We're not trying to be too clinical or technical like a lot of other people. Hey, we are clinical on the back end.
We don't have to relate to the user like that to relate to the user. We have to go at the level where they will vibe with us. Right. And I really love what Ritika like has kept on emphasizing from day one. She was like, we're not building a healthcare company just we're building the coolest healthcare brand. Let's call it a healthcare brand because for Gen Z and millennials, it's become so important.
Cool as factor has to be there. It has to be cool, right? Otherwise that friction or that stigma which is there in, in health care, accessing health, that shouldn't feel like accessing. Yeah. It should just feel like, okay, cool. I'm just talking to a person. Yeah.
When that happens, I think more and more people just approach it. So our approach has been to make it cool. Right. So, what are your emotions which everyone relates to and not just something like very clinical or very tertiary care, more around just primary and secondary? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
No, it has to be as we scale tomorrow, like, like I was telling our marketing lead of if yesterday we were talking about like careers and you know, we just like brainstorming about how he should chart out his own career. And I was telling him that listen, like, you know, you have to focus on working with like companies which allow you to succeed and fail because not every month, you know, they were like, it's going to be a blockbuster month. Okay. I got an eight million month doesn't mean my boss needs to expect like an 80 million month quarter down the line. That's not how life works. So patience is extremely important.
We're coming good marketers. I keep telling them, listen, look at some of the biggest YouTubers, right? They didn't make a YouTube channel because they were amazing early on, like, you know, MKBHD, his early set up was really bad, but you need to keep shipping. You have to survive again. Consistence.
Yeah. Can you be consistent for 10 years? If you will, I think you'll build a brand. I mean, obviously the right values, though, you can't like come over the wrong values and build a brand. Actually, company building is very boring. Yeah. It's not like hiring new person every day.
It's more like what is that old people like what are they doing every day? The grant work. If you start enjoying the grant work, then I think it's a good, good founder. You'll figure it out eventually. So are you guys going to launch a podcast anytime soon since your content game is so on top?
Yeah, we always keep on brainstorming about that. And I feel like here, since we talk so much about conversations around mental health and like emotions, we should definitely do one. But there's only so much we can do. We have a very lean team and I think they just punch above their weight class. I don't want to add any other thing to their plate or our plate at the moment.
So it's just about priorities. Yeah. And the other thing is, I think the timing will be important, right? So we feel like we can spend another year or two just building the community, the audience and then do a podcast because I think in the podcast, if we do like something around mental health to begin with, we want to showcase the best stories in mental health. And so we feel like we want to take a little bit more time and we'll have more resources in a year or two.
So yeah, we will. We want to do that. Like our community is called Cancel Stigma. It's on Discord and we already do so many events there where people talk about their mental health journey. So hopefully we'll translate it into a podcast eventually.
She never does this. I think it's an episode with me, Abhinit and Cleo. No, I'm sure that everybody would appreciate her being there also. I'm so sorry of the listeners if you did not anticipate Cleo. I'm not barking in a podcast.
So you guys already talked about your community and your Discord. Are there other things that you know you are like building towards or like, you know, that are on the horizon? And like, how are you guys thinking about like, you know, expanding from where you're at? I think like we talked about that we want to build a brand in healthcare and we want to be like very different in creating it. Like we want to be very cool and not go from like a going by healthcare perspective.
So along those lines, I feel we want to do more cool stuff. We want to do more lifestyle products around mental health, people who actually are pro mental health, like how people are pro LGBTQIQ community. People are also very pro mental health or like completely like, hey, this doesn't exist. So you know, pro people can actually support us like rep the merge and talk to, I mean, that's just going to instigate more conversations around mental health is something which we feel. So maybe something along those lines, we already have a great community.
Yeah, I think two ways, right? So we are at a stage where we are 100 people as a team. We just became profitable. Like, you know, some months back, we will try to like keep that going hopefully. And we're here to like stay for the longer and we're here for the next 10 years.
So I'm thinking two years, three years, can we do 10x of where we are? Can rocket health be a team of like, you know, 500, 600 people by 2x, 3x to become that? What all do we need to do? We need to like obviously keep on scaling our core business, which is mental health. That's one aspect of it.
And Ritika is like really involved tightly in that with all the teams and we have the strong foundation to do that. So I'm confident we'd be able to do that. So that's one way. The other way to do it is like we have services in mental health care. Can we do more products in mental health care?
As you said, one is like obviously lifestyle merge and you know, like giving people the access to like chance of repping the brand and we want to do that. The other thing is also doing things like a journal. Like, you know, that's a product we're trying to launch maybe 30, 40 days from now. You'll see like a canceled stigma journal come out and we never like published about it. So this is the first time we're like sharing it to the world.
Very small experiment on our side. Like again, like we launch products. We don't think we're going to do 100 mil or 10 mil or one mil. That's not how we think about stuff. We feel like our users were asking us for a mental health care journal because they all do journaling with therapy.
And so we were like, can we make a really good journal along with our psychologists and you know, all the learnings we've had delivering more than 80,000 therapy sessions in two years. Can we pull that off? And so we were like, yeah, sure, like let's try building it. So we are building it like our team is like involved in that. And so hopefully that and then, you know, building like more products around mental health care, that'll be one way to do it.
We know like the categories we want to build in, we already get a lot of user concerns specifically around those categories. So we know the niches we want to build in. It's just that we want to do it sustainably. We want to get enough and pool in enough money to actually invest there. Yeah, the other thing is obviously the way I like what we are trying to do with this brand is we're trying to build Gen Z and Millennial Health Care Brand, right?
But it's extremely important, by the way, for us to win that mental health care has to succeed really tremendously. Because whether we take external capital or not, we want to grow this company. And if we get external capital with the right kind of capital partner, that's amazing. I mean, consider us lucky because many healthcare companies don't get to that stage. But if even if we don't, we want to like make sure like we're able to grow this team.
We don't reach a situation where we can't expand because we have so many ideas. We really want this be the best in India, like the best mental health care category so that tomorrow we can finance other categories off it. Yeah, and there's a lot to do in that, like even to be the best mental health care. I think like, you know, from quality aspect, we need to strengthen a lot of systems. We need to give back also and like train more professionals into more practical aspects.
So yeah, we do want to work on the boring things. Yeah, the boring things in mental health care. So in mental health care, we definitely we want to, you know, build a full stack thing. We know we're there. We need to like add 20% more, you know, upskilling and, you know, products and all of that.
Then it'll become an ecosystem in mental health. So if you come to Rocket Health, you'll probably access everything there. Not just telehealth, not just therapy, psychiatry, pharmacy, diagnostics, like we just launched our mental health care therapy, like, you know, mental health care panel, diagnostic panel. And we just did, I mean, we used to have it. Now we are marketing a little bit of it to our audience.
Yeah, because we realized people don't know actually. So we were getting a lot of users who were deficient in vitamin D3, B12, like we are all sitting at homes. Most of the times work from home. Nobody is getting the sunlight at 8 AM outside. So, you know, everyone's deficient and obviously a lot of physical symptoms show up like hair fall.
So, you know, your dermat would tell you to get that test done. But a lot of times we don't realize that these also impact mental health. So a lot of time, low mood occurs, like a lot of time fatigue occurs when you're hemoglobin slow. So doing a panel around that just an intro panel, like if you've not gotten any blood tests done in the last six months or one year, you can actually test it out because we see almost one in six people coming deficient, at least people who are coming at Rocket Health. So, well, definitely we should also spread the news that it can actually affect your mental health and also introduce it into our larger ecosystem of products.
Yeah. Integrate it to our normal therapy users because they don't realize they can take therapy as much as they want. But if their vitamin levels are low, it's not going to help them. Okay, so I have one question. I'm so glad I remembered it.
Ritika, what is your favorite thing about working with Avinit and least favorite thing about working with him? Too many. She gave me a list yesterday too. Yeah. Okay.
I would say like the favorite thing about working with him is a lot of things actually, it's very easy to work with someone you've known your entire life. It's very easy to be on the same page and understand our visions align what we want to do align a lot. I feel the second thing I would say is that are what we do or what we're good at is complimentary to each other. I'm good at something else. He's good at something else. And it's like entirely different, but we bring in the best of both worlds.
Like he's amazing at like team building, I would say. I'm more structured. I'm amazing at like system building. So I feel like that's two different strengths which we bring in the team and both of these are required if you want to grow for a longer run. Least favorite things.
Where do I start? Tell me. We have time. I think, I mean, he's an elder sibling, right? So I feel like when I left my medical career, Elder sibling and Robson are coming.
Yeah, okay. Just realize he's the elder sibling even though he doesn't look like him. I know I look younger than her, but yeah. I feel a lot of pressure comes on him, especially that I have left medicine. I feel like everyone is like, Oh, Abhaneeth, what did you do?
Did you tell her to go? So, you know, I just want him to take less pressure. I know that we crack it. So Least favorite thing could be like, he's always in a switch on mode because of that pressure. So I want him to switch off also.
Yeah, she's told me that. What a sweet response. You want me to go deeper? No, but I totally understand Abhaneeth. Like I also feel like if I was not freelancing, both of my siblings also probably would have gotten proper jobs,
but because I was freelancing, they were also like, what is job? I should also do something of my own. You know, like I've done random things in my life before, which people are like, oh, this guy has been a rebel. Like I dropped out of college and stuff. So they all think, oh, like he's gotten his way around.
Why is he like, you know, like influencing others too? So I don't want that imprint to come. But obviously it didn't happen. Yeah, never happened. Yeah, it was not him.
It was very organic. He's like, don't, don't come. I was like, don't do this. It's not exciting. Just go to surgery.
It just happened. Yeah. And surprisingly, that decision was not tough for me. So it was okay. Yeah.
I really wanted to do this. And I'm okay to fail. It's the best thing to work with your sibling. If you can figure it out together. Most people I meet, like they always struggle to work with their siblings for us.
It's never been the case because I think naturally from day one, we have been like with the same vision. Like, you know, whether we have built like, we're building rocket health or like when we talk about like planning a trip or anything, I feel like the strong suit of like us both is like, we are very similar in terms of vision. In terms of doing things, we could be like a little different, but like we have the same design principles, for example, right? Like we both like minimal aesthetic stuff, right? I'm just throwing out like random stuff from life, right?
The content we watch, like, you know, it's very similar. So like in a lot of ways, Ritika and I are very similar, but we are also very different because she has the ability to go detail oriented very quickly. Like the kind of questions she has or the ability to like do tough conversations with anyone like she's way better than me. I'm the bad cop. She's the bad cop.
I'm the good cop, right? Basically. So what I'm trying to say is we have complementary skills, like she said, but like the best thing is we still are on one page always. We definitely argue. We go through our own like stuff where we like, hey, this is not working out like you think.
I do put a lot of pressure on her. The music is by Akshay Ramu Halli of BTRPT Music. Editing is by Beatnik.