How she turned her weight loss struggle into a health coaching app

After the birth of her daughter seven years ago, Ritu Soni Srivastava faced a problem that many do: she had trouble losing all the baby weight.

Pregnancy had been “an orgy of feasting,” she remembers. She put on half of her body weight. “I was petite my whole life. I thought I’d get rid of [the baby weight] whenever I wanted,” Ritu tells Tech in Asia. “People who haven’t been overweight don’t know how that works – your body and metabolism.”

A couple years after the birth of her daughter, she decided to try and lose the extra weight. She went to the gym, but got fatigued quickly. She was also eating more and felt hungry all the time, Ritu says.

That led to her feeling depressed and frustrated, especially when she couldn’t fit into the clothes she wanted to purchase. It took a conversation with her husband to put things into perspective.

“[He] sat me down and said: I know you’ve been struggling with this, but why are you so hellbent on doing it yourself? There’s no shame in asking for help,” she recalls. Ritu was working as the head of brand marketing for Bharti Airtel, one of India’s leading telcos at the time, and found her way to a dietician in the company circle. Ritu followed the professional’s instructions and, in three months, lost more than twice the weight she’d lost on her own in two years. But she never got to see the method and logic behind it, which angered her.

The instruction “eat a healthy breakfast to get to a healthy weight,” for example, could be interpreted in a number of ways

Three times a month, often for only two minutes at a time, Ritu met with the dietician, often squeezing the sessions into her lunch hours at work. But she never got to see the method and logic behind it. “It was a nasty, intransparent process,” she says. Ritu would ask questions, but the answer always came back the same: You want to lose weight, right? Do what I tell you.

The dietician was in the business of losing weight. Sharing secrets meant losing customers, and Ritu understood this, but after three months she got fed up and began doing her own research into how to obtain and maintain a healthy body.

The same independence that kept Ritu from seeking help with weight loss for so long lent itself well to an entrepreneurial spirit. In April 2014, Ritu launched a beta for a mobile app, ObiNo, to help others seeking lower numbers on the scale. The app went live in August that year.

ObiNo – co-founded by Ritu, Yogesh Sachdeva, and Vishal Soni – operates off a freemium model that offers different levels of diet and fitness coaching. It emphasizes not only what the user is doing to lose weight but also why.

The startup did not disclose its number of active users.

The coaching app

ObiNo was a bootstrapped company until August 2014, but it would take another half year before Ritu felt it had hit its stride. The first version was heavily influenced by Ritu’s own less-than-savory experience with her dietician, and it was focused on tools and independence. The idea was that everyone already had what he or she needed to lose weight if the right tools were provided. The response wasn’t stellar.

Gender and losing it

A healthy business

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