A weight loss startup’s journey to winning over Google and Microsoft

Weight loss ads might be the most annoying marketing ploys of all time. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a picture of someone with a piece of measuring tape badly Photoshopped over their stomach, I’d probably have enough money to fund my own healthtech startup. So when an app pops up saying it’ll see you through your weight loss journey, it’s not much of an attention grabber, is it?

Bangalore-based HealthifyMe has got a little bit more going for it. It made the Google Play store’s list of top 50 best apps of 2015 in the health and wellness space. Google has also awarded the app a top developer badge, which means it got the Google Play editorial staff’s vote of confidence. The startup also graduated from the Microsoft Ventures accelerator program, and its founders came back to teach a master class on building a global product to other startup founders in India. In other words, the student has become the master.

It took a while for HealthifyMe to get there, though. The seed idea for the startup was planted in 2011, when co-founder and current CEO Tushar Vashisht undertook a huge challenge: to live on the average Indian income of US$1.47 per day for three weeks and at the government-designated poverty line in India of US$0.47 per day for a week. Among other things, the experience opened his eyes to how difficult it was to maintain one’s health.

In 2012, HealthifyMe was born. The startup also includes co-founder Sachin Shenoy, who worked for six years on various Google projects. In 2013, HealthifyMe launched as a calorie counter app, driven by Tushar’s observation that western nutrition tracker apps did not include Indian foods in their libraries, let alone a breakdown of the nutrition information within those foods that helps users plan future meals.

Turning over a new Google leaf

By 2014, the team had a sole developer who made the app available for iOS (the Android app soon followed). It had about 40,000 users, but the team wanted more traction.

“We changed to a business-first strategy,” Nikhil Moorjani, HealthifyMe’s head of sales and marketing, tells Tech in Asia. “It doesn’t matter if you build the best product if people won’t use it, so we decided to change gears.” In what he describes as “the big turnaround,” the team took its focus off building new features for the product and zeroed in on what would bring users to the app. The HealthifyMe team added health and wellness coaches – nutritionists, yoga instructors, and fitness trainers – who are available for an additional fee that ranges from US$10.30-19.14 per month, depending on the number of coaches or experts wanted. This makes it similar to Orobind, an app that connects users with fitness coaches.

Part of their strategy, says Rohan Gupta, lead interaction designer, also includes not providing every feature that people request.

In the middle of last year, the team also made key design decisions with the company’s new strategy in mind. By moving to Google’s Material Design, which was launched in June 2014, they got the search engine to take notice of HealthifyMe. They worked together on design, and the Play store featured the startup for the August to September 2015 period.

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