Practo boss on how to build a global business out of India

Practo co-founder and CEO Shashank ND.

To Indian audiences, Shashank ND needs no introduction. He leads Practo, India’s most prominent healthcare startup.

Consumers know Practo as the place to find doctors and book appointments. The site handles 40 million appointments per year and is active in 35 cities. Most of them are in India, but Practo more recently also became available in countries such as Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brazil.

To doctors and hospitals, Practo is a software service provider with tools tailored to healthcare needs like appointment booking and document management.

Today, on stage at Tech in Asia Bangalore 2016, Shashank said with conviction that Practo expects to achieve profitability by the end of 2017.

Global ambitions from the start

Shashank and co-founder Abhinav Lal first started working on the idea of using software to solve problems in healthcare in 2008 when they developed a product under the name Turbodoc.

The ambitions grew quickly when they saw healthcare was a massive problem in India and much of the rest of the world. Instead of trying to solve the problem in India first, Practo’s ambitions were global from the start.

Photo credit: Army Medicine.

It’s a risky strategy – and not everybody’s cup of chai.

“We had to choose investors who were comfortable with the idea to go global. That’s how we filtered out investors,” Shashank says.

we’re happy solving this for people outside of the US.

Now he feels validated. Thinking big paid off.

“Our major learning since those early days is that, yes, you can actually build a global business out of India,” he says.

Growth and monetization

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