I recently spoke to Mohit Kumar, cofounder and CEO, Ultrahuman, a fast-growing consumer health startup, as part of my PMF Convo series, where I speak to founders, operators, VCs who have struggled with PMF (product-market fit) successfully, or unsuccessfully, with the startups they have founded or worked with (or work at).
Ultrahuman sells such devices as the Ring Air, a sleep tracking wearable; M1, a continuous glucose monitoring device and accompanying platform and Ultrahuman Home, that monitors environmental markers such as light, air quality etc. They help you track your healthcare vitals and help you improve on sleep, nutrition and health. Ring Air in particular has been a big hit with a rising share of revenue coming from international markets. Previously Mohit cofounded a food delivery enablement startup called Runnr (acquired by Zomato in 2017).
In this interview, Mohit talks about how his view on product-market fit (PMF) have evolved, Ultrahuman’s PMF journey, why more and more brands should eschew performance marketing in favour of compounding channels like content, influencer partnerships etc., why nudging consumers to open your app in the morning is an effective growth hack to drive retention, as well as his advice to younger founders on building a personal runway before worrying about the company’s runway, and finally his fave books and podcasts.
Mohit is an innovative thinker, and his differentiated approach to brand-building, long-term focus (and willingness to tradeoff short term gains), his passion for health all come through in this conversation. An edited transcript of our zoom chat, conducted on 14th August 2024, is below.
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Mohit’s views on PMF, and how it has evolved
Sajith: Wanted to get your perspective on product market fit. Do you have a definition? And if not, that’s fine. Also, when you built both Roadrunner, which became Runner, and Ultrahuman, did you intentionally think about product market fit? Like I want to achieve product market fit (PMF). If we achieve this goal, then that means we have hit product market fit. If that doesn’t happen, then we have not achieved PMF. So, that’s what I want to know. Was it a very intentional thing that I have to achieve PMF, or you just worried about growth and somebody else said you’ve got PMF. So, I want to hear your perspective as a founder, and two, your definition of PMF. Feel free to answer it, the way you want.
Mohit: Got it. I’ll try to answer this in one sequence and then we can fit back to the sequence of questions that you asked. So, my journey around PMF or finding product market fit was initially the fact that I used to understand PMF as only a product problem that if you build a good enough product, it’ll find its own market. But when I moved from building Roadrunner to Ultrahuman, a new lens got added in my life towards this thinking, which was, no, I just don’t need to build a good product or a quality product. I need to build it for the right nature of the customer and in some way get access to that kind of customer. I’ll explain what this means. Alright. And I think this first one is quite intuitive.
You find the product in the market for example, in Roadrunner, the inspiration was a company in China called Dada, a B2B logistics company. It was pretty inspirational to see these guys hit tens of millions of transactions a day at scale, which is unimaginable; I mean for the category to do millions of transactions a day back then. So, our view of the world was that, look, if we build a good enough product, in our case, the product back then meant the right kind of service and the ETA and the dispatch engine and the app, etc. Because Roadrunner was a delivery logistics company, that was the whole box of products.
But when I moved to Ultrahuman one lens that got added was, let’s say I have the best product in the world today in any category, there’s a pretty high chance that it might not see mass adoption because it never reached users, but also not the right kind of user. So what I mean by that is when we started building Ultrahuman, we realised that the journey to build this product is very intensive. It’s not going to happen in year one, year two, year three. It’ll probably take four or five years of fine tuning because the problem statement is evolving; health and fitness is a hard human motivation problem. So, you would need to keep evolving the problem and the workflow and the app. So, I thought that, look, I will never have an app or a workflow or a product which actually makes everyone happy and that’s not the goal as well.
But can we find people who like this journey of evolution, people who are actually users who get a product, judge it by what it’s today and then discard it or accept it, alright? And my question to myself was, are there such users in the world? And the answer I got was, if there were no such users in the world, then no new products would get created. No new experiences will get created. For example, when Notion started, they were a shittier notepad than Google Docs because they had less tools and capabilities, but over time they actually built so many capabilities, cleaned up so many things that they actually ended up becoming much better. For us, in the initial days, we needed ambassadors to drive the product and these ambassadors should be people who believe in the mission more than the product to begin with.
And that’s why what we did was when we launched our wait list for product access, we manually selected these people. I mean literally we went to their Twitter profiles, their Instagram profiles looked at what kind of content they post? Some of these people were easily affected by things like, oh, my flight got delayed tweeting Indigo Airlines is the worst airline ever, Eureka Forbes guys don’t pick up the call. They’re all cribbing in the timeline and these are good people, really smart people, but the mindset that they had towards the product was that if I have a bad experience, that’s the end all. And there were other kinds of people who were generally more positive in life. They’re like, oh, I tried this, this broke, but that’s okay. I believe in this, I’ll give it another try, etc. So what we did was we ended up picking the latter people who have slightly more patience with a new company and a new product.
And what happened as a result was that the first two people who got the product were generally more positive people in life. As a result, the outcome that we got was both critical feedback as well as basically positive feedback, but the critical feedback was mostly direct. They would write to us long emails that, oh, this is not working, this is working, but I would really want you guys to actually improve. And I don’t want to bash you guys on social media because you guys are less than a six month old company and you have the right intent. So they understood us as a company and I would say that in our journey this has been the most incredible step towards getting the right kind of customers, if that makes sense.
Sajith: Got it. Very interesting. So earlier it was a lens that if you make a great product the market will get created on its own. Today you are saying no, you have to intentionally select the right audience, customers, users, and the product has to align with them. Am I right?
Mohit: Yeah, so in some ways in the early days it’s like you’re building your own captable. So, you’re not just getting people for money, you’re getting people because they’re getting on your product with some belief in you with a long-term mission. So, if the early folks, for example, if you guys invested in us and start saying, Hey, Mohit month one over, where is the revenue month two over where is the revenue, it is not working out guys, then this is done. That kind of conversation versus saying, look, we believe in what you’re building and we’ll have some patience around what you’re building. Even if you get it wrong, we’ll give you another chance to build because we want to build this along with you. So, we started thinking, internally we keep saying that imagine you are building a captable, not your user base. If so, what kind of people would you get on? So, that was the forcing function in our head.
Sajith: Very interesting. I believe that there are two products that the founder sells, one is the customer product, and the second is the investor product. It is interesting how you compared the customer product to how the investor product is sold. So, you have to intentionally sell to the right customers. Yeah. Great. So just a little bit about the Ultrahuman journey and if you want feel free to contrast it with Roadrunner, but that’s a very different segment, B2C, B2B. So, you can also just talk about Ultrahuman. How did Ultrahuman approach or manage PMF? What has been the journey and where do you get a sense that it’s working?
Ultrahuman’s PMF journey
Mohit: For us that took around four years to be honest. This actual feeling, and I would say that it’s not like we have PMF everywhere in the company. There are a few capabilities or new product launches that are still very much in the nascency. They don’t have PMF, they don’t have any sort of even data to improve right now. So still, for example, we have a product called Ultrahuman Home, it’s pretty early. We still believe that our CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitoring) product is pre- PMF right now. Ultrahuman Ring Air is the product that actually has acquired PMF to some extent. Some capabilities have had PMF within that. The software capability that we have built recently, which is power plugs, does not have PMF yet, it has to get PMF over time. So, you can see that some parts of the puzzle have PMF, some parts of the puzzle is that it will get to PMF. The good part is that on an overall basis, the part that has PMF is the largest part of the pie. That’s like 84% of our revenue and that drives our flywheel and that actually helps other non PMF products to sustain so that we could take a much more patient approach towards those experiments.
So, it took us four years because year 1 was ‘what to build’, year 2 was broadly ‘know what to build, but how is it different’? Year 3 was ‘we know what to build, how it is different, but we don’t know how to sequentially build it’ because we can’t build everything at once. So, what are the first few things in what we know what we should build that we should prioritise? Alright, because actual execution of it, and now the kind of problems that you’re facing in year 4 are around, oh, the product flywheel is flying and Ring Air is getting traction, we can sell more of the same and you can make 5x our revenue in the next two years. The product makes money, the money that the product makes sustains the entire organisation. We are PAT (Profit after Tax) positive etc.
But at the same time, how do we protect this revenue, what sort of anti-fragility can we build in this revenue? So why is this fragile, for example, which is basically, that my demand says 40% revenue from retail, 20% from marketplaces and 15-20% from direct. So, in retail I have some bit of concentration on large accounts. Now these large accounts today might seem easy, but tomorrow could be competitive. So, if tomorrow they get competitive because when we get to hundred million dollars plus revenue, competitors will react. It’s not like there are static elements, there are dynamic elements. So, what are they going to do? They’re going to underprice, they’re going to do more in store marketing. So, those are the elements that we’re thinking proactively for what would we do when we see early signs of a problem coming in?
The other example is in the supply chain. So, we work with 300 components in the supply chain. And the way supply chain works is every part of the component is a part of the entire ship. So, unless you have all the 300, you can’t make this one product. It’s a totally dependent system. So you have to build redundancies in each one of these. If you build too much redundancy and you have too much cash being spent ahead of its curve. If you have too less redundancy, then basically you’ll run out of inventory. So, this balance will help us improve the anti-fragility element as well. And that’s the other thing that we’ve been thinking about. How do we now predict our revenue? Because our PMF, even though it looks like users love the product, they continue to enjoy the product, they will continue to do so only if we continue to increase our network effects via growth.
And that could only happen when the core of our growth engine, which is being able to sell more of the same, continues to work because we have a solid supply chain on one hand, and on the other hand, the distribution is not at the risk of stress. So, that’s what the thinking is today. If you see Ultrahuman in the last six months, most of our thinking has been around how to predict the revenue as you grow. Predict the revenue because now we have much more confidence on where to get demand from. If you ask me, Mohit, can you hit 2x targets by the end of the year, I can confidently say yes but If you ask me can you predict 95% of the revenue ramp up today for the rest of the year and beyond, I would say we’re still early in terms of being able to predict that. So that’s where we are at.
Sajith: So interesting. As you hit PMF, it seems revenue prediction becomes easier and you have clarity, visibility on demand. So, is that the definition of PMF? Do you have a definition of PMF in your mind to say that hey, ring has got PMF?
Mohit’s definition of PMF as decreasing CAC
Mohit: Yeah, one definition that we continue to use for PMF is every channel should, if it starts becoming progressively cheaper for us to acquire users, it’s a PMF channel and every product that has PMF it progressively becomes easier to acquire users. Ultimately it’s a user acquisition engine, right? In many ways. So if a product or a channel is helping us make acquisition cheaper month over month, it means there are signs of PMF. What that means is that, let’s say for example your channel is performance marketing. Now all of us know about performance marketing. You invest in performance marketing, your CAC initially will shoot and then it’ll come down. But the problem is if you let’s say beyond a certain point, the problem is it’ll shoot up again, your ad budget will go through the roof, go out of whack, etc.
So, it’s a channel that becomes better with putting in more money, but it does not compound. It does not become your infrastructure over time. So naturally, so maybe the keyword is that naturally it becomes cheaper as you invest more capital or even time. An example of a channel that becomes cheaper over time is a channel like SEO, like writing your own content, a channel like your own YouTube videos, those become cheaper over time because older videos, if they’re made well, they’ll have more credibility because of age. Another way is let’s say if you have a newsletter aggregated in one place, it behaves like a blog. Those would become your SEO content on the internet and those would compound over time. Generally those are the ones that tend to compound over time. The ‘spend money once, get traction, and then optimise ones’ don’t really compound over time.
Many B2B partnerships do tend to compound over time because what happens is once you get in with a certain amount of users, you prove your proof point, then you can basically build your own guard wall in that account because you put in so much of effort and then once you expand the user base, it compounds from there, because you already have traction with some initial set of users. So, what we have seen is that we believe more and more in channel compounding. Product compounding is a function of channel compounding. Because if channel compounding is not working, even if you have the best product, it doesn’t really matter. One example I keep using is there is a 99% mortality rate on Kickstarter, even though Kickstarter has around the best products in the world, new products in the world, less than 1% products actually make it to the real world and actually become a real company. Even though 99% of these are also products in some ways or some aspects basically. But the reality is that those products never compound. They just become like one time sale and then they don’t improve from there. The channel does not improve from there as well because they don’t end up building those long-term ways to acquire users.
Sajith: Got it. Very interesting. Great definition of PMF as a channel and customer acquisition problem. So, just in terms of metrics to gauge PMF, obviously CAC becomes a critical thing, if CAC is coming down it is correlated with PMF. Do you have other metrics you use to judge channel compounding and product compounding? Are there any other metrics that you guys track?
Mohit: CAC could be one, repeat revenue will be another one. So for example, if you have 20 stores in retail setup, and let’s say you’re predicting revenue for September, if 90% of the revenue is taken care of by the future month prediction revenue by all the old past accounts, that basically means that they’re in some ways repeating or compounding. So repeating or compounding is another bit to think about, let’s say the product market fit marker. I think engagement is a strong one to a large extent.
Morning usage of an app, drives its retention
Mohit: So, amount of time as well as the number of times people open up the app. Why this is important is because, now it’ll be different for B2B companies, but generally what we have seen is that there is a psychological angle to engagement for a user on an app. What I mean by that is as a human being, your learnability changes over the day. So, when you wake up you’re more neuroplastic because your brain neurons are fresh, you want to learn more things and then it degrades over time and then by the time you go to sleep, you have built up adenosine in your brain and then you go to sleep because you are tired and you don’t want to learn more things, alright? That’s why reading something will excite neurons and you’ll feel like i don’t want to use any more neurons, now let’s go to sleep. Now interestingly, here’s the fun part: the apps that get opened in the early part of the day, the neuroplastic part of the day are the ones that have the most amount of retention in the world.
Sajith: That’s interesting
Mohit: Because they become a part of your core behaviour.
Sajith: That’s interesting. Okay, so Calm and all the meditation apps.
Mohit: Instagram is a big one. Instagram has a morning peak of usage and people get up and say, oh, what happened over the night? I missed out on the action, what happened in the world? Uber is a big one. People develop this habit because they go to office or commute to some place early in the morning. They also do it in the evening while returning back. But the morning one is pretty pronounced. I worked for a few years at Ola and I saw that the morning spike is significantly larger compared to the evening spike, but this morning spike is the one that drives the behaviour that tells the brain that, oh, it’s very natural to open up the Uber app or Ola app to actually do some action.
There is another example where people wake up, the first thing they do is see the sleep score. How well did I sleep yesterday? So, that is pretty interesting because it’s like you’re training humans to understand their physiology in a slightly different way via numbers and methods instead of just their feelings. I mean their feelings will matter or do matter, but basically you’re making it much more quantitative so that they can fine tune it in a better way. And that’s why I think if you say that app opens per day are important, you should probably give more weightage to apps being opened after people wake up maybe three to four hours from there because you’re way more neuroplastic, you’re learning new behaviours and if you end up making someone, I read this study somewhere that if you end up making someone open up the app 90 times within their first 120 days, which is pretty frequent, then you become a core part of their life, unmissable behaviour. So, those were the two levers that we found to be pretty interesting. Now interestingly, those are the two levers that happened for us just six weeks ago.
The morning behaviour still existed, but the behaviour where basically people open up the app more than 90 times in 120 days only happened because of Ring Air adoption. It’s a daily use case tool, so you have to use it, open up the app like five times per day every day for almost 22 minutes a day basically, right? So, 22 minutes, five times, which is four minutes per open and then for almost every day for the next 100 – 200 days. So, that just becomes a core behaviour of your life. You just find it very natural to navigate into the app, open up the app, see something get back.
Sajith: Really interesting. So, Ring is driving adoption of the app and that is getting reflected in some of the other products as well. So, next question, GTM motion customer acquisition playbook, what did you focus on initially and what is it today? Obviously performance marketing was there, obviously there was content. If you could just take me through the sequence.
Customer acquisition playbook / GTM Motions
Mohit: When we started there was performance marketing, but luckily, we killed it very early, we didn’t succeed in it. We failed in it in many ways and I think it was good that we failed in it. Any channel that depends on a pipe of money, so money on channel on, money off channel off, almost always never works is what we have seen. There’s a reason for that. We call it a high stress channel. Even if that channel is profitable, one fine day, if you don’t have the cashflow, if you don’t have the money, you’ll always fear losing that volume, which is if I stop performance marketing, 30% of my traffic will be gone. So, what do you do?
You end up doing other things to sustain marketing by acquiring some random users, by making yourself believe that performance marketing is a great channel, but in reality it’s a channel that depends on money. And one day when the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) logic or whoever controls the pipe, whether it’s Meta or Google or anybody else, they would change the engine, change the logic, that fine day you’ll be addicted to the channel, but then it’ll be so expensive for you. That’s how the channels actually work by the way. You’ll notice that the more money you put in, the more efficient it becomes at taking your money essentially, which is very weird because ideally more money should mean more critical mass and it should become more efficient. But that does not happen. In many scenarios you pump in money quickly, it’ll actually increase the CAC.
Sajith: Yeah, channel saturation is very likely in performance marketing.
Mohit: …to just eat up your CAC. It is like, oh, you gave me more capital now I’ll figure out a way to use this capital. Which is weird because if it was a completely compounding channel, it’ll say, oh, you gave me more experiments, I will make it cheaper for you because all I needed was capital to become efficient. So, those are the ones that we actually killed in the early days. Luckily, I would say in our journey, if there is X and Y, so X is the amount of capital wasted, Y is the amount of capital used, X, I would contribute to all of these early experiments that we did in non-compounding channels and performance marketing would be one of them. The other one that we tried were athlete partnerships or celebrity partnerships. Now, because they are really hard to measure and because the thing with celebrities is that unless the celebrity is totally dedicated to you and 24*7 talks about your brand and believes in it, totally, it’s really hard for that partnership to work.
The reason for that is the filter for people in terms of looking at a celebrity has actually changed over the last few years, which is I look at a celebrity I see endorsement, and unless that celebrity is exclusive to you knows your brand in and out, incorporate this in your lifestyle, you’re not going to get so much of time from celebrity any which ways. If you’re going do that, it has to be a super expensive contract maybe in the form of equity or money. So, for us, because of these reasons, people should not expect that, oh, if celebrity posts once, then life is different. And if the celebrity has 70 million users, then suddenly we’ll have a surge of users, that never happens. I don’t think good users behave in this fashion that they see one post from a celebrity and they’ll be like, oh, let me buy this.
For a low ticket size item it could still happen. For a medium to high ticket size item, it’s very hard for people to make a non-informed decision and you have to figure out what kind of product you’re building. So those are channels that we saw that additionally, the wisdom people say, oh, this will work, but it doesn’t work. It didn’t work for us at least. But the channels that worked for us, and it was a painful journey, was around, let’s say for example, content creation, writing our own blog. Every month our traffic has grown YouTube videos. So, essentially giving a product to YouTubers and the YouTubers doing a review. So when we started, YouTubers used to do reviews, but then we saw a trend where YouTubers would do a review within 10 days of usage or maybe even three days. And they were like, this doesn’t make sense because in three days, even if you post a positive review, you wouldn’t have used the product first of all, right?
In many ways they’re just doing this for affiliate fee for example. So, what we did was we said, look, unless you’re doing an unboxing video where you unbox the product and then say, oh, I don’t know anything about this product, I’ll try it over the next few days, see you guys soon. Unless you’re doing that, you can’t really get the product from us and post a review if you are partnering with us unless you spend 90 days. So, you have to use the product for 90 days, develop your conviction, and only then you should talk about the product. And what happened as a result was that every team member in the company, everywhere, basically they were like, look, this doesn’t make sense, this is stupid, it’ll just slow us down. And the reality is that it did slow us down for a while, which was maybe early last year, but then when it started kicking in terms of its benefits and goodness, it never stopped basically.
So, it is now the largest and one of the most profitable channels of growth hacks. And the other cool thing is that when we launch a new feature or new brand, we can just go back to these people and say, look guys, we are launching something new and all those hundreds of millions of users who are available through their channels, we don’t have to spend an extra dollar to actually acquire those users anymore. So, it just becomes a part of your virtual access pool because those YouTubers have actually written about you. Probably a percentage of those would actually write about a new product feature that you’re launching or maybe a new product that you’re launching. But even that is super cheap or super-efficient compared to basically let’s say reacquiring those users via performance marketing.
So, that would be one channel that worked for us. The other big bet for us is retail. Retail, we are doubling down because we believe that seeing is believing, and this might be true for some categories, might not be true for others. In our category, we are creating a new experience for people that you could put something which is so minimal as a ring on your finger and measure so many new things. Some companies have been around, they have been large companies as well, but they’re still not as large for this to become a mainstream behaviour. And that’s why we believe that for the next few years, maybe like 10, 15, 20 years, this is going to be like, see to believe it, you have to go to the store, see the product, keep it in your hand, see the lightness, and then you’ll believe in the company.
Sajith: Very interesting. So, is there a specific term for these Youtube content partnerships?
Mohit: YouTuber partnerships? That’s pretty much, yeah.
Sajith: Okay, got it. So, today, for example, to drive predictability of demand, let’s say you want to hit x crores or x million $ the next month. Broadly what percentage, I’m sure performance marketing is being used, maybe not the sole one. So, I just want to know the mix right now.
Mohit: There’s no performance marketing we used.
Sajith: Oh wow, okay.
Mohit: It used to till a few years ago, but we don’t use it anymore. __ mix is, we are around 30% retail, 20% marketplace, primarily Amazon and now Coupang and Lazada in Southeast Asia as well. And then we have around 25 to 30% direct approximately. And then the remaining it’ll be 20%. So 30 – 20, 30 – 20 sort of.
Sajith: 30% is direct, and the last 20%?
Mohit: First 30% is retail, second 20% is marketplace. And then third, 30% is basically your direct and fourth 20% is your B2B. So 30 -20, 30 – 20.
Sajith: And from media perspective, there’s no performance marketing, but there is, for instance, do you advertise on Amazon or Coupang or stuff like that? They have their own internal, do you promote it on sponsored listings?
Mohit: Very, very tactically. So, essentially if we are running a promo, like for example Amazon Prime Day, then we might want to push it a little bit more, but with the constraint that the channel has to be PAT positive or individually profitable with all costs considered basically so that because of that constraint being there, we don’t do a bunch of things. For example, we often ask our team, should we run more discounts or should we actually run more channel ads, for example? And often always the answer comes to us that let’s pass on the value to the consumer instead of basically giving to a channel.
Sajith: That’s interesting. So, zero performance marketing, I haven’t seen this at this scale. So, just relying on YouTube content, blog posts, retail presence, etc. to drive sales. Interesting. The next few questions, maybe last three questions. So, you do interact with young founders who come to you, either investment or just advice. So, are there any specific caveats, thumb rules, the guidance that you give to them yeh karna, yeh nahi karna. what would be that vishesh tippani you have for the younger founders on this topic?
Mohit: On this topic? I don’t think that I meet a lot of people specifically for this topic.
Sajith: No, no. Let us say they come to you for generic advice.
His advice to younger founders
Mohit: The only two kinds of conversations I’ve ever had has been around look, a) you should find where your users are, who are your users and where are they? How do you get to good users? Good essentially means not people who pay money, but people who are positive in life. For example, if you select a group of friends in your vicinity, would you select pessimistic friends or optimistic friends? Yeah. You’d naturally want to select more optimistic friends, right? Happier people right? Because it’s very contagious and sometimes the smartest people sound very pessimistic as well. That’s also true. They’ll be critics to everything. They’ll be like, oh, this is wrong, that is wrong, etc. My view on this is that life is too short to deal with pessimistic people.
Just deal with good people and have your own bar for quality and success. So, you should have some delusion, not a lot of it, some delusion helps. A little bit of that flavour in life helps you to believe in what you’re doing. The rest is just find good people. There are enough good people in the world to keep you happy and to keep you motivated. If you’re surrounded on day one by all the critic users, and they’re like, oh, this is bad, this is terrible, you are a stupid founder and you built a shitty company, you’re just going to wake up unhappy. Instead work with people who believe in your mission first and then they give you time. This is important. And the journey to finding such users could be very different.
The other advice which might be even new for me, and I found a lot of benefits personally, is that develop personal longevity before you can think about company longevity. What I mean by that is it could be your health, but also your bank balance, your personal bank balance where you, before starting your own company, have a comfortable runway personally before you can actually dedicate 24*7 to something like a mission. And generally the problem is a lot of people who are starting up, I meet and sometimes they’ll have this question, I’m struggling because I’m on zero salary for the last two years, and I’m like, oh, how much money have you raised? I have $3 million in the bank. I am like, dude, if you take a 10 Lakh salary or 20 Lakh salary and make your company work, isn’t that a better deal overall basically to survive?
Why are you being so krantikari (radical) in life for no reason? It’s like yes, make the right kind of sacrifices, sacrifice your time, go 24*7, go all in. But why sacrifice your essentials, your basics, your nutrition, your health, your mental health, your family, etc? Those essentials are important. Statistically, this is why rich people get richer or successful people get more successful because the most successful businessman in India, people who create a business in India are the people who already have some kind of downside protection already. It’s not the rags to riches folks. Rags to riches is the story which becomes famous because, oh, this guy slept on the streets and became a millionaire. That becomes famous. But that’s not truth, that’s not practical. It’s good PR, but it’s not practical, right? In most scenarios, if you’re working in a job, develop four to five years of personal runway and invest in places where you could get some kind of interest, etc. get to a good comfortable place, then take the plunge or calculated risk.
A lot of places where people are in a miserable place, they are a founder building a great product, who’ll be like, look, I’ve not been to a restaurant for the last one month not eating good food. I’m like, why? No, no, no, I have to save money to survive. I mean, these are really dedicated people. No, but you should have some bit of a good life. You’re not talking about lavish living, etc. because that you can do when you actually make money. But do you not deserve the right to actually at least get to a stage which is half close to how you were when you were earning a salary? You should. So don’t be miserable because then your mind will go there naturally, even if you’re thinking it’s not there. So, that has been a big unlock for me as well, because when I made money thanks to Zomato, a lot of personal longevity came in life, which is like I don’t have to think about making money again. So, yeah, that helps.
Post PMF
Sajith: Very interesting. Last set of questions, now that you’ve got PMF, the next steps is what you said about protecting revenue, anticipating the competitors moves and safeguarding that. Is there anything else that you’re doing post PMF? Have you changed certain things in the company, et cetera? Like when Ring got PMF, is there anything that you’re doing for post PMF inputs, any thoughts?
Mohit: This might be particular to us, I think we are still very concentrated as an organisation, there’s a lot of dependency on every individual to deliver for the company to deliver because we are still a very small team delivering $60 million annually or $5 million a month approximately, and that is becoming double in the next few months. We believe that our ability to make money depends on people count relatively being similar, but revenue pool going up significantly. That’s how the margin will get created. Now with that constraint, what is the practical limitation? Practical limitation is these are the people who grew 4x while remaining the same people, they’re able to do 4x more work or 4x smarter work.f
So, can these guys do another 4x from here? And those answers are linked to not as much work, but how much exercise they do, do they do it regularly? Do they show up at the same time to office almost always from a discipline perspective, do they invest in nutrition? All those factors started dominating more, which is because now we see that there’s no judgement on people, but people who, I’m not talking about chronic sickness, etc. but generally people who are more susceptible to falling sick whenthere’s a little bit more stress then their work does get affected. That’s the reality. And our push has been that, oh, can we solve both the problems at the same time? Obviously the work problem, but most importantly a health problem at the same time. So, we did an experiment recently, which is what we called as Mayhem, because it happened in May. We got every engineer in the company to come down to our Bangalore office, spend a month, 30 days, no breaks in the middle, live right next to the factory for 30 days and ship more than 25 features. Alright, so back to back 30 days of intense sprint.
So, people did ship a lot of things. Obviously we got a lot of momentum boost. But what was interesting was that we were measuring, trying to understand what is the impact on their health. Interestingly, every individual in that cohort slept significantly better compared to how they were sleeping in their own life. Everyone’s activity was improved and basically their glucose levels were more stable than previous, which is basically that they were way more disciplined in their life because they had to be on a mission. So, everything else aligned around that mission. I’m not saying that we should always be in mission, but what that teaches us is that there is something magical that you can drive with discipline in your life, and lack of discipline is actually more stress. It’s not freedom, lack of discipline is actually more stress. Having discipline is more control in many ways. So, that is the advantage that we in some ways were able to see that just having discipline in one aspect of life aligns everything else, affects and improves everything else. So, that would be another way to think about it.
Sajith: How big is the team right now?
Mohit: 130 people.
Sajith: Very interesting. Yeah, it’s small for the revenue you’re making
Mohit: $100 million revenue, the goal is to be under 150 people basically.
The Pick
Sajith: Wow! Mohit, last two questions and then I’ll be off. So when you initially launched, it was little different, right? The ring came later. The (CGM) patch also came in later, but the goal was always to be in the space of health. Was there any other idea other than around health, meditation, wellness? Did you think of anything like that? I call this segment ‘The Pick’. I can pick 10 – 15 companies and if one of them fails, it’s fine. But for a founder, the pick is critical because each bet, if it does well, it seven – eight years of your life, 10 years of your life. Even if it doesn’t take off, see what happened to Runner was four years of your life work went there, etc. The founder can’t do more than four or five picks. So according to you, how did the pick go? Were you very clear that you wanted to work in health? How was the journey of picking?
Mohit: Yes. Long back when we started working, Vatsal (his cofounder) and I were chatting about a video calling app, by the way. When we got started, I think we were still thinking what is the best product that we could ship that has high chances of success in terms of both fundraising as well as revenue? And that lens actually changed over time. There’s a third dimension that got added. The third dimension was what is that product that will motivate me to wake up every day as well? And that has to be something that I use because if I don’t use something and I’m just building it, it is because of the first two goals, which is revenue and fund raises. But if I’m using it every day, it’s also because of my own needs.
So, we wanted to attach that third element somehow that I have to be using that product on a daily basis. And by the way, this is a success metric for our organisation also, that we measure our success by looking at what percentage of our people use our products on a daily basis organically, even though it is slightly biased as well, because we are all working together in the same company and we keep talking about these products, but then people do pick it up for their families, their friends themselves. People won’t use something for 300 days or more if it is just shoved down their throat. Eventually they’ll prioritise their urge, mindset, things that they like etc. So, from that we have seen a lot of adoption improvement over time where people naturally use the product a lot more because they personally find value and that’s been pretty inspiring.
Sajith: Got it. So, video calling was that you looked at, great. Last question. Favourite resources? It could be any field or GTM or anything business and even after business that you like to read. It could be a YouTube channel, it could be certain people?
His fave books, podcasts, YT channels
Mohit: I generally try to read a lot of public market notes because it tells me about the future a little bit and has clues around what we are building towards. Second is science books generally. I don’t like business books as much personally because I don’t have the patience to read through business books somehow. So, I did try reading a lot of them in the last four – five years. But I realised that for me what works is scientific principles, which maybe it’s not useful for business, but just keeps me grounded to what is the real world and what are scientific rules in the world. And second, it is basically this other part which is how public companies suffered, grew, again, recovered.
Sajith: Any favourite books or any books that you’ve liked in that category, in nature of these categories?
Mohit: Books in that category? That’s a good question. I just recently read about Warren Buffett’s investing principles, I think it’s written by Warren Buffet’s daughter-in-law (Mary Buffett, book is Buffetology), and it essentially says that every other business in this world, apart from Coca Cola is terrible. I mean especially Apple is a terrible business as per his investing style; coincidental that he just sold 50% of Apple. But yeah, so that’s been an interesting way to understand his perspective of how things about the research spends and all of those things. The other one would be just the Elon Musk biography which i started reading recently. It just feels a little bit more aspirational in terms of what one individual was able to do.
Sajith: And any favourite science books?
Mohit: Science books. There are many. Yeah, so from a science book perspective, I read a lot of physiology. There’s a book called Medical Physiology. It’s a bible, not really a book. So, that’s pretty interesting because it goes through the principles of sports science and then medical science and then back to sports science, etc. Then at a surface level, I liked Outlive by Peter Attia a lot. Then there’s ‘Emperor of All Maladies’, that’s pretty interesting as well. I mean, the fact that we understand so little about the human body is pretty well understood by reading that book and how fragile we are. So it just makes everything else easier, essentially. So, those have been a few, but we in the office, so we keep picking up new bits.
Sajith: Got it. Cool. If you want to share any other podcasts or anything like that you particularly liked or anything else that you liked, feel free to share. Else we’ll wrap this up.
Mohit: Yeah. Okay. So, not a big podcast guy, unfortunately, but Tim Ferris podcast was my favourite for many years. Ben Greenfield podcast as well. And then
Sajith: Not Huberman?
Mohit: Huberman as well. Yes, I think a few of those episodes have been really interesting. And then I’ve been a Joe Rogan listener for a long time, maybe since the very early days because of UFC and other things.
Sajith: Cool. Good stuff. Thanks. I’ll pause here. If there’s anything else that you want to add, please let me know. I’ll stop recording.
Mohit: No, sounds all good. I think this is pretty good.
Sajith: I’ll stop!