ST17 | Aanan Khurma On Using E-Commerce Platforms To Jumpstart Your Business

A few years ago, I barely knew anyone who put a lot of thought into their health and their well-being. Well, I mean, after almost three years of COVID, I think that has changed very much. Almost everyone I know now is like cycling or going to the gym, or using the time that they’ve got back from working from home, to try and take care of themselves. And this extends to not just working out, but also eating healthy, living healthy, maybe sleeping at the right time, things like that.

So, clearly, this has now created the space for a number of wellness-related businesses to flourish, who might have struggled maybe 10 years ago, when people weren’t really that into their own health and wellbeing. So today we are speaking with Aanan Khurma, of Wellversed. He’s a two-time entrepreneur in the wellness space. And he’s gonna tell us about how he’s made it in this space, because he’s had one successful exit before this, and how he’s seeing it evolve, as over the last three years, or maybe the last few years. The discussion today is also a little bit different because Wellversed is actually a company that has received some funding, which is very different from many of our other guests who are bootstrapped.

Discussion Topics: Aanan Khurma on Using eCommerce Platforms to Jumpstart Your Business

• The journey of Well-versed
• Acquiring brands and building partnership
• Secrets to do well on platforms like Amazon, SnapDeal, etc
• Getting support and people to join
• Learnings from the journey and the advice for listeners

Transcript: Aanan Khurma on Using eCommerce Platforms to Jumpstart Your Business

Amit Ray: But before we begin a couple of quick requests, please do follow ShopTok to ensure you don’t miss out on other such great conversations in the future. So with that said, Aanan, thank you so much for joining us today. Maybe before we start, you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey so far, and also about Wellversed.

Aanan Khurma: Thanks Amit. Thanks a lot for having me. Actually, you mentioned that I’m a two-time entrepreneur. The fact is that I’m a three-time entrepreneur, and I started my first company, back in 2011. And incidentally, that company was in the space of infection prevention and control. And with COVID coming in, that has become a huge, huge space. But I think at that point, we were too early to the market.

Although we did raise, I think 150 or 200k, from Microsoft, and the company was actually based in Israel. And we were working out of there. But we didn’t get a lot of commercial success and we had to wind that up. I think it’s about reading the market and reading the signals, and you can be passionate about what you want to be. But it’s about timing. And I think now we have a lot of people talking about success in terms of the timing of the venture, and why it is the most critical factor. So I think it’s about reading the timing of when you launch something.

So that being said, I started my first company in 2010 and 2011, and post that I have been in the space of healthcare and wellness. But what really got me into the wellness space to start with was a very, very personal quest. And it originated from a very philosophical thought where I got obsessed with the thought that eventually, any human being or any consciousness, has to come to an end.

And that thought, for me itself, was very disturbing, because I thought that it’s kind of an unfair arrangement where we weren’t asked that you are being brought into this world, but your exit is predetermined. And that’s how I became obsessed with what people are doing with longevity, what people are doing with wellness. Can there be a time when we can eventually exist perpetually, can we transfer our consciousness to artificial machines, or can we have biotech technology that can extend radically your lifespan and things like that?

So I started discovering a lot of people like Dimitri Schwab in Russia and even Google acquired a startup called Calico that is working on radical life extension, Ray is being headed by Ray Kurzweil, and things like that. So I saw that a lot of people are working towards it, but I think the first step is to eventually not succumb to lifestyle conditions and lose to things that are easily preventable, and that’s how I got into wellness in 2012 & 13. And I radically experimented with a lot of different regimes. I got into Japanese anti-aging techniques, Korean anti-aging skin science, and things like that, Ayurveda obviously, like a lot of that.

So I won’t say that I was formally trained at that point in time. Like, in the next subsequent 8 to 10 years, I have done certain certifications and all that. But at that point in time, it was devouring any and all information related to wellness and how to kind of live up to 120 years of age.

When I launched my first FMCG brand, it was called Fine Superfood. And I experimented for a couple of years. The growth was very slow in the initial years because we were just selling via WhatsApp or taking direct orders from websites. So it was a very primitive thing, but we managed to scale it a little. I think we got to around 20 lakhs rupee of sales per month. And this was a perishable product, it had a 15, 18 days shelf life.

Obviously, the product wasn’t suitable for general trade as it is. So we scaled it to a certain level, and then we collaborated with a brand called Sattviko, which has now become an FMCG brand.

Wellness is not about selling a single product or creating a single brand, it has to be a holistic approach. It has to impact each and every aspect of your life in a way that does not require you to change your behaviour. Even if something is as great as let’s say classical music, you cannot expect it to be adopted by the general population.

I learned a lot from Healthkart, 1mg and Prashant Tandon, Gaurav Agarwal in terms of how to read the market and things like that. The core thought was how we maximise human wellness in a way that does not require behavioural change.

Amit Ray: I’m curious about your previous business. So you were able to sell out to a different brand. So how was that experience briefly? Like, what attracted them to want to acquire your brand? And then, are there any learnings you got from there?

Aanan Khurma: So, the collaboration with Sattviko, started out as a very simple distribution exercise, where we were using one of their restaurant outlets to distribute our products. And I think, at that point, the uptake of the product became pretty high compared to other FMCG products that they were trying to push via their restaurant outlets.

And I think that is what piqued their interest along with our discussions around the fact that I didn’t have an understanding of distribution at that point in time. And there was a certain degree of frustration around that, how will we actually scale this to a larger level given incumbent players and given I think when it comes to taste in the mass audience? And I think that is how that whole discussion started.

And Prasoon basically saw some degree of value in acquiring the brand to add GMV to their own brand. And obviously, I think, a year or 18 months later, they pivoted from their restaurant business, which was unfortunate for our brand. But at that point in time, I think the future of the brand seemed pretty bright to me because I thought that if we are, let’s say, able to reach one crore per month kind of sales, why are these 25 outlets we can easily do crack B2B, B2C model via this product.

Amit Ray: Right. But otherwise, also, I think the brand was reasonably successful because you mentioned something like 20 lakh rupees per month, which would be two and a half crore rupees a year. Which in today’s world would be about 300,000 US. And actually, back then the rupee was a little bit stronger, so, maybe 400,000 US at that time, which is a fairly decent place to have achieved quite early, I think, in two years or so.

Aanan Khurma: Correct. So, the whole story of that brand was, I won’t say that it was the best of the branding because the product came out of a personal need. And we just really wanted people to use that product. That was the driving factor. And it was not that we were sitting in boardrooms and deciding what the branding would be, what the messaging would be, it was just about getting the product out there.

So I think from that perspective, we had reached a decent revenue level, but given what D2C brands are able to achieve in the early days right now, given all these channels like InstaMart and Zepto. I won’t say Zepto, but let’s say InstaMart, Amazon, and Amazon retail. I think 20 lakhs is not that much on the high side.

Amit Ray: Right. No, fair enough. But still, I mean, the fact is, you got it started, you took it to some level and I think that is commendable in itself. So tell me more about your current business Wellversed. So I think you mentioned something about accelerating brands and so on. So, I understand that you’re in the business of trying to make people live better, but how does the business actually work? How do you create brands or how do you acquire them things like that?

Aanan Khurma: So essentially, Wellversed is an accelerator operator of wellness brands. And our modus operandi is to identify genuine wellness brands in the early stages. When I say early stages, like when they are at a sale of about five lakhs rupees a month of sorts. And typically, we take over their sales channels, and we accelerate their sales across all the 25 major E-commerce channels in India.

And in some of these brands, we do invest as revenue-based financing, or as equity finance, and going forward, the way the model is evolving is not complete acquisition of these brands, but partial acquisition of these brands. So essentially, the model is very, very similar to what Thrasio, Heyday, SellerX Perge all these players are doing. But the only difference is that we don’t want to be an operator of E-commerce brands.

So, in order to back and create a house of genuine wellness brands, we need to have the entrepreneur’s skin in the game. And that is why we leave the entrepreneurs, majority of entrepreneurs take in the company because he is the one who will drive the messaging and the genuineness of the wellness products that he is trying to create.

So obviously, the model seems on the surface very similar to Thrasio where we identify brands, we invest in them, and we accelerate them across E-commerce channels. But the core is very, very different. We leave the kernel to the founder, and we want genuineness to flow into the wellness brand because that is what will maximise human wellness. And that is what Wellversed is all about.

Amit Ray: Okay, so I think there’s an interesting angle over here, which is you’re working with other entrepreneurs, but you’re leaving them to do their own thing. It’s not a full acquisition, kind of a model. And this is an alternate way of partnership almost, which is you provide a set of skills that you have, which is the ability to scale, I guess, sales across all of these channels. And they focus on the product, which is really there something that they may be more passionate about. Would that be a fair assessment?

Aanan Khurma: Correct. So just to go deeper into this, you know, in order to build any wellness brands, there are two parts to it. The first part is what we call the structural engineering of the brand. So structural engineering is everything that is standardised to running a brand, which is how will you warehouse the product, how will you optimise that, how will you deliver the product, where will you list the product, are the listings optimised or not, are the ad campaigns running or not.

So, this is the structural engineering of the product and typically new D2C entrepreneurs take around 2 to 2.5 years to reach a stage where they are able to optimise all the structural parts of the brand. So when we partner with brands in the earliest stage, they are able to optimise their structural part within 6 months, as opposed to 2.5 years. So, that is the first part.

The second part is the core ethos part of the brand, which is what the messaging is, what is the problem they are solving and what is the product they are creating to solve that problem. So this part is what we call the soul engineering of the brand. So this sole engineering, we leave it to the founder, and the structural engineering we take over because it is hyper accelerates their journey of 2.5 to 3 years, and it compresses into 6 months. So this is what we do.

Amit Ray: Very interesting, actually. And there’s clearly value to both sides. I mean, you’re aggregating so many brands, which otherwise you’d have to invent all of them. And they are getting speed to market and scale, which they won’t get so easily by themselves. Okay, got it. So now I understand this whole accelerator angle over here.

You mentioned earlier about behaviour change, and how that is difficult, and so on. That’s a really important point, because there are many businesses where the entrepreneur needs the person to do something different to get the full value of the product, but people don’t normally want to change. And that’s why many businesses end up failing. So how are you or what’s your thought process around not changing behaviour and still trying to get value for yourself?

Aanan Khurma: So, I will start this answer with an anecdote, where we were having lunch with someone, and I think it was one of my team members who went out for a smoke. And the person who was sitting across the table was saying that you run a wellness company and one of your team members smokes. So, this is against your ethos.

So I said, this is actually not against our ethos. The only thing that is against our ethos is that we haven’t till now invented a cigarette that does not harm you. So, I think, essentially, the kind of products we create and the kinds of brands we accelerate are products that do not ask people to change their behaviour, because what we feel is that long life in itself is not just a justified end right you have to have entertainment, you have to have an enjoyable life as well.

So we just don’t want to have a life where you are confined to a room you’re not being exposed to anything and you have a long life, there is no point in that. And there’s an interesting saying that when you don’t smoke, you don’t drink and you don’t party, you don’t have a long life, it just seems like your life is longer. So we don’t want to enable lifestyle, which just seems longer, they should actually be longer, they should be full of experiences.

So I think essentially, anything and everything that we create is viewed Wellversed from that lens whether we are trying to ask people to change their behaviour or not. And I’m not saying that we are the only ones that do that, typically brands that have been successful, have inadvertently created products, which do not ask people to change their behaviour, impossible beyond need and all these people are essentially doing, what our ethos is. So this is the crux of it, I would say.

Amit Ray: Actually, examples of the impossible and beyond are fantastic. Because they didn’t set out to say, let’s make tofu tastes better, so that more people will eat it. They set out to say, how can I make beef-tasting things, but which are actually good for you? And approached it from that point of view, which required a lot of obviously, work and engineering much more than making tofu taste a little bit better.

But look how that is worked out. And you’re exactly right. I think, for many of these kinds of things, the right approach is to take this more difficult approach to say, if you want to influence large numbers of people, you have to do it in a way that they are already doing. And that’s a really good insight and a very good example also.

So thanks for that. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about how you got started, you know, this time around. So you did mention that you help accelerate brands on 25 different E-commerce platforms. So, is that how you got started on these E-commerce platforms like Amazon?

Aanan Khurma: Actually with Wellversed also, we didn’t start up front with accelerating brands. In early 2018 we created a couple of our own brands, so we created a brand for snacking healthy, it was called Unsnack, and it’s still out there in the market. And then we created a brand called Ketofy, which is right now the largest keto brand in India.

And the way we came about it was, again, we looked into the behaviour of people and we try to understand what is the dire need within the fitness, wellness space, and obviously, like weight loss, and diabetes and all these things bubble up to the top when you do a need analysis in the fitness wellness space. And what we saw was that a lot of people are working towards this, and getting information, don’t eat that, don’t do this, don’t do that.

And we wanted to remove this word, don’t we want to say do this. And what we were saying nutritionists do was, you know, if you want to do weight loss, stop eating this, stop eating that, or if you want to reverse diabetes, you need to stop eating rice, you know, basic things like rice and roti and things like that.

So initially, when we were brainstorming on how to build Wellversed, we were also slightly heavier towards information. But eventually that ethos of not demanding people to change their behaviour flowed in, and we ended up creating our own brands. And Ketofy particularly was a brand that simplified, or enabled people to go on a low-carb paradigm without having to change their ingrained habits.

And you know, Indian food, by default, is very high in carbs, everything we eat from rice, roti, all our staples, even all our sabji’s are full of carbs. And if you’re asking an Indian person to leave flour, this is not going to work. So, eventually, we had to do a certain degree of food technology engineering to create these products, because no manufacturer was willing to manufacture the kind of products that we’re creating.

And I can say this with 1000% confidence that there was nothing known as ultra-low carb flour before we launched in early 2018. And everything that you see on Amazon, and even in the US, flour was not a dire need within the US market because doing a ketogenic or low-carb lifestyle is very easy for the population.

So there was nothing known as a keto bhujia, or keto flour, or things like that, so we were the first ones to do that. And it got sucked in so quickly that we scaled with Ketofy to 30 lakhs rupees of sales without even having our own website, we didn’t have our own website, we were just selling 5 to 6 SKUs on Amazon, not even on any other channels. And this is the process that we have been trying to replicate with other brands now.

So every company has two to three strategic visions. Obviously, the strategic vision of maximising human wellness is there. And that can only be achieved, through multiple brands, we cannot club, let’s say fitness equipment and fitness food under the same umbrella. So obviously, we have to have a conglomerate of multiple brands. And then on top of that, you have a superimposed tactical vision of not having people change their behavior.

So that’s how I think we arrived at the accelerator structure. And right now we are accelerating around 25 brands, which are spread across 6 to 7 domains of wellness, which includes, you know, obviously functional food and supplements, we are masters of that, then you have fitness equipment, skincare, hair care, stuff like that.

Amit Ray: Right. So, actually, a couple of questions over here, one is that you started with something, which was a unique product, and that was able to grow to like you said 30 lakh rupees a month, even without a website, which is quite cool.

Now, like you’ve managed to do this with one product, and because you had all of this science and stuff behind it, but is that actually possible with so many brands? Like, on what basis are you looking for these new brands, because they won’t have this kind of secret sauce, which is like a completely new product offering right?

Aanan Khurma: No, so typically we see that there are two kinds of brands, one is brands, which are trying to create an emotional niche within a certain set of people. And these are brands like let’s say Rage coffee, Sleepy Owl, and these are people who are creating the same products, but with a different emotional anchoring that let’s say certain segments of Gen Z or millennials, it will lead to and that’s how they’re creating the brand.

So creating those kinds of brands is a very different ballgame fair, I won’t suggest that you can typically start you have to create the brand story first. And these are very brand story-heavy brands. And obviously, no brand can be built without a story. But these brands start with this story because the product is a commodity product, and it’s not a product that is solving a new need.

And typically within the accelerator model, we try to gravitate towards brands that are unique or products that they’re creating that do not exist in the past. And typically what we try to tell this brand is that don’t create your website first, because your story and your website and your ethos will get sculpted as you get exposed to the market. And as you decide how you want to scale within the mass market, because this is not coffee, this is not just a normal wheat flour that you’re trying to create, this is a newer way of doing the same thing.

Amit Ray: Yeah, this is pretty interesting, because this is the whole MVP, Minimum Viable Product approach that whatever tech companies champion, but you’re doing that actually with FMCG, or the food kind of sector, which is to say, don’t worry about all the ancillary stuff, just get your product to market in the easiest possible way, which is these platforms.

And then as you do it, the sales itself will tell you, whether first of all the product is worth it or not. And whether your messaging is resonating, and you keep tweaking over there until you find your brand story. And then you make whatever you want after that.

Aanan Khurma: Correct. And you know typically, we try to gorge the repeat rates. And especially I won’t say this about the other E-commerce channels, but Amazon has a very evolved structure in terms of providing metrics of you know, they won’t give you phone numbers of users, but there are ways to track repeat rates offset of all SKUs that you’re selling.

And what we try to tell these early-stage entrepreneurs is that get your product out there and monitor the repeat rate, because that is where your brand is going to be built. And that is how your messaging needs to be molded.

Amit Ray: Okay, interesting. So I think two things you’re saying here, one is that you should use whatever data is available to you, don’t just throw it there, and then just track sales. But that and also, the second point is within that the repeat rate is the main metric that you’re concerned about. Because obviously, if people are buying it again, that means there’s something good that’s happening over there.

Aanan Khurma: Because there are two things if the person has bought your product once, then the need exists. If the person has bought your product multiple times, then your product is good. And those are the only two ways to crack a brand.

Amit Ray: Right. Extremely nice way of explaining this Aanan. I think this is the kind of simplicity that I think a lot of people may not be able to realise by themselves. So I think that’s very neat. And it’s a very good way of operating on these platforms as well because this is basically what you’re going to get from there anyway.

Speaking of platforms, you obviously started on these platforms in 2018, which was four years back, and I’m sure you’ve evolved over time. So what are some of the, let’s say the secrets, you’ve learned to do well, on all of these platforms, Amazon, SnapDeal, any of these?

Aanan Khurma: So, I won’t say they are secrets, because everything is out there, but I can just share some of the things that we have learned. So all these platforms operate in a similar fashion to the way AdWords would operate or search engines would operate. So you have to have very different mindsets, when you think of marketing on social channels, versus marketing on these channels.

So you have to club search engines and product search platforms in the same category. Because you will use the same tactical strategies for all of these, and then a very different tactical strategy for social media, because social media is about people stumbling upon products based on their interest, and then gorging what the engagement interaction has been, whereas on product or E-commerce channels, you have to capture a portion of the search intent, and you want that capturing to be 100%.

So I think from a tactical perspective, that mindset needs to be there that you have to operate totally from a search keyword perspective. And this is where a lot of people or early-stage entrepreneurs make mistakes because they try to create brand ethos on these search channels, whereas, on these search channels, you have to capture the search intent, which is very functional in nature. So, let’s say, going back to the example of Ketofy.

So Ketofy, the brand ethos is fitness food, but I cannot build the entire search strategy on Amazon around fitness food, because that is not what the user will be searching for. The user will be searching for keto Atta, let’s say. So you have to think from that perspective and a very exceptional perspective, when you think about these channels and when you’re thinking of social channels, then you do a lot of things around you know, fitness, food, why sugar is bad, and very broader things, things like that.

So, I think for the CEO or the founder wearing this hat is very, very important don’t try to push your brand ideology on the search channels immediately.

Amit Ray: Right. Okay, I think that’s great. Now with search, let’s say the traditional search, which is Google and stuff, it takes months to build up a search profile, good enough so that you start seeing a lot of visitors and stuff on the platforms, is it similar, or do you immediately see results if you optimise for the search?

Aanan Khurma: No, so there are two parts to it. Again, all search efforts are bifurcated into organic and inorganic, so organic takes time to build where the fundamental principles are the same, whether you are incorporating keywords or not, whether your content is of high quality or not, your images are of high quality or not adhering to the platform-specific, you know, SEO principles, whether you’re doing that or not, and they are available out there, most entrepreneurs think of creating their listing on Amazon and other E-commerce channels as a very tedious, trivial task, that someone else to do it, you know, they don’t do it themselves.

But that is the fundamental thing that you should look at, rather than building a website, because every listing of your product on an E-commerce channel is the website of that particular product. And you have to be the one to create that listing to start with, and this is the mistake, which I also made, I thought that these are standard tasks, and someone else should do it. And it took me a couple of months to realise that no, this is the most important task and instead of creating social pages or websites and stuff like that, you should work on creating a great listing for your SKU. So, that is one.

So, that is the organic part of things, and coming to the inorganic part you have to be well versed with the tools and especially you should start with the channel. So, I would say you should first start with the product channel fit, where people if they have just heard that Amazon is a great sales channel, it might not be a great sales channel for a fashion D2C product.

So you have to identify the SKU channel, which fits first, and then understand all the inorganic performance marketing nuances of it, which are all out there, it is nothing new. So it has to be bifurcated in that sense, and not create confusion between search intent, brand intent, inorganic and organic. So this is the way I do it.

Amit Ray: Very nice. I think Inorganic is paid, right, so, I suppose people can pay and there’ll be ads, and it will be easier to see that. But the organic one is the important one, because most entrepreneurs who listen to this show are bootstrapped, and obviously won’t have so much money to put into paying.

So I like the takeaway that essentially look at these as search engines, and look at your page or your SKU listing as a website or a web page. And as long as you take these things in that spirit, you will actually start seeing some results over here.

Aanan Khurma: So very simple things like on Amazon, Amazon allows you to add up to 20 questions and answers on your listing. If you want to SKU optimise your listing, you have to insert everything and anything that the user has asked on your, let’s say Q&A section and the Q&A section of your competitor. So you should look at all your competitor listings, see what the consumer questions are, and address those in your listing upfront and SKU optimization. So these are very simple tactics it is just that it just takes discipline, effort, and focus.

Amit Ray: And that’s a good tip also, because this is not even, like stuffing keywords kind of thing. Questions and Answers are genuine things. I mean, it’s value add to your listing as well. So, really good. So thanks a lot. I think that was almost like a masterclass and platforms in like five minutes, so that’s really cool. So let’s take a slightly different angle over here.

Now you have a very expansive vision, which is to well lengthen the human lifespan, or make it at least more enriching and worthwhile human lifespan. Now, when you were first starting out, how would you convince people to buy into this kind of vision because it’s not saying, hey, join us and we’ll make a new social network or something like that, which people understand?

But we are going to make a whole new we’re going to elongate lifespan, and we are going to make people live healthier. You know, people might interpret this as either something very trivial, which is, oh, live healthier means supplements, or something just to, you know, beyond any one person, like Elon Musk style, elongating lifespan. So how did you convince people of this kind of vision and also get them to join you in this?

Aanan Khurma: So I think a lot of the conviction stems from the personal choices that I’ve made in my life and most of the people who were a part of the early stage team knew me personally, and in early 2012, and 13 when I was going through this personal transformation, where I got obsessed with lifespan and healthspan, and things like that, you know, I made a lot of changes as far as personal discipline is concerned to what I eat, to adopting a minimalist lifestyle.

So, for the past, I think now, eight years, I have only worn black clothes as a sign of minimalism and as a sign of discipline, that till the time we are able to achieve maximize health span, this is what I’m going to do. And that shows a personal connection towards the cause, which might seem off-seen to certain people.

And I’m sure a lot of people who have this that, you know, will maximise health span, or will enable people to live up to 120 years of age, they think it’s not going to happen, but they think that if the person he has such a conviction, he’ll do at least something right, it’s not that he won’t be able to do anything.

So I think, a certain degree of confidence stems from those small acts of personal life where that conviction comes out and that discipline comes out. And I think that is how it started, where our initial discussions were not centred around let’s say, directly extending the human lifespan or health span.

But around making a lot of people take the first step in this direction with minimal behaviour change. So people knew that there’s a broad vision superimposed on top of the small steps that we are enabling people to take. And I think that is why several people, even in the early stage, we didn’t have a lot of money to give them, but they decided to stay and put in all that effort.

Amit Ray: Yeah, that’s great. So tell me about your first few hires. Like, when did they join? I know, you have some co-founders as well. So how did that come about?

Aanan Khurma: So I’ve also been a part of Stanford Biodesign, it’s a one-year 18-month-long fellowship, centred on identifying the right needs within the healthcare space. And as a part of that program, I used to do a lot of design thinking outreach workshops, and incidentally, the second co-founder, Aditya Seth, was an attendee of one of those design workshops. And when I was quoting certain examples of design thinking, he was pretty inspired by this stuff.

And due to his family situation, he had to drop out of college. So he was very intrigued by the entire thought process. And he came to me personally, after I think, several days of the workshop, where he said that I want to do something in this direction, and we connected a lot over, you know, how we should create products that require minimal behaviour change, and things like that. And we started experimenting in this space. So that’s how it came about to be.

But at that point, I hadn’t thought of him as a co-founder. And we had a very trivial arrangement of sorts, where I was paying him in a personal capacity, just as a stipend to explore things. And we were exploring ideas, even the name Wellversed, hadn’t been formulated at that point in time, and we were just experimenting with the brands. So that’s how it came about to be. And my second co-founder, Ripunjay, was my colleague at the Stanford Biodesign program.

But he came into the picture a lot later when things had stabilised a little, I would say 9 months to 12 months into the operation of Wellversed, that’s how we reconnected and he was trying to do his own D2C brand similar to Vahdam teas. And that’s how he came to me that I’m trying to build my own brand. And then we thought, why not do something together?

So early hires, I won’t say they were hires per se because we didn’t have that much capital, it was me paying them in personal capacity for the first six months. And then we had an Angel investor who put in 25 lakh rupees, because he had started consuming our product, and he was very fascinated by what we were doing. And that’s how we formally strategize the company.

Amit Ray: So, obviously with most businesses, the business starts and then you hire some people, and some of them obviously turn out to be extremely motivated evangelising, like they’re all about the company. But obviously, in most companies, such people don’t get elevated to co-founder status or anything like that.

So what did you think about this whole situation? Like, what was the rationale behind elevating a couple of people to becoming co-founders? And how should maybe other business owners also maybe consider how they’re looking at their people?

Aanan Khurma: So, there are two to three different aspects of this. One is, at any given point in time, you know, in life you cannot operate mechanically, you cannot have all the options presented to you upfront and then make the best possible decision. So every decision has to be made within a limited set of choices in that timeframe.

So, one was, that you have to decide which people would put all their skin in the game and help to take this company to the next level, and those are the people who will stick for long and who should be the co-founders. And it’s not that I can go about town and interview, let’s say, 1000s of people and then decide who the co-founder should be. So a lot of it is situationally governed as well.

But then I think, the second decision-making process is that whether you bond over things that matter or not, and you know, me and Aditya, and Ripunjay, what we really connected over and what we really synchronise with is the fact that we have to create a company where people would want to work. So obviously, the strategic vision is to maximise human wellness. And that stems a lot from my personal quest. I won’t say that the other two co-founders are as psyched about maximising human wellness as I am.

That is the strategic vision of the company. But on a day-to-day level, what matters more is creating a company where people would want to give in their 100%. And that is what we synchronise over. And that is the point where I decided that you know, you can have, let’s say, the best of the best people but not synchronised over with things that actually matter, and partnerships, which actually work are the ones who solve these core issues.

Amit Ray: Right. So I think that makes sense. I mean, essentially, you need to have as your co-founders, people who are going to actually move the business forward and more importantly, share the same vision and the same ethos, at least, in some way.

Aanan Khurma: Correct. So it’s just like being in a marriage, right? So, like, marriage is not a glamorous process. Everyone who has been married knows that. So eventually, it boils down to whether the basic tenets have been met or not. And the basic body parts synchronising on basic tenets or not. So I think that is where my conviction stemmed from.

Amit Ray: Right. So kind of, again, changing tack a little bit. So, talking a little bit about competition. So you mentioned earlier that you’re similar, actually, you are, you’re a D2C brand aggregator or accelerator, where you are bringing so many brands under the same roof. And yours is a little different approach where the entrepreneur continues to run their brand, and so on. But many of the people that are in the D2C space are extremely well funded.

I mean, they’re not Angel level funded, for sure. They’re like series C, series D-level funded companies. So, are there situations where you actually go, where you compete with them directly on any of your portfolio of brands? And if so, how do you actually win that particular situation, because they obviously have unlimited money to promote their brands?

Aanan Khurma: So, typically, the mindset and modus operandi of all of these E-commerce aggregator players is very, very different. So, one that they do not acquire or promote brands that are centred around the common ethos. So their deciding criteria is, what is the top line revenue of a brand, and it has to be more than 70 to 80 lakhs per month, one second, it’s only about the EBITA revenues at the moment at present.

And, on the surface, our model is similar to all these aggregators, but we come into the picture a lot early, where the brand is only doing, let’s say, five lakhs rupees a month of sales. And we resolve their basic operational issues, we do the structural engineering for them. So rather than looking at these people, as competitors, we also view them as an endpoint for certain acquisitions, which they can do from our portfolio.

So we don’t look at them, particularly as competitors, because they don’t come into the stage as early. But who would be a closer competitor, would-be players, like, let’s say, Evenflow, who are coming in earlier to the picture, or other accelerators like these, but then again our ethos is very, very different. So for example, we would never go and accelerate a brand, which is selling, let’s say, sugar, or a brand of sugar.

So, I think in those two senses, we are very, very different from them. And we are very glad that I think we need more players like Thrasio, Pers, and Sellerx because they will eventually become acquires for models like ours. So let’s say we have scaled a brand to 1 crore, per month kind of revenue. And we feel that in the longer lifespan extension game, this brand might not be the best, and we would want to sell off our stake. So we will sell it off to Thrasio and players like this.

Amit Ray: Yeah, this is a good point. I mean, you’re essentially playing a role, let’s say, in the mid-market. So, therefore, what might seem on the surface to be a competitor actually could end up being an acquirer or a partner in the future. So that’s an interesting insight.

So, in the last four years or so that you’ve been running this, what are some of the challenges or the trade-offs that you’ve had to make or you’ve had to think about while you were running this business? I think ethos is one of the things that sounds like it is a common factor over here. But is there anything else?

Aanan Khurma: So I think we are super obsessed about the culture that we are building at the company. And I’m sure that all entrepreneurs take it very seriously. But we take it a step ahead, in the sense that the three founders are 100% alignment is on the kind of company that we are creating and what happened on a day-to-day basis.

So, we align on very practical things where we don’t want to incentivize, or we don’t want to drive people with far-fetched distant dreams that one day this will happen, you know, we want to drive them with what happens with them on a day to day basis. And that eventually translates into creating a company that people want to work at, that they enjoy working at, on a day-to-day basis.

And that cultural connotation of the kind of people that we’re letting you know, our process of hiring is so stringent that all our employees right now, we have around 120 employees and obviously like 30 to 35 of these are blue-collar workers, but apart from them, all employees are trained in the interview process stage which we call as culture fit.

So we have a synchronised interviewing process for detecting which person is culture fit or not, and that is how we culturally drive the ethos of creating a company that people would want to show up at every day. And I have heard a lot of companies who have been struggling to get their employees back to the office after the COVID lockdown and things like that.

But since we fall into the essential space, we haven’t even had one day where we operated remotely or all our employees have been working from the office, we have had more than 80% attendance, and all this without mandating anything to anyone, we don’t tell our employees that you need to come to the office, you know, we don’t even have a culture where an employee has to ask their manager that I want to be on leave, or I want to be on work from home, it is totally their ethical choice, you know, how they want to work, and they just have to make their output metric and things like that.

So this is how we are driving, this is what we aligned with to create a company where you want to show up on a daily basis, because we feel that if you are spending 12 hours a day, or let’s say 10 hours a day, at work, you’re spending most of your life at your work, and that needs to be something that is enjoyable. And that again translates to an important component of wellness, which is mental wellness.

Amit Ray: Right. Yeah, I mean, that’s walking the talk, right? I mean, if you’re a wellness company, you have to make sure that your folks feel happy and supported, and genuinely excited about coming to work.

So I like this focus on, or rather, let’s call it extreme focus, maybe on making sure that people are culture fit, and that the way that the company operates is something that the person is going to appreciate when they join. So, maybe the last couple of questions here. One is speaking of this whole wellness and the desire to come to work, what keeps you motivated, and desirous of coming to work every day?

Aanan Khurma: So, I’ve written extensively on this, and I like to differentiate between motivation and satisfaction. And this is a similar kind of distinction you can make between pleasure and joy. So pleasure arises out of very short-term, immediate things. So you eat sugar, you will feel pleasure, or you will feel happiness, right, If you eat unhealthy stuff, you will feel pleasure in the moment.

But eventually, it will truncate into a decrease in the general joy that you feel in life, you know, at the back of your head, you’re doing something wrong, or you’re not operating in the way that you’re supposed to do. And this is the way I think about motivation, versus satisfaction. So satisfaction is kind of built day by day, by doing certain stuff on a daily basis.

So, discipline has a huge role to play. So, I’m not saying that everyone has days where they feel that if they got some motivation, it would be a better day. But I think it’s about building this muscle of discipline that eventually drives long-term satisfaction. And after certain years of practice, what starts happening is that, because if you have been in discipline for, let’s say, more than 30 days, you have that sense of satisfaction.

So even if you do it one day, you will know that you’re not building towards something, and you will just start filling that pleasure in that discipline as well. So it takes a certain time to get past that phase, where discipline seems boring, and things like that. But eventually, you come to a point where you know that you’re building towards long-term joy, kind of a state. So this is how I operate.

But obviously, on a day-to-day basis, you have to have anchors that will pull you up when you’re feeling down. And working with people you want to work with is obviously one of the best ways to overcome that lack of motivation that you’re feeling at the moment. And this is where that extreme focus on culture, again, comes in that you want to be surrounded by people that you really want to be. So it’s a two-part strategy.

Obviously, building the discipline muscle, and no great thing has been built without discipline, and without embracing boredom that is obviously there. But then taking practical steps where you’re stocking the kind of food which is not unhealthy, but you also enjoy eating at your office and you’re surrounded by people that you like working with, and things like that. So a lot of practical.

Amit Ray: Right. That’s actually Aanam, one of the more original answers that I’ve heard to this question, which is, essentially, one needs to differentiate between what is fleeting happiness or something like that versus longer-term satisfaction and joy. And longer-term satisfaction is made by building things brick by brick, and you need to have the discipline to do so.

And so, as long as you can embrace that discipline, and in fact, like what you said, embrace the boredom, almost of doing this day in and day out, you will build something that you are proud of and satisfied by. And the journey becomes obviously easier if you’re doing it with people that you like. And that’s where you set up an environment of culturally integrated people whom you’d love to work with. This is really nice. I think this is a nice way of looking at things also.

Because often we think about Oh, my God, if I’m not feeling absolutely ecstatic on a certain day, is my business worth it? Is my job worth it? Am I doing the right thing? But the fact is, you will probably be doing the right thing if you just keep at it, and you build something meaningful out of that. So this is really nice, I think it’s a good way of looking at things overall, not just in business.

So maybe let me end by asking you a question about your learnings or your lessons so far. So what might you have done differently? Or what advice would you have to emerging entrepreneurs who might want to follow in your footsteps?

Aanan Khurma: So, I think I would just like to say one thing, and obviously, like, there are a lot of learnings in an entrepreneur’s life. And I have been in the game for the last, I don’t know, 12, 15 years, so a lot of learning there. But I think fundamentally, if anyone wants to do great things, they shouldn’t focus on everything at once.

And I think people talk a lot about time management, but I think time management is nothing, it’s only focused management, that is the problem. And you know, typically, what happens is that people are either into phase, whether they are indisciplined, they are not focusing on anything, or they are totally disciplined, where they’re trying to do everything at once. And that stage of discipline lasts for only a few days, and then it fizzles out because you’re trying to do so many things at once.

So if you narrow down your focus to just one thing, then you can have a healthy balance between let’s say pleasures, which you are not able to quit, but then also being able to focus on something that you’re building in the long term, you know, just one thing. And the mistake I have made as an entrepreneur, and as a person is trying to focus on a lot of things at the same time in my earlier years.

So let’s say you have decided to become an avid reader at this stage, and you’re just, let’s say 17, 18 years old right now, so just focus on reading a lot of books. And don’t try to say that I will also listen to a lot of podcasts, I will also listen to a lot of YouTube videos because I have to become the most learned person, just select one thing and focus on that and become the master of that first, and you will realise that how much your life can change just within six months, within six months, your self-esteem will get boosted because you won’t think of yourself as a person who’s reading books, but you will think of yourself as a person who is a reader.

Your perception of yourself will change. And that will trickle down in all aspects of your life, that confidence will change everything that you are doing. So, this is what my one suggestion would be.

Amit Ray: Yeah, this is really nice, very philosophical Aanan, I didn’t expect a business conversation to end up with this much philosophy. But I think it’s an interesting thing, which is the focus, I think, basically, you’re saying that there’s a bunch of people who are not focusing on anything at all, they’re just doing whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like that’s one category already.

But people who feel like they’re focusing could be focusing on too many things. It’s like, I have this task list and I’m checking off, checking off, checking off, I feel very happy that I’ve checked off everything. But then the next day, again, I have a task list and you keep doing that. And as a result, you’ve just dissipated all of your efforts versus you saying just do one thing.

And when you do that one thing over and over again, until you become good at it, then your own perception of yourself changes. I think that example is very good, which is to go from I am reading books to I am a reader is very different. Because to say I’m a reader means that you’re naturally that and which means now you can build on that thing to become something else.

Versus I’m reading books will just go on forever. And you will just keep on reading books. And that way. That’s really cool, I think a very nice way to kind of close out this conversation. So since you’ve mentioned so many cool things, let me just summarise, actually, I wrote down quite a few. So let me summarise them in a few minutes.

So one is I think we started out by saying that, even if you have massive vision, something that maybe even is generally unbelievable kind of vision you can still do it if you start simple. You have to start somewhere where you can actually start but you can have a vision that is world-beating or you know flying to Mars and colonising there and like Elon Musk’s vision and so on. So you can have that but you need to start with something achievable.

The second thing, which I took away was, you don’t even have to have your own thing to build a business, you can actually build a business offering a platform to others. Now, of course, the way that we think of platforms is the Amazons, and whatever of the world. But it could be a platform of services, or a platform of expertise that you’re offering to someone else, which helps them become successful quicker.

And by doing that, you can actually build this almost like a decentralised conglomerate of some kind, which is an interesting way of building a business. And I know we’ve been talking about it in the D2C construct, but maybe this same logic can be applied to other things as well.

The third one, which is a very big point, at least for me, was not forcing behaviour change. So if you can play into the existing behaviour, then you’re likely to be very successful versus trying to force people to adopt the behaviour that you want them to. And again, your example, there was very good, which is not to say, don’t have bread, instead, say here is how you can have bread. And maybe it’s the keto flour bread, or maybe it is having less of the bread or whatever, but you can still have it. And that will at least keep you happy versus saying don’t have it at all.

The fourth point was the whole minimum viable product, this is a topic that’s far more prevalent in tech. But essentially, you’re demonstrating that it can apply to anything, you know, anything that you set out to do, just get your product to market and the market will tell you if the product works or not. And everything else is ancillary. And you can build all of that once you know the product is working.

Another takeaway for me was that just because something doesn’t exist in a developed market, like your keto flour, or ultra-low carb flour, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist at all. And so the fact that in India, because everything is carb-heavy, and it’s not just India, there are a few markets in Asia, which are more carb-heavy, this kind of product would work. It is just that in the US where all of this keto movement started, it’s not a thing. And so it never existed before.

The next point was around data. So, again, a bit of a tech industry sort of thought process, which is use all the data that you have, and if some platform gives you more data, consume as much of it as you can. And as a focus, look at purchases obviously, because purchases show you that there is some need for the product in the market.

But then, more importantly, the repeat rate, which shows that your product is the one that’s fitting the need best. And that was a really simple way of looking at it, which is purchase means there’s a need, and repeat means that your product is filling the need best, which is perfect.

Then on platforms, you should I mean, if you’re selling a product, you probably want to start off on platforms. And if you’re doing that, then treat a platform similar to how you would treat Google or a search engine. People are coming there with intent. So don’t go there with your grand vision and brand positioning, just go there with will this search lead to my product or not.

And once it leaves there, will it convert the person to a sale or not, which means just treat it as a website and search optimise. And you gave a lot of very good tips like, look at it as SEO, think of the SKU to channel fit, like maybe Amazon is good for this kind of product. SnapDeal is good for that kind of product. And so plan your product for the channel. And then the question and answers angle is a really good one, which gives you search optimization and it adds value to your page.

The other one was around people. So you can actually attract people to your vision, not just by declaring the vision, but by living it. So if you through your personal choices are demonstrating that you’re walking the walk, then people will gravitate towards you. And some of those people actually could become well, co-founders in your case, actually, you also did mention that some of them were consumers who then became investors, which is really perfect, you want your best customers to also be invested in your product. So you can attract people just through your vision and by living that vision every day.

Some other points we talked about were trade-offs. So in your case, you’re working heavily on the culture, and you’re willing to give up on maybe otherwise suitable candidates if they don’t feel like they’re going to fit in with your culture. And because you work only with people who are nicely integrated with each other and gel with each other it makes the work experience so much nicer, which also means that this entire pandemic period and stuff people were okay. They were happy to come to work and stuff which, you know, let’s face it, not every company was able to make it happen so easily.

And I think finally you end it with a couple of, I would say more philosophical points, which I really liked. One is the distinction between delight versus satisfaction or motivation versus satisfaction. Motivation and delight and pleasure are fleeting. And yes, you’ll get it by doing things and those things may not even be good for you, but you’ll get it.

But it’ll disappear very quickly versus satisfaction, which is a long-term thing and you build it through discipline. So you don’t need to feel continuously motivated or pumped, you just need to feel the need to come to the office or do whatever it is you’re doing day in and day out. And that will build something that you’re proud of, and which will last like that pride and that satisfaction will last for a lifetime versus for the few minutes that you know, you’re feeling excited. So embrace consistency and embrace boredom, I thought, that’s actually quite a cool way of looking at it.

And the last point was around focus management versus time management. So you can be the best time manager in the world and check off all your lists. But you’d still be very unfocused, because if you’ve just done too many different things instead, focus on doing just one thing, and do it well. And when you do that, it’ll become part of you, which means you’ve developed as a person, and then you can move on to doing the next thing very well.

And that’s how you become a better version of yourself, versus being completely scattered all over the place trying to do everything at the same time. So, thanks a lot Aanan. This was a really fun conversation for me, and I really appreciate you joining us today.

Aanan Khurma: Thanks for having me, Amit. It was great. Actually, this summary I also learned a lot after you summarised it in this manner. So that was really great. Thanks.

Amit Ray: Thanks a lot, Aanan. I mean, it was a fun conversation. And for those listening, I really hope you took away a lot of interesting insights, just like I did today. And that’s the best way I think, to get distilled insights from all of these cool people that we’re talking to, on ShopTok and frankly, all of our other shows as well. It’s information that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. So thank you for listening. We were Aanan & Amit with ShopTok. See you next time.