Silicon Valley to startup success

With the advent of the digital era there has been a deluge of startups revolving around technology. However, there are only a few that are novelty. Tell us in brief about your journey and the challenges you faced as a startup company?

Doctor C was started in 2014. I just came from USA and was looking for better healthcare in India and how to use technology to deliver better experiences to customers. The biggest challenge we came across was that healthcare centres in India are not consumer-centric or consumer friendly. So, we built the company to deliver the most consumer-centric healthcare services online.

As you said healthcare centres in India are not consumer-centric what challenges did you face in convincing the sector that they can move online?

The challenges were quite different, at the early stage many people did not believe that health care centre can move online and many health practitioners and customers were hesitant to work with us but slowly in 2017 we could reach to people. The pandemic has led to a rapid expansion of the company. We provide all types of diagnostic tests, telemedicine consultancy, testing at home or going to location. Today we are operating in 10 cities across six States and we now stand at 320+ employees.

Your company has raised funds through seed funding. Maybe, you are lucky in that respect but it is seen that most of the startups are struggling for want of investments and are closing down after a couple of months or at the most a couple of years. What advice would you give to them?

Most important in today's world before going in for investment is you need to build the business that is demonstrable, whatever you are building should work for the customer and how your customer is adopting your product, understand whether your product is ready to go to the investor is the most important factor to start a startup. An investor not only looks for a good idea but also for a good team. We could survive, as we had a supportive team and before reaching the larger audience, we did lot of research.

There are about 150 million startups in the world today. On an average, there are 1,37,000 startups emerging every day. But at the same time the corporate world is fierce. How do you think the startups can survive?

It is very important to start new things and almost all the companies start as a startup before emerging as a corporate. As we see some companies come with some innovative idea in the beginning but slowly the company grows less in renovation. For a lot of people who are willing to do new things they have not done before, for them startup like ours is the best example.

Do you think the government is startup friendly though it makes tall claims? Is it really extending a helping hand to the startups?

Yes it has become friendly over the years, I hope it continues to do so and gets more friendly in the coming years by promoting more initiatives in the State and in the country at large. Today we have much better facilities that we had five years back.

What more do you think Government should do to encourage particularly in health sector and make startups get converted into successful companies?

It is very important to build entrepreneurship culture in any country. So, government should also encourage and support the entrepreneur to grow more. Government should make it easy for the startup to raise money, as they are already supporting by proving tax holiday. I think government should build an ecosystem where it is easy to start a company and easier to get the promoters. The government should work easing the compliance process making it easy for startups to survive.

Why do startups fail? What's your take on it? What do you advise them?

The biggest reason a startup fails is not having proper supportive team. Other reason is that enough people not validating your idea. Make sure your business has strong fundamentals and you have to start thinking not how to raise money but how your product can win trust of the customers only then think of raising money.

How to win the trust of customers and how to create loyal customer base?

Trust is built over time but it takes hardly any time to break. You should make sure whenever the customer interacts with you, you are able to give them good service and always treat them as your family member. Thus you create a good customer base.