Life after the Fellowship: Kshitij Garg

June 2018: A man who runs his life on the philosophy of never giving up, would hardly ever fail! I try to apply the same idea into my own life. Healers at Home (HAH), my third attempt at entrepreneurship, is a Delhi-based startup that provides home healthcare and wellness services.  The platform allows customers to access services like physiotherapy, nursing, attendant services and mother and child care at the time and place of their choice. In just two years, the company has a strong team of 20 employees and 1000+ expert healers and has clocked in over two lakh home visits. I take inspiration from the autobiography of Jack Ma, the founder of the Alibaba group, and it is my love for motivational books and songs that fuel my drive for success.

My grandfather ran a business in the town of Kekri – my birthplace. After suffering losses for a long time, the business had to be shut down. I learned the art of negotiation and cracking a deal from my father and it has been one of the biggest lessons I have learned so far. During my engineering days at IIT Kanpur, I was fortunate enough to have some like-minded batchmates.  Together, we launched a startup that provided photography and videography solutions.

After my four years at IIT Kanpur, I enrolled into the founding batch of the YIF. Here, I met and interacted with some of the finest students and some of the most interesting people who shared the same drive and passion for starting their own ventures. When I look back at those days, I realise that my one year at YIF strengthened my passion to pursue my dreams more than ever.

I took a second shot at the startup world with Lead – Leaders Accelerating Development, a venture that provided an acceleration platform for new ideas for startups in the field of socio-economic development. However, the stars were still not in my favor as I faced issues with widening the horizons for the company. My journey has been nothing short of a roller-coaster ride! 

Through my entrepreneurial highs and lows, I also suffered from severe back pain.  It caused me a lot of discomfort not just physically but mentally too, and it began to affect my work. The solution to this problem turned out to be the inspiration I was looking for. All I had to do was to ask myself what I needed to make my life easier.  The answer was, I needed a physiotherapist at home. I needed a physiotherapist who could schedule a visit based on my schedule, instead of the other way around. Without wasting any time, through research, I found out that there was an unorganized market of INR 20,000 crores for the home healthcare and wellness services for me to explore. Thus, there were no issues of scalability to haunt me this time. The Indian home healthcare industry was valued at a whopping $2.2 billion in 2013 and has been growing at a rate of eight per cent per annum ever since.  I set up a pilot project, which started on 21st June. As a result, I became my first client.

It was not long before HAH received its first round of seed funding in October, 2015 and since then, we have not looked back. The next couple of years that followed had loads of learning. Persistence kept me on track and in 2017, HAH finished its second round of funding. Some of the investors include – Let’s Venture and Chandigarh Angels Network that saw participation from Jay Patel, U.S. based doctor and investor, Chandigarh Angels; Chand Das, former CEO of ITC and Pawan Kumar, former President of IBM Global Services.
 

It has been a wonderful journey of struggle and pain thus far, but at the end of the tunnel there is healing and happiness. And that is what we, at the Healers At Home family, hope to provide t our customers and extended family — true healing and happiness.

Apart from featuring in the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2018, I was listed in the 100 Most Impactful Healthcare Leaders in 2017 by the World Health and Wellness Congress, and also in the Top 100 Startups in India to Watch in 2016. Healer’s at Home is climbing the ladder exponentially and I hope that HAH soon becomes one of the leading companies in the home healthcare market.