FeetApart Wellness, founded by Ashrith G and Abhishek Roy in January 2015, is an innovative platform operating online in Bangalore, with a mission to improve employee productivity, health, and teamwork. Through its gamified social network for health and wellness within organizations, FeetApart aims to create a fun and engaging work environment while promoting a healthier lifestyle.
Today, we are thrilled to welcome Abhishek Roy, the Co-Founder of FeetApart, in this session on ConflatingVisions to share their inspiring story. Abhishek reveals how the idea of FeetApart took shape, tells us about his co-founder and their future plans with their innovative startup.
Hi Abhishek, glad to have you among us today in this session at conflatingVisions. To start with we would like you to say a few lines about yourself.
Hello, I am a techie with 12 years of experience, passed out of Bangalore Institute of Technology. I have earlier worked in Aol earlier, and have led the data team at Qyuki. Being a sports lover, I have always wanted to do something related to health & fitness. I have been running marathons for the last 8 years and quit smoking as I picked on running. For me, the love to inspire others to pick up a healthy lifestyle is innate.
Who are the other founders of FeetApart? What were you all doing before launching the venture?
Ashrith is the other co-founder of FeetApart. He holds a Computer Science B.E. from PESIT(Bangalore) with 8 years of experience, having worked in Huawei and Qyuki.
We both were part of the Data team at Qyuki (social network for talent, Shekhar Kapur and AR Rahman initiative).
How did the idea to build FeetApart came to your mind?
I wanted to build something for sports and an active lifestyle. The idea took shape when Ashrith suggested building a social network around health and fitness. Ashrith, a teetotaler and a meditator for 7 years, conducts online meditation sessions for users across the globe. We realized we both complemented each other with the mind and body wellbeing experience and we both loved inspiring others to get healthier.
We then started brainstorming and came up with a B2B-focused employee wellness solution, which is what FeetApart is today.
Please tell us about FeetApart. How does it work?
FeetApart aims to reduce overall employer costs by improving the productivity of employees and making them healthier, fitter and better team players. And all of this definitely adds lots of fun to the work environment.
For basic understanding, consider it as a gamified social network for health & wellness within an organization, aimed at improving employee productivity and health.
Share the investment details.
We recently closed an angel funding round led by Vishal Bali, a senior executive at Nielsen.
It’s in the news already.
How has been the journey so far?
The journey has been one great ride so far with all the components of life mixed in – fun, excitement, drama, disappointment, exuberance and mostly importantly perseverance.
How do you go about building a successful customer base?
We have so far relied on some social selling and some of our own network to generate a decent customer base. Being extremely user-experience-focused has helped a great deal for a very high active user base as well. We are now hiring sales and marketing enthusiasts to grow it further.
What makes you different from your competitors?
We are a data-driven company, other than being health enthusiasts ourselves. Our fitness app layer is very strong, it is cheat-proof to run contests and competitions of any kind for any organization.
What has been the most challenging part of your entrepreneurial journey so far?
Getting initial customers was hard, as the wellness industry is very nascent in India, more so during 2014-15.
How did you overcome the challenge?
There is only one sure-shot solution to overcoming challenges – believing in ourselves and sticking to our vision. We as a team have loads of perseverance.
What are your future plans?
Since we are a SaaS business, we will be selling both in and outside India. We will be focusing on doing innovations in B2B2C marketing as well. On the product side, we are integrating with many fitness wearables and apps, other than providing users and organizations with lots of relevant data and actionable insights to improve employee fitness, morale and productivity.
And one last question of this session Abhishek, if you have had one wish, what would it be?
I am really enjoying building and growing FeetApart, I feel I should have started something like this at least 10 years back, obviously catering to the needs of the market at that time.
