Bootstrapping Using Services from Pune: Mindbowser CEO Ayush Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Take me to the inflection point where you hit upon the healthcare focus. What was the impetus for that?

Ayush Jain: So that was actually around the time of COVID. Moving forward, we focused on making internal changes—hiring our own sales team, setting up foundations, and so on—because we were always striving for growth. As founders, we were constantly pushing to become a 10x version of ourselves.

At that time, though, despite all these efforts, we weren’t seeing significant results. Then COVID happened. We already had health-related applications in our portfolio, and when the pandemic hit, digital health really took off, and we also took off.

In 2019, we had barely crossed one million in revenue. But by 2020, we reached $2.5 million, and the following year, we hit $3.5 million. Now, we’re north of $5 million. So, things steadily improved after that.

Sramana Mitra: But tell me what happened when you focused on healthcare? What was the impetus of focusing on healthcare?

Ayush Jain: The initial demand was more organic in nature because of COVID. Since there was demand, and we started building solutions.

Sramana Mitra: You were trying to do healthcare solutions during COVID and you were getting those kinds of startup projects through Upwork or your regular channel, right?

Ayush Jain: Right. Everybody at that time wanted to build digital health or telehealth solutions and improve health care.

Sramana Mitra: Cool. I see. So, through those projects, you started developing frameworks.

Ayush Jain: So that’s what happened. We began expanding beyond just health, and that’s when we, as founders, made another critical decision. Similar to our earlier strategy of being selective about the kind of customers in terms of size, in 2021, we decided to focus heavily on the healthcare domain.

Since then, we’ve primarily become a healthcare company, building holistic solutions in health. This was our biggest pivot. First, we started training our people in healthcare. We introduced a mandatory 30-day training program for every developer to understand handling PHI (Protected Health Information) and how the healthcare system works, among other things.

Second, we brought in a domain expert. We hired someone specifically to provide healthcare knowledge for every project we undertake and to help us collaborate more effectively with clients. Back then, we were just tech people.

Even as founders, we didn’t know that much, and as a result, our team didn’t either, since companies of our size – of under $10M – are still very much founder-led. That was the challenge. So we deliberately started looking for people with healthcare experience to build out that knowledge.

In 2022, we began developing solutions like I mentioned earlier—what we call ‘replicable recipes,’ or Lego pieces of health. Today, we have a library of over 50 such solution recipes. And with AI emerging strongly in the last 18 months, many of those recipes have been further enhanced by AI. This has now become our cornerstone.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Pune: Mindbowser CEO Ayush Jain
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