There are 158 million people in India who are overweight, of which 1.35 million take the pains of visiting nutritionists to lose weight. Furthermore, there are 40 million people in India, who suffer from diseases like Diabetes type 2. All of these people need a convenient way to prevent/cure such lifestyle diseases.
Lifemojo provide an easy access to preventive health care experts and necessary tracking tools. They also provide a platform to preventive health care providers to run and scale-up their existing operations. They are accessible on Web and Mobile using GPRS/SMS with the first-of-its kind LifeMojo mobile tracker.
CEO Under Scan: Mr. Namit Nagia, CEO, Lifemojo
Interviewed By: Ms. Sharmistha Pal, IBS- Pune, Campus Editor, The CEO Insights
How is the present Indian work culture affecting the lives of the people?
Indian economy is divided into different sectors and work culture in every sector is different from other sectors. For example a person who is working in a travel agency will have a normal working hour that is 9 to 9. But a person working in IT industry will not have the same working hours or conditions. It may be more stressful. They may not have fix timings. On the contrary there are people who are self employed, there they do not have rigid timings.
Moreover it also depends on the kind of job a person is into as some jobs are more demanding than others in that case stress will be more and health of people will be adversely affected. This is because people will not have time for their selves. They will follow unhealthy lifestyle and because of that they will more prone to diseases.
There is a lot of stress among people these days. What are the different reasons?
Yes, there is a lot of stress among people these days & there are different reasons for it which depends on person to person and work habits has a major role to play in this. Competition has increased in every field and everyone wants to achieve their goals in minimum possible time resulting leading to increased stress level.
Stress has also increased because of improper eating habits and unhealthy time zone in which people tend to work. It may be forced or not forced as in it may be an individual’s choice.
For example: A bachelor may work till late night and prefer to start his day late which may not be forced by his company. It may be his personal choice. They are very lenient in their approach to a healthy lifestyle because of their freedom. They do not have any rigid boundaries.
But there are ways to tackle it. Stress can be handled easily by doing small physical activities like an individual who is very busy with his work may take short walk or run at regular intervals.
Your professional career has seen a lot of changes from Tourism Industry to IT industry and then presently to Health care. How would you describe the shift?
It was actually from technical to telecom to travel industry. My experience in all of these industries is great, irrespective of the domain. Apart from domain knowledge everything else in the business remains the same. I gained a lot of knowledge from all these sectors and I actually learned how a vertical industry works.
It has broaden my prospective as when a person sees business working in one environment then he or she pick up the right ideas and right things and try to apply in other business and it works successfully. Like a person working in travel agency will be able to figure out many similar things in healthcare and other sectors.
Working in different sectors helped me a lot in gaining knowledge that I can apply in my present business.
How do you differentiate yourself from the other players in the industry?
There are many leading players in this industry like VLCC, Body Care etc. but we always try to differentiate our services from other players. These institutes have same pattern for their services like weight loss and wellness. The customer needs to be physically present at their location for enrolling into a particular program which takes lot of time, energy etc. The customers need to travel at a particular location which is not required for healthy lifestyle.
We at Lifemojo focus on quality and effectiveness of every program. We provide our services online and through telephone which helps our customers to stick to healthy lifestyle. As there are many people who get themselves enrolled in any program but do not have the time to continue it on a regular basis because of their busy schedule.
There are individual companies which are very hard to locate in the Indian market as they do not have the required marketing budget to advertise but they may be the best guys to give you suggestion about healthy lifestyle. We differentiate our services from our competitors in terms of convenience that we provide to our customers.
In simple way it can be said that we are just a click or a call away from our customers.
What kind of clients come to you and how do you help them?
We have customers from different age groups. Demand is more for weight reduction program. There are also customers who want to get rid of bad habits and seek suggestion to lead better and healthy lifestyle. For example: we have many customers who want to quit smoking or drinking.
We help them by maintaining their personalized profiles and giving them personal attention for their problems since need of every customer is different. We customize our services according to the need of the customer. At the same time we also offer standard products to our clients.
What are the different standard products you offer to your clients?
The most important factor in keeping well is to eat right. By “Eat Right” we don’t mean the usual low calorie or low fat food. Only the food that suits your body is “Right” for you and will get you the desired results. Our standard programs include Personalized Weight Loss Diet Plan, One time Personalized Diet Consultation, Couple Weight Loss Diet Plan, Diabetes Diet Plan, Cook Healthy and Diet Plan for Healthy Skin & Hair ranging from Rs. 100 per month to Rs. 1490 per month.
What kind of pricing strategy you adopt for pricing your products?
Pricing strategy for a firm which has just started is very much different from firms which are their in the market for longer time period that is those which are well established in the market. This is because firms which are new in the market or industry experiment with their prices. There are firms which charge around 1500 to 4000 per month for weight loss program. But as we are new in the market, earlier we have kept 700 per month for weight loss program but then we were not able to meet our expenses and costs. So we have increased it to 990 per month. We follow a cost based pricing strategy rather than following a market based pricing strategy. Hence it helps our customer to get value added services all the times at low cost.
Where would you like to see LifeMojo 5 years down the line?
Five years down the line, I would like to see Lifemojo to be the company that manages complete health and fitness for its client that can be an organization or for an individual. Like people use life insurance and feel secured about their future in monetary terms. We want to give our clients same sense of security but our approach will be different.
We will be emphasizing on what is best for their health like their eating habits and their lifestyle. We will recommend the right approach to stay healthy and to achieve that we will be maintaining personalized profile of each customer so that we can give personal attention to each of our client as everyone is different with unique needs and desires.
Do you have alliances with different companies and if yes then what sort of alliances you look forward to?
In terms of health experts, we have alliance with Dr. Shikha Sharma. Apart from our own packages I found her program to be most effective. Other than this we have different wellness content that we generate in-house. We have tie up with rediffmail, Altop from US , Bharat matrimony and almost in every place where people could possibly look for healthy lifestyle.
Is it enough to be happy, or is it enough to be fit or happiness and fitness both are correlated.
This is a kind of philosophical question as it depends on personal choice. Both are very important for an individual and are equally needed. It is about individual perception. For eg: As a kid I would love to have chocolates but now it may not make me that much happy. Being fit will be the priority for me. Moreover happiness is a state of mind and if a person is healthy and physically fit then he will be happy.
Any message you would like to give to The CEO Insights.
It is a very good initiative. I have never been to a B-School but I guess this helped all the guys who are looking for a similar kind of insights. When I was in engineering college I was looking for such ideas for the companies.
I think you guys are doing great job. It is providing great help to the student community as it provide direct and current happenings of the corporate world. At the same time it is a great help to the companies also. So al the best!!