After successfully exiting his first healthcare startup, this entrepreneur is now targeting Hyderabad's home healthcare market
We have all had times when we have been a little under the weather and wished for a quick cure right in the comfort of our own home. Whether it is to get rid of a sudden headache or dispel a bout of viral fever, on-demand home health services make it easier for people to get the needed medication or even therapy at home. Seeing the business potential in this idea, Jayadeep Reddy set up Zozz, an on-demand home health service that provides doctors, physiotherapists and medication to users in their own home, in less than one hour.
The idea came to Jayadeep when he was working on his earlier startup in the online healthcare space. He realised that many of his customers were looking for the right home healthcare providers in India and there was growing demand for quality healthcare.
Cracking a new idea
After exiting his earlier startup eVaidya in 2015, it took Jayadeep six months to come up with the idea for Zozz, during a casual get-together with the team sometime around November
We started digging into what customers expected from us and the impact that product created in people's health and behaviour. Home healthcare was a market need and many times our sales guys gave feedback about the customer's need and expectation, says Jayadeep.
Zooz was born from the older team at eVaidya, with T.P. Srikanth being the co-founder. The duo had worked in the same hospital too earlier. They roped in Navdheer Sargam, who Jayadeep had met during the pilot stage of the project, Madhuri Sanikeni for HR management and Vishnu Reddy, a full-stack developer.
Initially, the team did a pilot with a few known doctors visiting patients at home. Seeing the positive response, Zozz was born.
Creating a differentiator
“Being in technology-based healthcare industry for more than a decade it was not very challenging to launch an app or company. But it is very important how you make it more user-friendly and marketable,” says 32-year-old Jayadeep.
Home healthcare is a big global market. It is estimated to be a $349-billion market by 2020, growing at a CAGR of nine percent. There is a strongly growing market for geriatric care, treatment of cancer, and diabetes. According to the Global Age Watch, over 20 percent of the Indians will be over 60 years and will need home healthcare.
Several other data points like double income households, rising trends and social structural changes have made home healthcare vital. There are several big players like Portea, and others like India Home Healthcare, Unique Home Care by Apollo, Healers and Home and Nightingales.
Zozz works as a local health aggregator connecting users with the best doctor who can reach their home in the shortest possible time. “While other service providers have their own fleet of doctors and staff we consider that model might be more manageable but not scalable. Zozz uses technology to make the home health service manageable and scalable at the same time, which makes us unique compared to other providers,” says Jayadeep.
Started in February this year, the team currently has doctors doing 30 to 40 house calls in Hyderabad. The startup gets a share out of every visit that a doctor makes, like any on-demand service. While the team started out with an open-for-all model, since this month the team follows a membership model.
When each customer gets a membership of Rs 999 for a family of four, they get 12 doctor visits in a year. There are currently 1,500 members, and Zozz is adding 40 to 50 members every day. The customers can either avail the membership online or via local pharmacy stores. The team has tied up with over 40 local pharmacies, which in turn give membership as a loyalty benefit.
The bootstrapped team intends to expand its services across south India and all the metro cities by the end of the year before shifting focus to Tier II and Tier II cities. “We are working on our own IoT home healthcare devices to make care much more manageable and plan to launching them early next year,” says Jayadeep.