The Silver Lining: Ensuring health and wellness with holistic healing
The Delhi-based startup provides alternative healing therapies, focusing on mind, body and relationships to ensure overall well-being.
From the time he was a young boy, Aman Chandra was exposed to alternate forms of healing, as his mother was a Pranic Healer. The entrepreneur who holds an MBA from the International Management Institute, with two-and-a-half years’ experience in marketing, always believed that health and well-being needed a holistic approach.
“Holistic healing has taught me to look at life differently, as it isn’t restricted to physical healing,” says Aman. The idea for Silver Lining came up when he started experiencing a certain disconnect in the stressful corporate world.
The Silver Lining is a well-being startup based in Delhi, whose mission is to heal in a holistic way. The focus is on overall well-being, while touching on different aspects like mind, body and relationships.
Wide range of services
“We have a team of passionate holistic healers from across the globe. Our website/app helps people seamlessly match, discover, connect, and get healed by the right healer. Our goal is to make empowered living just four clicks away,” explains Aman.
The services comprises different alternative healing practices like Reiki, Theta, Pranic, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Chakra Healing, Life Coaching, Spiritual Counselling, and more. The basic concept of holistic healing is that it works at the mind-body-soul level to keep the energy flowing. The end result is transformative and complete healing.
The challenges
Most alternative healing programmes are disorganised and access to good healers is a major problem. It was easy for Aman to find the right people because of his mother’s experience in the field. “We’ve employed some unique hacks to overcome such challenges and scale our operations. These include conducting regular myth-busting campaigns online, taking continuous feedback from seekers and then working with partner healers to improve the delivery of our healing services,” says Aman. The core team at The Silver Lining comprises Aman and his friends Abhishek Jindal and Awanish.
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Using the services is easy. All you have to do is log in and select your area of preference – mind, body, relationships, or financial prosperity. Once this is done, the team helps you choose from different healing practices that can address the selected issue, and help you learn more about each practice.
Once a user makes an informed decision on his preferred system of healing, he can find, choose and make a booking with the appropriate healer, based on parameters like mode of healing (long distance, online, face-to-face), fee per session, the experience of the healer, etc.) The chosen healer gets in touch with the user and thus the healing process begins. The user pays the healer after completing the sessions.
“Making inroads into the market has been a challenge because the concept itself is new. However, we’ve experienced slow and steady growth, both in numbers and brand recall,” says Aman.
Revenue model and differentiator
Currently, the revenue model is based on earnings through their partner healers. In the future, they plan to explore other avenues like sponsorships and product sales.
On competition, Aman says that there are a few small local players in the field, but no big national players. What really sets them apart is the threefold core offering – a tech driven approach for Gen Y, an authenticity guarantee for the healing services via a full stack approach, and a core team which understands the seekers’ requirements and healers’ challenges in and out.
“The Silver Lining is a one-stop well-being solution, offering trainings/workshops for those interested in learning healing. We also offer individual healing sessions, and products for better well-being (incense sticks, healing crystals, etc.),” says Aman.
The market and future
Most of the alternative healing therapies fall under a highly disorganised market. An article in The Fast Company on the big business of crystal healing says that since the business lacks a centralised governing agency, it is difficult to assign a fixed value to it. The article quotes expert collectors and dealers like Daniel Trinchillo who have made confident estimates. “This is easily a billion-dollar industry,” says Trinchillo, who’s also known as the 'Indiana Jones of Crystals', having spent 35 years searching for rare minerals all over the world.
The team claims to have achieved early stage revenues of nearly Rs 50,000 per month. Aman adds that the peak traction on the platform is 800 visitors per day, with a user transaction count of five percent of daily visitors. Speaking of the future, he says. “We’re charged and super excited to expand our operations beyond North India. We are looking at the South and the West in the next three months, and then going global in the next six to nine months. We believe that we can add a silver lining to everyone’s well-being.”