The Indian Startup

We interviewed Namit Nangia about his startup LifeMojo.com:

How would you describe your startup to a layman?

LifeMojo is a company focused on helping you achieve your fitness goals faster.

Our web platform LifeMojo.com helps you start your fitness journey, monitor your progress and figure out how to eat right and stay healthy.

Please tell us about the background of the founders and their roles at the company.

We are 3 founders, details of what we have done in the past are available here : http://istrait.com/aboutus.htm

The roles that we take up for LifeMojo:

1. Varun Gupta is our CTO and manages the entire content on LifeMojo.com apart from his technical contribution.

2. Himanshu Khurana is our CFO and CMO so he takes care of the Finances and Marketing for LifeMojo.

3. Namit Nangia is our CEO and takes care of business development, sales, creative elements for the website and strategy for LifeMojo.

All of the co-founders have a technical background so we all contribute to the technical development on LifeMojo.

What gave you the idea for a health portal? Was it a personal experience that inspired you?

Yes, It was a bad personal experience that inspired us to start LifeMojo.

Namit, Co-Founder and CEO of LifeMojo got a chance to meet Dr. Shikha Sharma (a renowned weight management and health expert) as a Technology Advisor. Dr Sharma wanted a solution for a few problems that existed in her business. After that meeting and after seeing Adnan Sami lose 75 Kg, Namit tried losing weight and was able to lose 11 Kg in 45 days (which he soon regained). On analysis of this successful weight loss, the LifeMojo team realized that the key was constant monitoring of what he ate, his fitness regimen, and an eye on his weight. But the problem was that he soon regained weight. The team looked around and found a lot of similar people and a solution to this problem. The solution is right diet consultation, as per one’s body composition and meal preferences. But this right advice is (1) expensive, (2) inconvenient due to the traveling involved (3) inaccessible, since good nutrition experts who understand one’s meal preferences are not easy to find. And thus as a solution to all these problems, LifeMojo was born!

What is the size of your userbase? What makes people pick lifemojo over other health information resources?

We have close to 3000 registered users on LifeMojo. We think there are multiple reasons why our users prefer LifeMojo

1. LifeMojo offer the most comprehensive collection of calories for Indian Food Items.

2. All content on LifeMojo comes directly from Nutrition or Fitness Experts.

3. All the tips on LifeMojo are Home Remedies.

We think these set a very strong basis for quality of things on LifeMojo, which is what everyone is looking for.

How do you bring users to your website? What is your advertising strategy?

We have never spent on Advertising, except the Laptop Stickers and 6 LifeMojo T Shirts that we got printed for us founders.

On a serious note, we have tried to keep all our content SEO friendly and thus we see close to 60 % of the traffic as Organic Search Traffic.

We try and be active on Social Media and try to market LifeMojo there to get more users.

Our partnerships with Media Houses like IndiaTV and Avantgard Life (a Hyderabad based Lifestyle magazine) where we power their Health content, have been very helpful to get more eyeballs on LifeMojo.

Blogs, Internet reviews, Newspapers, people who use LifeMojo; they all have been nice enough to say nice things about us and get a lot of users to us.

You were lucky enough to become part of a mentorship program early on in the life of your startup. How has this helped shape your venture?

MVP has been a great help in shaping up this venture. They helped us a lot specially with the Social Media Marketing front, about which we had absolutely no clue.

The mentorship has helped us structure things right and focus on the right aspects of business.

Being a community website, we are very interested in the Share Your Progress aspect of LifeMojo. Can you share some details about this feature? Is this a social network for healthy people?

LifeMojo is not a social network for healthy people. Our Share your progress comprises of your public profile page and an RSS Feed of your updates. Both these help you share your progress with the world. For wellness and fitness, motivation is the key. And the more you share your progress, the more it motivates you to do better.

What is LifeMojoPro? How is it different from the portal?

LifeMojoPro is our B2B offering for Health Experts (like Nutritionists) that helps them run their business efficiently and helps them in scaling up. It is a SaaS based CRM and ERP for Fitness Centers.

What is your revenue model? Are you profitable? Can you disclose a few statistics like number of users, employees etc?

We have revenues coming from LifeMojoPro Deals, advertising revenue from Content from LifeMojo and revenue share that we do with our Media Partnerships. Going forward we would have additional revenues from Nutritionist and Fitness Consultation Services on LifeMojo.

Did you have to conduct a lot of user surveys to figure out what people wanted from your health portal before launch? How has user feedback helped shape lifemojo.com’s business model?

No, we did not do a market survey before getting into LifeMojo. It was more of a personal itch that drove us to create the solution i.e. LifeMojo.

After we launched, we have not built a single feature until users asked for it. User feedback has been a tremendous help in shaping up all aspects of LifeMojo, the content, the features, the soon to be launched services.

User Feedback has become core of our daily routine, we interact with at least one user daily to keep a tap on what they want.

Have you been able to make any strategic partnerships with doctors, hospitals, or vendors that has helped your startup grow?

Our First customer for LifeMojoPro, Dr. Shikha Sharma was a great help in shaping up the initial B2B product and our view of the preventive healthcare industry.

Is there any other information that you would like to share with us?

There is one service in particular that users appreciated and use a lot. It is “Calorie Search on GTalk” (http://www.lifemojo.com/features/calories-gtalk) . You can add calories@lifemojo.com as a friend to your GTalk or Gmail chat and to look up calories in any food item or activity, you can simply send the name of the item as chat message and you get the reply instantly.

This has been quite popular with our users and has spread like a viral.

Any tools that you would like to recommend to our startup tools section?

Pipl.com

Search anyone, anywhere.

Do give it a try.

My views

Fitness is currently a hot trend in the Indian marketplace and I believe that LifeMojo provides very interesting connections between fitness professionals and those looking to implement a fitness regime in their lives. By establishing strong partnerships with traditional media channels to distribute their content as well as creating interactive services that work on chat and mobile channels, they have succeded in creating a brand name that has strong visibility as well as a product that is accessible to a large consumer base.

Namit is a member of theindianstartup.com’s community of entrepreneurs.  You can see his profile here.  If you have any questions for the LifeMojo team, please post them in the comments here or contact him through his profile.