“Healthhunt has a highly robust, engaging and smart tech-based platform in the health and wellness space in Asia” – By, Ms. Pooja Duggal, Founder Healthunt

1. What is the thing that inspires you to build an online health wellness store?

After 15 years in the cut-throat diamond industry, standing as one of the top five women globally in this industry, it struck me one day that anyone else in my place would have started to feel the burn. I realized that my dedication to yoga and healthy eating had kept me going through the worst of situations. I was the youngest non-male member of the senior team at Rapaport at the time. Most people around me dismissed the idea of daily well-being and thought that being healthy was a laborious ordeal and ended up spending a fortune, years later in healthcare bills with debatable results. Thus, I decided to disrupt this understanding of daily wellbeing and help millions of people achieve their healthiest, happiest lives.

Unfortunately, 61% of the total deaths in our country are due to lifestyle diseases; which means that they are lifestyle modifiable and hence preventable. I decided to dig deeper into concepts of nutrition, fitness, mental well-being, and organic beauty and decided to enroll in the world’s largest school for nutrition called Integrative Nutrition in New York. After becoming a certified health coach, I decided to create Healthhunt and scale it to the millions of users currently active on our platform.

2. What are the challenges that a startup faces?

We had three major challenges:

•   We didn’t want to be just another content company with average advertising revenue.  So, we had to rethink how we could monetize content.
•   We wanted to give people high-quality, holistic information on well-being, and save them from getting lost in the abyss of mediocre content out there. All of our content is thoroughly fact-checked and hence verified.
• Today, it’s all about personal health content, healthhunt had to ensure a unique user experience by experimenting very early with learning algorithms so we could progress to a fully customized experience based on machine learning.

3. What are your services and products offering? 

Healthhunt has a highly robust,  engaging and smart tech-based platform in the health and wellness space in Asia. We have several tools in place to ensure that we are constantly reaching millions of users across web, social and direct mailers. We are the only company in Asia that provides highly customized co-branded holistic solutions to the corporate world. Healthhunt is now powering corporates across Asia with holistic solutions straight to their inbox. We have many paying corporate clients for the tool because at the end of the day, the healthwire delivers what it promises while also creating an excellent opportunity for brands to showcase their products and services to a large and already engaged audience.

Our platform is solving a 4 fold content conundrum: 

Content today, especially in the health and wellness space, is

1.      Overwhelming
2.      Not tailored
3.      Disconnected
4.      Generalized

Our company’s policies and guidelines are designed to overcome these challenges. We talk to the millennial at large and produce content they can resonate with, which is exactly what has helped us tremendously in finding success when it comes to engagement with our users.

The platform creates an opportunity for its users across brands and consumers to read healthy and buy healthy (for the users) and share healthy and make money (for the brands).

It’s all about personal health content today and we have been experimenting early with learning algorithms with a view to roll out a full customized experience.

4. What is the one thing that sets you apart from your competitors?

We are the first SaaS wellness platform that empowers businesses with curated repository of health and wellness information. We have been experimenting with early machine learning algorithm and are gravitating towards a fully AI-based platform. We personalise it to suit a wide audience so that everyone can have the insight and knowledge to make the right health choices every day.

•   The SaaS platform is an annual subscription model with a pay per user built in. We have many companies signed up for this service, some of which are very large corporate houses across India.
•   We have a robust digital advertising model in place, where we help health and wellness brands reach the right target audience through paid campaigns.
•   Our marketplace works on an affiliate-basis.
•   90% of health content on the internet today is not verified. We are dedicated to solving this problem and pushing out fact-checked and verified content.

5. What are your future plans? 

Oh, I take “life is a journey” seriously and my future plans are always detailed and action-packed. I’m studying Japanese at the moment and want to be fluent in at least 3 more languages in the next 5 years. I want to learn to surf. I also plan to get numerous more additional certifications in specializations under health and wellness. Above all, I want to set a good foundation for Healthhunt. We’re the first to revolutionize functional health and direct primary care in India, and I want Healthhunt to impact several billion lives by 2023. I see us being the foremost authority with a sophisticated AI-based platform providing a unique experience to every user.