Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in health and wellness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Sagar Sheel, co-founder of Giver Nutrition, located in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. His co-founder Vineet Jain is instrumental to the success of the company.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Founded in 2020, Giver Nutrition is India's first specialty health supplement company focused on Mental Health, Sleep Health, and Essential Health currently available in India & USA. We are on a mission to empower as many individuals as possible to achieve the best version of their unique selves by providing them with extensively researched, clinically backed, high-quality, and safer nutritional supplements at an affordable range.
Our focused group of customers includes students, professionals, gamers, and athletes. We intend to serve anyone willing to dive into their higher potential as our supplements are designed to complement the ever-changing lifestyles and daily needs of any individual.
Giver Nutrition has pledged to donate 5% of our net profits to Old Age Homes as we want to stand by our people at the times when they need it the most.
Tell us about yourself
It all started at an Airport. Firstly, you must know its backdrop; my co-founder Vineet Jain and I first met in our college in Bangalore; individually, we both belonged to very different communities, cultures, and states. However, within the first week of our graduation days, we somehow clicked well together; it occurred that both of us enjoyed traveling, mostly the unplanned ones, and also, both of us never really wanted to work in an organization for a longer time rather, we wanted to start something of our own, that we connect with.
We were studying pharmaceutical sciences as our major and often get lost in the discussion related to public health and, most importantly, mental health; in India, and also in the world, Mental Health yet hasn't been normalized as much as in other areas of sciences. And we both connected over it while we were discussing some studies conducted in India on Mental Health issues and realized how much people hide their mental health-related challenges and, unfortunately, almost forever, which leads to normal stress to lifestyle chronic conditions due to lack of awareness and fear of societal perception. And we somehow always wanted to work on normalizing mental health talks and also widen the awareness of tools and programs that are likely to help.
One of the most common areas of interest on our off-days/weekends was to visit the airport in our city, the very core reason we use to visit airports was the opportunity to observe the wide variety of people, we use to talk to random people, mostly listen to them, without any predefined communication structure, and this helped us to connect with many people from diverse background, and we would always end up learning new things, and towards the end, we only use to ask about one question, what is your take on mental health at your workspace or society and what would you like to change about it? The commonest answers we got were these two, "it's bad," and second was, "we don't talk about it," which kind of urged us to stay on the course to be working on this segment. After three years of finishing our graduation, we launched our company, Giver Nutrition. We launched our very first range of nootropics and sleep management supplements. Currently, we are focused on launching mental health-related programs focused on two major segments one for students & corporate mental health management.
Every day we go to our office with one major goal, "Let's make one person accept their mental health as a challenge and aid them towards getting a solution about it."
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Well, we are very new in business and believe we are yet to see our best days; however, two of our biggest achievements so far definitely include reaching the lives of 10000 unique customers that we have served. Secondly, the emails of appreciation that we receive on a daily basis that's what fuel our motivation on a daily basis.
And to put it out there, one of our biggest achievements will be when we reach and aid 100K senior citizens in Old Age Homes through our program of aiding seniors in our society by providing them with essential needs.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
The hardest thing about becoming an entrepreneur is managing time and coordinating all support functions, which is the most crucial thing to managing customer experience and scaling the business.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Bring automation to your organization as much as you can; any work that can be automated without the need for much physical labor shall be automated; this will save you a great amount of time.
- Well, everyone says that we must burn cash to stay in the game. However, our approach has been more on staying cash positive; staying cash positive boosts your confidence and works as an insurance for rainy days.
- Listen to your customer feedback and accept that there is nothing called a final product, at least until you have the flexibility to improvise. Keep working on the customer feedback extra measures to reach out to your customers and learn from their feedback; your customers will end up helping you make a perfect product.
Where can people find you and your business?
on January 30, 2022
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solopreneur that you'd like to share, then email community@subkit.com; we'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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