[Raised $30 million] Ep.102 - The First 100 with Mohit Kumar, the Founder and CEO of Ultrahuman

Mohit Kumar is the Founder and CEO of Ultrahuman, which is helping health-conscious individuals achieve optimal metabolic health through a blood sugar sensor and a ring. Ultrahuman has raised to date $30 million.

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Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Mohit, good to have you on the show. How are you doing today? Likewise, thank you for inviting me. Amazing, I'm really interested in what you're building because I've been using biosensors almost 10 years now. And your company, you're the founder and CEO of UltraHuman, which is basically helping health conscious individual achieve optimal metabolic health through both of your products. One is your CGM blood sugar sensor. and in a ring that tracks a lot of metabolic as well factors. You've raised today 30 million. But before we dive into all of this, tell us what inspired you to build Outra Human. So the story actually starts pretty much, you can say four years ago. I was getting out of a previous gig. Backstory is that in 2015, I started a company in the logistics space, sold the company to a company called Zomato. which as a result I ended up building their food delivery business that expanded to almost a million transactions a day, almost a million people hired on the ground. So that was a phenomenal success for us. And after that, I really wanted to do something that was really close to my heart, right? In terms of what I really wanted to do in life. And fitness and health sort of like emerged to be a core theme given that I was interested in mixed martial arts and specifically jujitsu. What I did as a next step was that I actually thought that maybe I'll just go out and train at a martial arts camp. So in the year 2019, I just went to this camp called Tiger Muay Thai, which is in Phuket, and spent a few months there training with some of the athletes. And what I observed compared to what I'd seen a few years ago was that people have actually moved from basically training as hard as possible to training as smart as possible. And these athletes actually are using data, sports science, medical science to their advantage. and training much faster. And it was perfect because I was in my 30s and I didn't want to do the same thing as everyone else. I wanted to use a leverage technology to actually get fitter faster. And so I started looking at what these technologies were. And one of the things that I observed was glucose tracking was really cool. The interface was not like essentially to put on a glucose tracking device, you have to have a reader, you have to have like a clunky experience. Data goes to some other human who actually analyze your data. And it was not... very insightful, but the source data was really cool, but then to get to insights, it could actually take a lot of time. So being the entrepreneur I was before that, I maybe thought like, look, let's maybe I can build something here just for myself, maybe to begin with and for a few people I know, I knew a few athletes because of my time at Tiger Muay Thai. So I started building along with my co founder, what's something in this space. And the aspiration was to like, let's say, start using glucose data to actually provide insights about nutrition. Not really for everyone, but then maybe focused on athletes, a small group of athletes. The aspiration was we will cover 1000 athletes at max and run like a small concentrated camp of people who could actually benefit from this. But what happened was that, of course, it took off in ways we couldn't imagine. And that happened because people actually started, like regular people, they wanted to understand more about their health. They started signing up for the service. That was the inflection point. So you're not the first in that category. There are companies that are centered on sleep. There's are companies that are centered on blood glucose monitoring. What is the reason that you're doing both? Is there a relationship between both? Absolutely. So the second question, which is, is there a relation between both? Absolutely, right? Because it's human physiology. Glucose affects how you sleep, your sleep affects how you dispose of glucose or how insulin sensitive you are, which affects glucose interin, right? So... Of course, the relationship is established, but let's answer the first one as well, which is why do both? Why not start with one and focus on one? And I think what we realized is that when we built the first glucose experience for people, what we saw was that actually people who are using the glucose monitoring experience, they started asking us questions around like, look, I'm eating the same food, but I'm getting different types of glucose response. And sometimes these answers were around like, look, you have been less active than what you were maybe a few months ago. or you are probably like more stressed or you are getting less sleep, more sleep etc. So all the answers that we were getting, of course some of these were around the food that people were consuming but many of these were also about the lifestyle that they were living and I could say that maybe like it was 50% lifestyle and 50% food. It's very easy to put the blame on food but the reality is that it's very hard to change let's say what you eat because you get accustomed to what you eat and you probably like build a life around what the things that you actually prefer eating. So we thought that, I think, giving people more insights about their own lifestyle might actually help people make these changes and optimize their life faster. And that's the reason why we actually built a variable from ground up, which is essentially the ring. The ring because across all the variables that are available, we personally were very interested in the ring form factor because of the fact that you could keep it on the body very, very easily compared to a device that has a sort of like a display on top or has one day battery life and all of that. The ring was very easy to keep it on, it's seven day battery life, extremely minimal, extremely lightweight, right? And it tracks you passively. So that's how the hypothesis actually evolved. And I think what we realized is that people are not really looking for devices, people are looking for insights. So eventually, whether you use one variable or two variables or a collection of variables and markers across the system, what people are looking for is actionable and clear insights. And that's what we actually evolved to build because what we want to get people to is how can you actually use data from multiple sources to actually understand what's really happening inside your body and how you can figure out the lowest hanging fruit of your health. In the next few years, you'll actually see us launching new variables, new markers, but the common theme is going to be things that can track you passively and do not require a lot of effort from your side. Like for example, you won't see us actually launching something that requires a lot of input from your side, like for example, an activity watch, something like that, but you will... basically see us launching things, it will measure you passively while you go about living your life. What sort of biomarkers are you looking to track in the future other than, you know, sleep, blood glucose? Is there anything that comes to mind that is either invasive or non-invasive? Yeah, so I think we are very interested in cortisol. We are very interested in inflammatory markers like CRP, specifically because these are the markers that are very, extremely well studied over the last... 25-30 years in terms of what sort of impact do they have on chronic disease probability. But also these are the things that you could actually change by improving your lifestyle. You don't require a pill to change these markers. You actually need to fix some of the basic things like sleep, activity, stress levels, etc. to actually fix these markers. These are the two which I think in the near term are the ones that we are actually looking at. I think apart from these, we are very interested in looking at the full blood panel and specific markers around basically your lipid profile, bunch of markers around inflammation additionally, right? And the idea is to actually create like this one common or you can say centralized platform where across variables as well as all these blood markers, you could actually understand over time how your body is actually changing. And if you can understand how your body changes, you can also improve the process of change. Amazing, thank you for sharing these insights. So you're not the first in the category of both the wearables, both invasive and non-invasive. How did you approach your early branding strategy so that you build trust with the consumer? Because if I want to, let's say, buy a sleep tracker, right? There's plenty out there like Apple Watch, Ring, et cetera. So I could go to these well-known brands because I know that the quality is there. With ultra human, if you're new to the market. How did you gain trust of the consumer early on? Absolutely. So one of the ways to understand this is that when we started building these products, one of the things we observed was that it's not like people don't have wearables. People do have wearables. And if I look at an average individual around me, the folks I knew, everybody would have maybe one wearable on their body and five wearables inside one of their drawers in the closet or maybe some place inside their house. Potentially, one problem to solve was that how do we get people to use these variables? And that was problem number one. The second one was that even if people use these variables, what are the changes that people can actually make? If people can use these variables, but they can't really make any long-term and actionable or long-term and meaningful changes to their health, it's not going to be a valuable addition to their life. So based on these two, of course, the first one's answer was that, like, can we design something? that is very easy to keep it on. So that people don't keep it inside a drawer but keep it on their body. Things like seven day battery life, essentially the form factor being super minimal, hardly noticeable. You can wear it with your favorite watch. All those factors played in like really well in our favor. As a result, for example, almost 98% of the people who actually buy the ring actually keep it on. They never take it off. If you compare it to, let's say, popular smartwatches, that number is actually less than 10%. So... That's the gap actually that we're bridging. Almost everyone actually keeps it on their body because it's very easy to keep it on. Coming to the second one, how did we gain trust, right? And what we realized is that, again, the point that people are looking for not the device, because device is actually friction, like to keep something on their body. What people are looking for is insights. So what is different in case of ultra human is that we have positioned and even worked upon ultra human product or as a platform, which basically is made by a sports scientist and community that is powered by you. And as an example, a lot of users who use the platform, they can actually contribute to the algorithm. They can actually tell us this is how we can improve the algorithm, change the algorithm. As a matter of fact, we have this community called the Cyborg Army. The Cyborg Army is essentially a collection of people who are using these variables to actually give us feedback on their own data and give us ways to improve the algorithm. So it's a collective group of users and us building these platforms and giving people insights. As a result of this process essentially, we've actually evolved much faster than the existing variables out there. So when you use a ultra human ring, the quality of insights that you see are much, you can say much more robust, much more studied, you can say much more up to date compared to any other variable out there. So when a user goes out and buys a variable, they're buying a point in time software and hardware whereas when they're buying ultra human, they're buying something that they can contribute to something that grows with them. and over time evolves much faster than what they actually need. So those are some of the core differences. I think some of the minor differences could be things like we've actually done clinical trials as well on the CGM variable, which makes us one of the, you can say one of the unique companies in this space that actually studied the glucose marker in a clinical setup for non-diabetic people as well. So that essentially you could understand as a non-diabetic, what does glucose mean for you? So those are some unique differences. Amazing. Walk us back to your... early or your early adopters, who were they, how did you reach them? And I think at a point in time back a few years ago, you had a wait list of 125,000. So give us the masterclass version of how can you actually create such hype and demand for a product that wasn't yet in the market, even though if you could think about it, I could go buy an alternative. So why would I want to be on a wait list of ultra human when the products of your competitors are active in the market. Absolutely. So it started with, as I mentioned earlier, we wanted to build this product for athletes and top performers, right? Intent was never to build this for everyone to begin with. We evolved to build it for everyone because we realized that everybody could actually benefit from this technology. And what happened in the early days was that we wanted to release it only to a few initial individuals who are athletes or performers. who just don't need this, but they can also contribute to it. They can actually tell us more about what we could improve on the platform. What sort of basically data do we need to, markers do we need to add? What sort of algorithmic improvements do we need to make? So that was our thought process in terms of selecting the initial few athletes and top performers. Now what happened was that it turns out these athletes and top performers are people who are actually followed a lot, not just on social media, but also in terms of their essentially like... being thought leaders in their industries. So when we thought that there's a lot more interest than just athletes, we actually took this technology and released a wait list. Like our expectation was that maybe 5,000 people will join this and we'll have to figure out a way to fulfill this because like practically didn't build supply for this. Interestingly, more than 100,000 people, actually 125,000 plus people joined it. I think at the end of the wait list, we are almost close to 200,000 people. In the next few weeks. they ended up essentially joining this waitlist. We were really curious like, why would everyone actually want to use? And back then we didn't have the ring, we just had the glucose monitor. We were interested like, why would people actually want to use it? Like, what is the reason? Is it just hype or is it, there's really a reason behind it? And then we started rolling out the product to people and realized that people are really confused with how they think about nutrition. Because there's so much of nutrition advice out there. I mean, if you search about any diet that's possible, there'll be pros and cons and Like every new individual is telling you that, oh, don't eat this, eat that. This is bad for you, this is good for you. Keto is good, paleo is bad, et cetera, et cetera, right? So reality is that it actually depends. It depends on who you are and what is your life and what's your lifestyle and essentially what sort of feeling profile do you need and what sort of biological makeup do you actually have, right? So this level of personalization was actually missing and that's why people are looking for a better answer. The promise that the CGM platform had, which we strive to fulfill every day is essentially can you actually look at your biological data and make a smarter decision about your food without excluding everything, without going on crash diets without thinking about like let me change my life today can you make a small change every day and we realize that people are making small changes like for example somebody who is extremely unfit could just start walking after their meals and that is progress for them somebody who is actually eating a heavy meal before they sleep they could actually basically space out their meals slightly better. And that actually compounds over a period of time instead of going to a gym for a month and basically just quitting altogether. What were basically the channels where you marketed that wait list? How did you make sure like all these 125,000 found out about you? I think it started with just one tweet that came out from my, my co-founder also tweeted. And I think we got like really, you can say tons of in-bounds about people just curious about the technology, not. I mean, back then it was not about people buying, people could buy something because they're just looking for something cool and something new. But then what we saw was that people really wanted to know more. Like, why should we even track glucose? I'm a non-diabetic, why should I really track glucose? And many of these actually were people who wanted research data, basically is there robust enough research available in this space? And that actually pushed us a lot to actually look at the research data. And you can say that like, In combination, of course, there was emerging research, but then this space was fairly new. Glucose was essentially being tracked only by type 1 diabetics and then eventually a little bit of type 2 diabetics essentially as well, right? So we had to essentially do our own trials to actually get this data as well out there in the public. But back to the point, people wrote these long form emails and I think at peak I would have probably been replying to hundreds of emails every day answering these people and just like basically having a conversation with them. The other thing that we did was we wanted to get it out to people who were generally more curious. So we prioritized them. People who were more curious got the product first. And that actually helped us basically improve the product much faster. But at the same time, people who were more curious, it's not like they always gave a positive feedback or a negative feedback. But they were keen enough to actually give a feedback always. They were not silent users. So that actually helped us sort of like get out from maybe the first 10,000 people who signed up on the waitlist on the day one. to the next 30,000 people who joined after one week, because these people actually talked about their experience and talked about the pros and the cons and the shortcomings and the advantages. I would say that was the start of the snowball. Amazing. So you have a wait list, you go live. I think your CGM was your first product. How did you ensure like you optimized for conversion? Because the moment you tell someone the product is live, first they do some reviews, they have this, let's say level of Do I buy it? Do I not buy it? And then when they look at the price, the price is fairly premium. So how would you optimize the most sales out your wait list? And then the second question is, how do you ensure the repeat purchase? Because these CGMs, I believe you do not create the hardware. You are the software provider. And every two weeks you have to change the sensor. So it's quite a nice subscription model, but it also means that customers might churn out. So how did you optimize both the conversion and then the recurring conversion? I think the conversion in the initial days for us the conversion metric was about How do we drive more awareness because people who did not convert in most scenarios did not even ask the second question Like why should I even try it? People who converted I would say that in the initial days 80% of them converted because They want to try something new It was not like they believed in the technology yet, or they had experienced something like this. I can tell you, for example, the first 500 users who did a survey that have you ever used a glucose monitor? And almost 98% of them had never ever even heard of a glucose monitor in their life. Forget using, because these were perfectly healthy people. Yeah, metabolically, they were in different, you can say, spectrum in terms of health, but then they were non-diabetic people. So there was no reason for them to actually know about glucose before that. So one of the things that we realized was that, how do we educate these people faster? And what sort of content do we create on Twitter, on Instagram, every other channel? Like non-salesy content, right? Just genuine content about why glucose technology matters, glucose tracking matters. And the second one was, how do we become super responsive to consumer queries? So these emails, when one of my matrices was that, if somebody writes an email to me, I have to reply within 10 seconds. Can I make it as fast as possible? Can I make it, can I reply? Like not more than five minutes it should take, right? So fastest is 10 seconds and then not later than five minutes. And because you set the pace of the conversation, people will engage in the conversation further. So those are some of the things that we actually, we realized that the faster you reply, the more people engage, the more people engage, the more people they talk to about this because people are not just driven by utility, they're also driven by curiosity. And that drove a lot of our funnel in the early days. We also did a lot of efforts to write a lot about it, like on our blogs, on our social media, specifically the research. Initial advice that we got from a lot of people was that, hey, don't complicate things, just like tell people what they're getting. But I think what we did was we did something that was the reverse of it. We actually told people about the exact technicalities of how glucose actually affects the body, how glucose metabolism actually happens, how insulin works as a carrier of glucose, etc. And to our surprise, a lot of people actually wanted to know more about their body. The internal awareness of the product and brand today is that we believe that we are a science education company at its core, right? We want people to be more curious about the health. We want people to be extremely knowledgeable about the health. And if you could build a platform around it, the device and the means don't really matter. So that was the acquisition effort in the end of the day. What learnings did you bring from your early time at Zomato that has helped you grow your business? Is there any things that has worked in the past and you applied it again today and it's working perfectly? Actually, there are many. I would say that if I were to pick one, the best one would be to essentially start with a super lean team for everything that you want to do. Don't over-structure things because over-structuring actually slows down things. I'll give you an example. So... The last time when we built a startup, or our team's exercise would be pretty much be around like, look, we want to build a new product. The new product requires five types of roles to build the new product. Five types of people who are in different roles to build a new product. So I'll build five different types of teams around the product. I'll hire those people, and then basically we'll start executing once those people are hired, or somewhere around the lake. That's what my initial design process in the previous startup. but we learned over time was that structuring in an experimental setup just slows you down. Versus what we do now is that we actually start with a super lean team, maybe a team of one or two people who actually do things end to end. They take control of the outcome. And as a result of that, they're able to move much faster. And we only hire or only get people on when we feel that there's a dire need of that individual. So that actually keeps, obviously keeps our costs low and keeps us lean at the same time. What it gives us is that people have absolute control, they have the ability to now think wider, deeper, they feel much more empowered, the outcome belongs to them. And I think this level of org structuring was sort of like a big unlock for us. I think I would say that a lot of these things we acquired over time as we worked within Zomato because we tested out different org structures and org strategies. This is the one where... you give really curious people a really hard problem to solve and give them all the resources versus giving like a team of people with experience and give them resources. The former always works better. Amazing. What is a principle in life or in business that has served you well on your entrepreneurial journey? I would say that I derived this from, in a way, from martial arts is the fact that in martial arts, there is a belt system, as you know. So there's a... black belt and then there is a white belt. White belt is the beginner, black belt is the pro or essentially you become an expert. And what a lot of people don't know is that the cycle of belts is not fixed. You get a white belt and then you sort of like go through the intermediate belts and then you become a black belt and then it wears out and you become a white belt again. Right? So that's how belts are designed. So the white belt gets soilier and dirtier. Essentially the dirtier is actually knowledge in a symbolical sense. and then it wears out once you become a black belt and then you become white belt again. This resembles a cycle of learning and unlearning. And I think this has been one insight that I've been trying to follow in life that the only long lasting organizations or people or companies or anything, not just organizations but even people, people who could learn to become experts over time but they can also unlearn to become beginners and start with a beginner mindset again. Because then no new person can come and disrupt you because you have the ability to compete with that person. No new thought process will, you will not have the ego to say like, look, I will not do this because I'm an expert in XYZ, but I don't want to listen to your thoughts. So I think that's one principle that I've been trying to follow in both life and business. This is great advice. Thank you for sharing this. What are your thoughts on the future of health monitoring technology? And how do you see your product evolving to meet the changing needs? And when do you think it will go really mainstream? Because today when I look at it, it's quite expensive when you have all of these technologies. For example, the CGM that you have on your website, if I wanna commit for a full year, I'm paying roughly more than 2000, maybe $500 per year. And then there's other products out in the market. So if I want to achieve optimal metabolic health, it cannot go mainstream because it's quite expensive today, especially as you said earlier in the podcast, you want to go the route where you can monitor people's blood panel, lipid profile, CRP, all of these biomarkers that could give you quite frankly the optimal metabolic health. And in the US, for example, I've read recently, like if you look at the recommendation on when to do a blood test, you would see that if you're between 20 and 40, they recommend every five years. If you're between 40 and 50 every three years, and then only if you're over 50. it's one year, which is quite absurd, right? When all of these biomarkers are hidden and you cannot see, it's like driving a car without seeing any of the dashboards there. So where do you think we're going? And when do you think it would be affordable enough for everyone to have access to it? In terms of where do we think we are going? I think the core, you can say behavior of an individual today, as the individual thinks about health is that look, when there's a problem, I will go and find a solution to the problem. In case there's a problem, I'll go and find a solution to the problem. And I wouldn't say that it's a bad approach, it's just a approach of thinking about health. The problem with this approach is obvious that by the time you solve the problem, the problem has already caused the damage. Example chronic disease. And the other problem is that you don't have enough data when you actually go and solve the problem. Which is... as you rightly mentioned, it's like driving without actually having visibility. So this is one type of behavior. We want to change it in a way that people regularly instrument themselves without even having a problem regularly track their health, track their body. And as a result, what happens is that once you have more data on your own body, obviously, whenever there's a problem, the diagnosis will be better, significantly better. But even if there is no problem or there is no disease that you face in the future, you can track what is the actual slope of your health. Are you improving? Are you degrading? By default, by the way, everybody's aging. So we have to be better than the pace of our aging. That's forgiven, right? So from that perspective, I think what we're trying to create is actually how do we get first million people on this planet, maybe the first 10 million people eventually to begin with, who actually are culture leaders from this perspective. tracking the health in a preventive, in a proactive way. And then they educate the next billion and the next seven billion people, right? Six, seven billion people. That's the type of approach that we want to take. Now, point number two, how do we make technology more affordable, more distributable? You can say in some ways, more reachable by everyone else. I think to think about this, if you just look at not the CGM, but let's the ring in this case, right? The technology and the sensors that we use 10 years back would have been maybe like 20 times more expensive than what we're using right now. And the reason why it's affordable now, even by companies like us, like medium, early to medium stage companies, is because somebody scaled up sensor manufacturing because there was demand. Similarly, for glucose sensor manufacturing as well, today we are in this stage of scaling up demand. And that gives us the ability to actually now look at even solving for cost in a serious way. Like one year back, we had no leverage to solve for cost. But now, of course, there is a volume way of solving the cost, but then there is also production way of solving the cost, which is we can now go back to the manufacturers and work with them very, very closely to figure out like, can we actually make a much more accessible technology available? So this has already happened, like the cost of sensors for us essentially over time has actually reduced and that is the benefit that we pass on to the users as well. And the idea really is How do we not just cut it by 50%, but how do we cut it by 80, 90% in the future? And that requires a technological breakthrough. And that technological breakthrough will come with a lot of demand and adoption in this field. So I would say that we're just in the beginning of this, sort of like think of it like this, right? To make a cheap rocket, you have to basically launch a few rockets and then think about how do you build a reusable rocket so that launching a rocket is cheaper. And then... Once you platformize it, then of course everybody else can also build it, right? So that's the step that we're taking with glucose monitors as well, because we believe that glucose monitoring has the ability to sort of like change humanity forever. Mohit, one last question. What's next? I think you would see a new biomarker coming in on the platform in the next somewhere around three months. It could be new hardware as well. So we're trying to figure out what is the right way to launch this new biomarker. essentially it'll be a game changer when it comes to tracking health, inflammation and quality of life. So I think that's what we are working closer towards. And of course, at the same time, the biggest focus is to work with people who are a part of the platform already and use their insights to improve the platform further. Amazing. Is UltraHumans product available for everyone in the world or is it a specific region you're selling to at this stage? The ring is available worldwide, anywhere in the world. CGM, we essentially ship to India, UAE, UK, and a few other European countries, I think, potentially, we just launched, I think, France, Germany, and then I think we're launching a few East African and North African countries as well. So I think that's our broad structure right now. And yeah, of course, expanding every month. Amazing, Mohit, this was a great episode. How can people reach you? Yeah. So I'm on mohitatultrahuman.com, M-O-H-I-T at ultrahuman.com. I really love interacting with people who actually like to talk about this space. It's a fascinating space, it's a fascinating rabbit hole of insights and thoughts. And I think, yeah, please feel free to reach out to me at mohitatultrahuman.com, M-O-H-I-T at ultrahuman.com. Thank you for sharing your story and good luck with the growth of Ultrahuman. Thank you so much, Shadi. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. 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