What Tanmay Saksena teaches about privacy-first marketing

Healthcare is not offered piece by piece and service by service. Healthcare is about an integrated offering because the user would go to a platform based on trust. So e-pharmacies are new to India. This is a rather new concept. People are, you know, gradually getting used to it. Of course, it's very, very convenient because medicines are something that many need on a regular basis. So what is the potential here and what are also the challenges because also from a regulatory as well as from a business side?

Look, e-pharmacies, certainly the intent of it is to give convenience to the consumers. For us, the approach has always been patient first and patient centric approach. And this is something where a big problem traditionally has been access to medicines because you will see that most of the market are small shop owners. And so the range of medicines required in one shop, it's not sometimes physically possible. And the advantage of being an internet, one of the services that we provide is the e-pharmacy service.

And as an internet provider, you know, we can give you access to the 100,000 almost plus SKUs that are in the market. So there's certainly that level of convenience that gets offered. And what are the challenges here of running an internet focused, or rather, I mean, today it's not internet focused, but that being a major part of your strategy? Look, challenges are the usual business challenge because you need to start making people comfortable with this new way of engaging and ordering something as close to their heart as medicines.

And creating the trust, creating the awareness that such a thing is possible. That's usually the challenge. Other than that, I don't see anything particular because we view ourselves as enhancing the market. And not really, the market is huge, the potential is huge. So it's not less of a competitive threat right now because there's enough market for everybody else. So which other part, I mean, medicine delivery is obviously one significant area and there's a regular sort of demand coming in for many people.

But which other part of the ecosystem are you looking to also, I mean, challenges in other part of the ecosystem you're looking to solve? Sure. So before the challenge, I'll talk about our reach within the ecosystem because our strategy has always been an integrated healthcare play, which means that we believe that healthcare is not offered piece by piece and service by service. Healthcare is about an integrated offering because the user would go to a platform based on trust.

And once they trust the platform, they're going to consume all services offered, right? That's the only approach to really build a healthcare platform. And so we started with information, in fact, and pharmacy came on later on top of that. And then around the same time, we started with labs business, which was we have a fleet of folks who come and collect samples at home. And we have all the top brands of labs in our marketplace, including our own. We also do online doctor consultation.

And all this has given us an infrastructure that now allows us to present very valuable sort of strong value proposition to other players in the ecosystem, like insurance companies, like pharmaceutical companies. Yes. Large providers, hospitals, just because what this business that has been built on the consumer trust. And you did touch upon us to how you're sort of going deeper into the country and are able to, how many cities do you? So almost 2,500 plus cities across the country. That's massive reach, right?

And so how is it sort of, how is that hyper-local model working out to me? How does it look like? Correct. So with medicines, the way we think about it is there are two kind of use cases, right? We're going to look at folks who have chronic conditions, which is a large portion of our business. And for that, the model doesn't need to be hyper-local. It just needs to be accessible or a large reach should exist. We are slowly setting up our supply chains in such a way that we'll soon start servicing folks even with acute conditions,

which is like aches, fevers, headaches, where you need some remedy immediately, right? And that's going to follow soon also. So you recently raised a new round of funding. Congratulations on that. Apart from consumers, where else in the ecosystem that we touched upon will you sort of grow? What is the plan with this now, a new round of funding? So our big focus this year is now ecosystem partnerships, right? And the thing that is less evident now in media and all of that is because most of the focus has been on the e-pharmacy business

and the price wars that are happening and all of that, right? Now, again, our approach has been very clear right from the beginning is that since we are building, it's an ecosystem play. We have already now deep partnerships with many of the top hospitals of the country where we are running their, you know, we are taking care of the consumer experience post-OPD consultation all the way to the pharmacy and then lab test requirements, right? Given that we have that infrastructure already in place. Wonderful.

So what role does digital play in your overall marketing mix? You're a digital first company, but, you know, when you reach out to customers, I'm sure you're using other mediums as well. So, so far we have been very frugal and we focused basically on performance marketing. So the idea was that marketing is a very actually small augment to our user acquisition strategy, which is the biggest thing, right? Because we get so much of organic traffic, that portion has been fairly small.

But now with, you know, more resources and with our size and heft in the ecosystem, we also want to start talking about our story to the consumers. So they, so we want them to know us beyond just the services through which they interact with us. We want them to know for our ethos and our philosophy. And that is very much consumer centric and building that aura of trust. And that's what we're going to focus on. And tell us a bit about Tanmay outside of the workplace. Well, most of my life today is consumed with work, but I do love to be...

You're a startup guy, I can understand that. Yes, yes. Because there's so much to be done. But I do love to read in my spare time.