Yogesh and Kulin in Conversation with Nexus | ft. Onsurity

Onsurity was founded in mid-2020 by entrepreneurs Yogesh Agarwal and Kulin Shah, who bring deep experience in insurance underwriting, distribution, customer experience and building scalable tech-enabled businesses. Kulin and Yogesh (one of the youngest qualified actuaries globally) share a vision of redefining archaic insurance onboarding processes by creating a unique self-serve platform where organizations can purchase flexible and customized health benefit subscriptions for their employees in just minutes.

We caught up with Yogesh and Kulin for a session of Conversation with Nexus hosted by Anand Datta.

You can watch the full session here.

We have the transcript of the video below for your reading pleasure covering the key areas:

1. Yogesh’s Introduction — his background as one of the world’s youngest Actuaries and starting Onsurity.
2. Kulin’s journey — from being a VC to one of the most successful BD persons in the industry now.
3. Product-market fit — recognising the PMF.
4. Hiring people — building a team remotely in the growth phase.
5. Company DNA — defining the DNA of Onsurity.
6. Onboarding angel investors — rurning customers into angel investors.
7. Advice to founders — keeping themselves motivated in their entrepreneurial journey.
8. The future — what’s next for Onsurity?

Anand
Thanks, Kulin. Thanks, Yogesh for taking out the time. Amazing to have you guys over here in our Nexus conversation. It’s a little unusual to be in this formal setup and discussing how things have been on Onsurity and how this journey has been for you till now? Why don’t we start with a little bit of an introduction, Kulin and Yogesh? I know that one of the most important or critical parts of any startup and startup journey is for entrepreneur. So, I think people will really love to understand what has been your journey. Especially, why don’t we start with Yogesh you, as we know you are world’s youngest Actuary and now building something in the insurance space. If you can just take us through a little bit about your background — what has been your journey and how it all started in Onsurity? And then we’ll come to Kulin.

Yogesh
Yeah, thanks, Anand. So effectively in order to let tell you more about me, how I started Onsurity I will tell you more about my background. So basically, I’m a qualified Actuary and a Chartered Accountant. I started my career with KPMG as an actuarial consultant, where being an actual consultant to a couple of general insurance companies in India and in the US and where my primary role was doing actuarial valuation as well as pricing and analysing and designing insurance products for different insurance and reinsurance companies in India and outside India. After KPMG I worked as Chief Risk Officer and Chief Actuary in a couple of general insurance companies in India and also worked as an appointed actuary in one of the insurance companies. Being an appointed Actuary, I was on a daily basis reporting to the regulator and was responsible for the overall actuarial function and the financial well-being function and the risk management function of the company. So, that was my goal. And then, I started my own consulting firm, somewhere around 2017, which was a kind of a semi setup, where almost 10 to 11 individuals were working in my consulting firm. So in 2017, and during the same time, I was actually consulting different insurance companies in India, and one of the insurance companies was also into InsureTech, India’s first insuretech in which basically, my role was to design for insurance products and help them to underwrite those insurance products and then also, I helped them in developing different reinsurance strategy. So, that was my background before starting Onsurity. And while working for my own consulting firm, I realised that giving employee benefits is becoming very imperative in order to attract the right talent. But unfortunately, there is basically no insurance company or any employee benefits company, which is specifically focusing towards the SMB setups, or the small businesses setups. Because most of these companies actually require minimum team size of almost 50 to 55 and even up to like 500 employees, there is no relevant schemes or more relevant benefit scheme that are easily available to small startups or SMB kind of businesses. And this was my learning during my consulting days because I wanted to give a good employee benefit package to my employees, but was not being able to get or source the right plan. And this really helped me to think about Onsurity where in how we can actually create a kind of a platform where SMBs can come around and get the right Employee Benefit plans for their employees and at a reasonable cost, which actually covers almost most of the important benefit package that is necessary for their employees. So with that, started Onsurity. I guess conceptualising of Onsurity started somewhere around November 2019 — December 2019. Then I met you and you were helpful to write a check for our seed round. Then somewhere around February — March, at the same time when you guys had written the check, then Kulin joined me as a co-founder in March 2020. And since then, we are trying to build Onsurity. So basically, since our launch in May 2020 until now, we have almost more than 1100+ SMBs on our platform. We are very proud to say that the kind of the thought process from where we started Onsuirty, we are right now being able to do a perfect product-market fit and effectively getting this 700 companies, I think that the team at Onsurity had really worked very hard in order to build a company which is completely product-centric and customer-centric. A couple of very, very unique features that we have brought in to the market like monthly payments, which become like a game changer for the SMB because then as soon as you make it as a monthly benefit subscription model, it becomes quite affordable for the SMB to sponsor for their employee team. And apart from that, at Onsurity, we really focus a lot on the consumer experience. Because what we understand that the kind of the sector, what we are working around, it’s very important to build the trust of the consumers or the businesses. And that’s why we are focusing a lot on our complete claims experience or hospitalisation experience for the businesses that the employees who may not be well aware about ‘What is an employee benefit? What is your health insurance?’, they will be able to claim on that particular product very easily. So that is, in nutshell.

Anand
Congratulations on that, Yogesh and congratulations on touching 100,000 lives recently. Me being from the insurance industry as well, I think that’s probably the top five fastest-growing products in insurance or health insurance at least. So congratulations on that. On that line, let me move to Kulin. Kulin, your journey has been, I would say, exactly the opposite of my journey where I moved from operations to VC and now your journey has been from VC to being one of the most successful BD persons in the industry. How has it been, and maybe, just to connect that to also like what has been the experience in onboarding really small businesses on Onsurity? And how that experience has been to take that to more than 100,000 customers in the span of one and a half years now?

Kulin
First of all, Anand, thanks for having me and Yogesh over out here. And by the way, this is the first time that we’ve announced our 100000 plus customers. So yes, you have got an exclusive from Onsurity. So, we’ve had very different journeys, you know, almost polar. I started off as a VC professional. This is back in 2008 when I think VCs and what VCs and what startups did was not a mainstream job, or a mainstream activity. Did that for almost three and a half years and worked on multiple sectors. We were almost sector agnostic — consumer tech, high tech, education, both in India and in the US. And I think, at that point of time, interacting with so many founders, seeing them hustle, seeing them scale, seeing them evolve businesses right from five team members to building 100 plus kind of companies, was something that was very inspirational to me. And I think that was a turning point. And I said, I think two things — one, I don’t want to, and hopefully, I don’t have to go back to a corporate world and two, that I want to spend the rest of my time in the startup space. And I think that’s how the starting of my startup journey started. Then built a b2c consumer product and ran that for almost three years, where you’re trying to kind of aggregate purchase demand and see how we can bring economies of scale for people who wanted to make purchases. Ran that for almost three years, learned some very interesting lessons, both on the product side, on the consumer side. Then took the hard decision. And we were then at Freecharge. We knew Kunal and Alok fairly well. And at Freecharge, when they started working on good partnerships, which was a fairly new charter, no one had really kind of dipped into it. Did that and then post Snapdeal acquisition, I was given the mandate to build a team and launch the Freecharge Wallet for the digital ecosystem in India. Freecharge and the kind of approach that we took, we were able to bring on board close to about 100,000 merchants in less than 12 months of launch. And at peak, I think we were driving close to about 200,000 transactions on a daily basis. So built fairly scalable solutions, both on the product side, on the engineering side. And obviously, on the distribution side, we approach the market very differently. And then took a sabbatical for almost seven to eight months, and then came back to India. And, then started with insurance. I think it’s about solving the right problem. And I think that’s what Yogesh and I did, where we were able to build products, and embed them in pieces. And, yeah, that was a very interesting journey, both Yogesh and I worked on these products. In short, about 40 million users, and build a book of more than 100 crores in GWP. And here we are building Onsurity. Completely opposite, not for any enterprise segment. But building for the real India. And it’s been an interesting journey. I think, right from getting teams of three and five, to possibly getting teams where there are more than 2000 people who are getting networks or platforms, which have more than, you know, a large supply side, who want to kind of get healthcare benefits. It has been a fairly interesting journey. And I think one of the thought processes that has helped us is to kind of always stick to one specific thing, that is how we solve a consumer experience. Then size does not matter, it does not matter how you’re doing it. Of course, the focus continues to remain to build for SMEs, a segment which has never got a product like this. While healthcare in India means health insurance, but we are truly trying to become a good healthcare value proposition, where we have given products which give properly instant gratification in terms of say, teleconsultations, medicine orders, lab tests. At the same time, we also have bundled insurance in it, which basically helps us to kind of drive a large value proposition. And like, Yogesh mentioned, you know, affordability and giving access is a key aim for us in the initial few years of Onsurity. And I think there’s been a huge underlying demand. And we have spoken about this many times, and there’s a huge underlying demand, just that the right technology, the right team, and the right product needs to be out there who can solve this. And I think with our combined experience and the kind of team that we have built, I think we are there to kind of make a difference and create an impact.

Anand
Absolutely, and cannot agree more. But to that, I will just put a pointed question to you, Kulin. During this customer acquisition, was there one point in which you realised that there is a product-market fit now? And how do young entrepreneurs think about it? From when you look back in your journey, how do you recognise that there has been a product market fit or some customer saying ‘this is what we wanted always’.

Kulin
I think we’ve been fortunate to see our early product market fit because we spent a lot of time on building the right product, the right technology, the right pricing, and, hats off to Yogesh obviously on this one, that he’s been able to kind of drive this. When it came to distribution, I think that PMF moment that ‘this is working’, came at a time when we started getting referrals, where people started telling us that “you know I’ve referred Onsurity to about five or six people.” And those five or six people whom we were referred to, had the smallest sales cycle. I think this is the fastest that we could possibly do, where people have got referred, they’ve come on to Onsurity platform, and they have purchased the health care membership without any assistance. And when you see that, you know that you built possibly the product in the right direction. Because when you talk only about health insurance, it has been a journey that people take almost 30 to 45 days to purchase a product, get people enrolled. And for us, it was amazing, seeing that our vision is actually somewhere down the line coming through because we could see people just doing it within two minutes.

Anand
Very, very powerful. So in a way, what I’m taking from your answer is that once when an NPS is super high, because the references are driving in, you do not have to spend on marketing, people come in themselves. And third, it goes into a self serve motion, like people are asking for the product, rather than you having to push for a product, even in a product like insurance, which has traditionally been a push product, then you can absolutely be slammed and say that it is the PMF.

Kulin
And you know what, I actually want to put one more point out here. Had it been only insurance, I think would have taken a much longer time. Our combined offering is actually something that SMBs or SMEs have clearly liked because a lot of times SMEs — and I think Yogesh can possibly add more to this — always look for products and funds, where there’s some kind of money back kind of a thing. But I think our healthcare approach made people realise that we can drive savings from day one. And I think that is something our comprehensive healthcare kind of an approach has actually helped us while obviously insurance continues to become a key anchor feature. But I think our overall comprehensive and being obviously, India’s first monthly healthcare subscription platform — these two things combined helped us a lot to get the initial product market fit.

Anand
Very nice, nice. So the other point that I’m hearing from you is that in today’s consumer instant gratification is something which you have to make a part of the product, whichever product you’re making, you should look into that. Very interesting.
With that changing a little bit of gear and moving to Yogesh. Yogesh, the question I wanted to ask and, this is very time appropriate that we have been going through this pandemic and nobody would have thought in March when we were beating our thalis to support the entire system that this pandemic will last for this this long. How has the experience been in building a team which has been mostly remote at a growth phase, hiring people, maintaining the culture? Any thought? First from you Yogesh and then maybe Kulin also. How did you manage it?

Yogesh
I would say yes, the pandemic had helped us to do the product-market fit quickly. But building the right team and all through remotely and given that before the lockdown, we were just like a 15 team member and we are almost like 100+ team members now. Growing from 15 to 100 is definitely where we have really focused a lot on the communication, effectively trying to communicate to most of the team members and effectively making them understand what we really inspired to do, what is our vision but also understanding of the vision that the organisation has, then starts becoming easier in order to motivate them and in order to steer them towards the goals we have. So that is one part. And again when we were hiring, we were focusing more towards how we can easily get strong references or strong background checks of the team members. We can, any which way do a 30 minute or 15 minute call or a video call for anyone to understand the particular team member and how they will fit well into the overall org thing. If something seems to be difficult, we try to solve it out by how we can exactly go through the strong background checks or take the reference from the team member or from the ex-employees. So that is what we had done, which actually helped us to build a very strong team.

Anand
Got it. Got it. And Kulin, what about you? Because I think Yogesh was taking care of the product and the tech and all that sort of thing. You were building a BD team, which is generally an outgoing team. So how has the experience been for you?

Kulin
So building the business development, the partnership team was the easiest because we still have a very, very lean team. I think, just at the cost of repeating myself, but our product-market fit and our references are so good that we didn’t really have to go aggressively out there and sell. That’s why we don’t call ourselves sales team at all. We are a business development team, we go out there to solve a problem for the customer. I think a few of the things, just to add to what Yogesh said, for the first, I think 75 or 80 team members, and today also, for some of the team members, every person has spoken to either Yogesh or me. Right to the extent that when we were building our customer experience (the industry knows that as a customer support team) we’ve also spoken to people who are coming in at an entry level, where people have told us that, we have never seen the founders of the company talk to folks like us. And I was not sure we know how to answer them. I said, listen, we want to handpick our team, and hence, we have actually invested time. Requested people to take calls at about 9.30 in the night, or 10 o’clock in the night. We’ve done interviews at all odd hours and over the weekends, but we’ve hand-picked people. Because it was very important. Especially in a pandemic where people are working remotely, culture fit becomes the most important thing. Because that will define the culture. Of course, while founders would like to make everything sound very, hunky dory, or very fancy, but we face our own set of challenges by building a team remotely, keeping the team motivated, going that extra mile and over-communicating like Yogesh said. Trying to create that bond, because I think that’s what the whole initial team is about. And helping them to meet their aspirations, while building the company was the most important thing. And one of the things that we have been very, very serious about and we continue to do that is how to give more responsibilities to people who come on board, so that they feel like they are growing, and they are learning every day something new. So that has always been an approach that we’ve taken. And we always want to drive growth internally. We don’t believe like a lot of companies that just keep adding a top layer. We want people to come, deliver, grow and keep growing, and hopefully we don’t have to hire someone from the outside world unless required. So that has been a thought process that we followed and I think that’s what also keeps a team motivated that there’s a great opportunity to grow at Onsurity.

Anand
That’s very very important — motivation to grow. But if I were to ask you to define the DNA of Onsurity it in one line. Kulin, why don’t you go first and we’ll come to Yogesh. How will you define the DNA? And what do you want ideal Onsurite to be if I were to call.

Kulin
It’s very simple for us and I don’t need a sentence. And I think Yogesh will agree. Customer-first. That’s it. That is the DNA of the company. Yogesh, why don’t you add to this. I have only two words — customer experience.

Yogesh
I was telling customer-centric but as Kulin mentioned customer-first. We are customer-centric starting from what customer needs and basically a desire that actually made sure that the product, what we are designing it around, on the designing phase to the execution phase and then completely selling the right product. Also understanding the prime requirement of the customer to then servicing the customer. So effectively everything as a business. I know it sounds very traditional, or very fancy. But yeah, it’s always like a customer-centric approach. Because at the end of the day, it’s the customer who is driving every Onsurity-ian, as you said. And this is where, if someone has that kind of a DNA, definitely Onsurity will be a very great place for him or her to have it.

Anand
So actually coming to an interesting point from there, your customer-centricity sort of probably reflects in the fact that a bunch of your customers moved on to become your angels. Like there is no bigger proof of the pudding than people actually putting in money, and then no better proof of a satisfied customer. So how did that happen? If you want to touch upon that, any insights from that? How did your customers turn into your angels? And you probably have the broadest and deepest Angel pool in the startup ecosystem.

Kulin
Yeah, I think that’s been a very interesting one. We never expected this to happen. And to be very honest, having been in the startup space, for the last decade or more, I haven’t seen too many places where customers turn angels, but angels have definitely turned customers. In our case, it was fairly opposite. And I think, it stems from two things. One is that we have been able to drive a great customer experience. And when we have kind of explained our models, we never explained it to the founders. We always extend it to to the HR teams, or possibly people on the operation side, saying ‘okay, this is what our product is’. And I think, it was internally when a team member comes and tells the founder that this is a really good product. And then when we started helping with claims and the experience was, again, seamless. And I think more than both of us, I think it is our team who has converted customers into investors because they’ve been pitching to these people. And we don’t say that, “oh, if it’s an X company, I have to pitch better. And if the Y company pitch lesser”. I think our passion is there equally for everyone. I think that our technology, our entire business model and our way of driving consumer experience, I think, got the conversation started with a lot of founders saying, ‘Okay, now tell me, what are you guys building? Like, we are already your customers, we’ve seen your entire journey from onboarding to the mobile app, to the dashboards that you guys have built. We think that something interesting is going on.’ And these are obviously founders for whom we have a lot of respect. These are serial entrepreneurs. Includes guys like Revant and Dhyanesh of Mosaic Wellness, Jeetendra Gupta of Jupiter. And all of these guys have seen the entire space at the end of the day. Like, they are not someone whose teams have just seen Onsurity. They have seen the entire space, but they’ve selected Onsurity. And I think that was the biggest game changer for us. And, you know, these guys came and said, we want to support Onsurity, and we want to be a part of this. And we were more than happy to have these guys on board to come and build this product with us.

Anand
So I’m going to come to a question to Yoegsh and maybe Kulin you can add on. You know, many times when we talk about startup journey, we talk about grit, and the importance of how you have to keep fighting on and that’s something that you two have demonstrated a lot during this one and a half years of the journey. In short period, you have shown a lot of grittiness. Any advice for the young founders who might be seeing this video, on a few things like how to fight it on because, as we all know, entrepreneurship is not an easy journey. What keeps you motivated, what kept you motivated through this journey of the last half, two years, and what keeps you motivated for the future. And any other insights that you want to share from your journey thus far, and you’re obviously experienced from before which will help.

Yogesh
So basically for any young enterpreneur, I personally find this is a very uphill journey for everyone. And I guess all the founders will have the same kind of experience, the journey would not be smooth. Every day you need to fight or there is one battle to fight every day. But the best part in order to overcome this or how to solve this is just one thing, it’s your quality of the team and how much you can depend on them and how much you can keep them motivated for them to take those battles for you or for the organisation. So effectively, if you really want to develop a successful startup, I think it’s very, very important to have the right team. Given that I’m the first time entrepreneur, before starting Onsurity, I was always having a mindset “okay, I have this kind of a skill set. But what about getting a complete complementary skill?” That’s how I could try to convince Kulin to come as a co-founder, and again, we keep on identifying what are the gaps in our current team and or what are our vision and what is the kind of team that we will be requiring for it, and just to get the right team. And once you have that right team, that’s all that you need to do. And all the other things like I would say, the investment, the customers, the GTM, all the revenue, everything will start following itself. But what is very important is to get the right team and then transform them to deliver because this is how successful startups can be built. And therefore that is the number one prerequisite, I would say. And the number two is basically before venturing into any startup, just see that what would be the problem that it is going to solve for and if it’s going to solve the right problem, and if you can become the customer of that particular product, then only venture into that particular product. And there you actually see the product market is very, very big because in order to have a very successful startup. I would say that those startups can really flourish which have a very big TAM. Because as soon as you start, there needs to be a very big market in order to actually develop a product, to develop a complete company overall, surrounding that particular problem statement. So I guess these are the two prerequisites as per me for any young entrepreneur.

Anand
Very well covered, Yogesh. Build a team on which you can rely so that when shit hits fans and you are in the forefront, there are people who take care of the defenses also. So very, very strong. And of course, to believe in the product because if you believe it then it’s easier to keep going on because you truly believe in. Awesome. So last question from our side, Kulin and Yogesh, what’s next in Onsurity? What’s cooking, what’s coming, what of course, you can share in a public forum. What happens from here to five years down the line?

Yogesh
I would say that we have not even scratched the surface of what the goal was, and our goal is for Onsurity. So we will just keep on focusing on what exactly we are currently doing and try to go deeper, because overall the problem statement that we are trying to solve for, it's in itself is very, very big — at one end of the spectrum, we have like SMBs who are going to stand for their employee benefit, but at the other end, we need to make it more affordable and more sustainable. And making the entire health product affordable and sustainable, you need to have a very right infrastructure for the delivery of the healthcare services, because any which way the kind of the TAM or the market that we are having it around, it’s very price sensitive and again, they need to have a company or they need to work with a company which really, really focuses on the customers. So effectively, in order to do this, it will be a very difficult task because you need to be very, very efficient and in order to become very efficient, you need to have a very right technology and infrastructure, which can actually serve like 63 million SMEs that are there in India, and almost like 440 million lives that are associated with those SME businesses. So that what we will be focusing around that how we can actually make our overall infrastructure and technology more efficient so that we can reach these 63 million SMBs very, very quickly and, and make sure that their employees and their family members are well protected and getting the right health care needs.

Kulin
Yeah, I think that’s the right thing. Like, going deeper into the problem statement. And there are multiple places that we have realised over this one and a half years that there are so many pieces that are broken in this entire journey. I think fixing those things itself will fix the consumer experience. So I think consumer experience will lie at the core of everything, and then going deep and deep to make sure that all of those things are being solved for. So I think that will be always the higher guiding force for us.

Anand
That’s super powerful. I remember some of our discussions were that taking health insurance to already served does not serve what Onsurity wants to become. It’s when you try to reach the SMBs, what Yogesh touched upon, and cover that for 14 million lives. That’s very, very powerful, Yogesh. Thank you so much Yogesh and Kulin for taking out the time. I am pretty sure you are making something which is very valuable, not only in terms of the valuations per se but in terms of what India needs in terms of covering the lives of multiple people who have over the last two years seen what a pandemic or a health catastrophe can do to the finances, as well as the well being of the family. So very, very stoked to be partnering with you all as Nexus and happy to do our part in whatever we can.

Kulin
And we are equally excited to have a partner with you guys. And thanks for all your support. I think we found a great partner in an investor.

Yogesh
Especially thanks to Anand just for believing in what we are trying to build and just to have kind of the same vision that we had at the planning stage or the conceptualization stage of Onsurity.

Anand
Absolutely our pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks.