TRISHA RAJANI: MODERN SUCCESS FROM AYURVEDA’S ANCIENT PRINCIPLES
Trisha Rajani Vaidya, Founder and Ex COO of Dr. Vaidya
We spoke to Trisha Rajani about her entrepreneurship journey building Dr.Vaidya’s, the largest Ayurveda DTC brand in India, and one of the country’s big success stories in the category. From 2016-21, Trisha and her cofounder (and husband) scaled the team from 66 to 140+, millions of customers and finally an acquisition by the RPSG group.
Tell us about your journey into entrepreneurship?
I was working at a company focusing on raising funds for early stage startups in the impact space. I was dating Arjun, and at the time, he was working in private equity. We were both obsessed with early stage companies, always thinking how we could improve the ideas we were seeing. Somewhere during this phase, we kept having these thoughts and ideas, and really an itch, so to speak. Arjun then went on to actually start Dr. Vaidya’s after his grandfather passed away.
I am a genuinely hardworking person, and salary isn’t the only thing that drives me, and never has been. But it came to a point where I felt unfulfilled - putting in 110% for a salary and a “well done” just wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. When Arjun took the plunge, he did it by himself for the first 6 months. We got engaged in March, and I joined him in april. He was actually the one that convinced me. The business had failed in the offline strategy, and he was like “you know online better than I do, and I can’t do everything. Why don’t we do this together?” I believed in the idea, and I was ready to go out on my own.
How old were you when you started working with Arjun?
I was 25 and he was 24. Pretty young.
Are there any notable funny stories of your couple/relationship dynamics during the building phase of the company?
We get asked this all the time - we were together 24 hours a day! The beauty is you don’t fight, or when you do, the fight has to end really quickly because there is always the next fire to put out or the next success to celebrate. Weirdly enough, it was a huge advantage in our relationship - you get to see the person’s highs and lows in the truest form. And as a partner, you want to see them at their best but also want to be the first one to help them when they’re upset.
People at work didn’t realise we were married - I never changed my last name and a lot of our team didn’t know. On the way to the wedding altar, Arjun was actually sitting and approving social media posts for the business. All our celebrations were celebrated at work - birthdays, anniversaries.
Can you give us some more context on your business, role split, size of team?
So the business was Ayurveda - this category of medicine has been in Arjun’s family for 6 generations. They were all Ayurvedic doctors, and Arjun himself was also cured by these products. Everyone in our parents’ generation knows about Ayurveda, but in our generation no one knows about it. The Western world popularised yoga, and we didn’t want to see the same thing happen with Ayurveda. So we set out to make it more accessible and democratise this knowledge.
We went online rather than traditional offline, starting with zero orders a day, it took us a while to reach product-market-fit. We managed to scale in 4000-5000 orders/day, 16,000 pincodes in India, and the largest Ayurveda DTC brand in the country. What’s special is that we cater not just to tier 1 but also tier 2 and tier 3 of India’s population. Team-wise, we scaled from 5 to 120 people.
In terms of role split, we divided things very quickly based on skills and strengths - I looked after performance marketing, ops, customer service, data, etc. Arjun did more of the brand - he was the brand custodian, ran the factory, PR - he was the face of the company.
Our entire team knew who to ask for what - there was no confusion. We argued a lot and had a lot of health debates - we didn’t agree on everything, but we would argue it out, and whoever’s department it was had final say, and you then you back your co-founder and act as a united front. That’s really critical.
How many rounds of funding did you raise?
We had some capital initially from our family and from the time of his granddad. We bootstrapped with that. We then got approached earlier than when we were planning to raise, and were considering strategic investors versus VC funding. We spoke to lots of people in the industry and chose the strategic route after a year of weighing up our options. And we knew fundraising is super time consuming and takes away from time spent building the business.
So we only had one round, and then we were acquired (both by the same party). We knew we would eventually sell as that is how we’d reach the scale we aspired to.
What was the rationale for early exit/acquisition in four years? What was the ultimate goal of where you wanted the business to go?
Running an FMCG biz in India is super hard. The reason we partnered with RP-Sanjiv Goenka group is because they had such good knowledge of offline as well. We also knew they had the capital to take it to its potential. We spoke to a few players in the market and we found them to be the right fit.
What have been the biggest learnings since that time? What do you wish you knew then that you know now?
Hundreds of things! If I had to pick a few…
We hired good talent a bit later on. We were young and couldn’t mentally rationalise the costs, but we should have hired a more senior team earlier on.
We both wish we were more focused on brand building initially rather than just performance.
Hopefully if I did it a second time around, I'd try and figure out a better work life balance - we didn’t have any! That would have been useful.
We actually made this into a course! How to build a DTC brand. We love imparting this knowledge to others.
Would you be a founder again?
I think so - I don’t see why not. But I was quite burnt out, and I didn't realise it till we exited - till we had stress-free sleep and doses of 8 hours of sleep (which was a foreign concept until exit!). I don't think I realised how much the stress affected my body. After we sold the business, friends even commented that we were finally present and engaged in conversations. It did take a toll in that sense. We were super young so maybe that's why also, but the plan was to take a break for 6 months and travel the world, but COVID hit and we got some great opportunities in the meantime. But we’re both open to it!
What do you think about the state of play for female founders?
I think there needs to be a lot done to address the lack of role models, and encourage young women into entrepreneurship early and that it’s an option available to everyone.
I’ve been to industry events representing Dr. Vaidya’s - once, I was at an event where I was the only woman in the entire room, and the youngest person there by far. The people there were pretty taken aback - they’d never seen a woman at one of these investing forums. During the networking, I definitely felt excluded and shut out of the conversations. I told Arjun I was happy I went but that maybe if he had attended, we would have gotten more out of it. I was super excluded from the side chatter - this really irked me.
At a different conference, I asked a question and prefaced it with “my husband and I run this business…”, and another woman stood up and said “it’s because of you that women don’t get to shine - because you work for your husband.” She’d completely distorted what I said. This attitude needs to change. Society can’t keep boxing women into corners and labeling them - we need to be more inclusive.
So what are you up to these days?
A bunch of things (surprise surprise)
I’m an advisor to GlobalBees - the Thrasio model for India. I help them with their acquisitions
I advise Trell, a social commerce company
Advise a VC fund as well
Angel invest
I help our family business in luxury jewelry and watches - primarily with their digital strategy
So I do a bunch of different things and I love it. A portfolio career in its truest sense.
What kinds of businesses do you angel invest in?
We started in DTC - we felt we could add more value, and enablers as well. Now we also look at fintech, edtech, early stage, EV space. The community is great and we co invest with angels and funds too.