Summary

The Offline Network Episode 29: Wellness & Health Platforms (aired 2025-11-05). Guests: Revant Bhate, Sahil Gupta from Mosaic Wellness, MyMuse. Revant: "But yeah, if you're a five and a half year old business trying to change the way India looks at health and wellness broadly, we have multiple brands for different consumer segments." Revant: "Even Honasa, which is actually the biggest success story in the house of brands, actually bought B-Blunt from Godrej." Topics: venture capital and funding, AI and LLMs, consumer brands and D2C, B2B/SaaS. The Offline Network is India's live show on startups, tech, and venture — streaming M/W/F at 4 PM IST on YouTube.

Full Transcript

Utsav Somani: This is a test. All right, listeners. I hope you've had a good weekend today. We are heading straight into business. Our professor Raven this year. He's going to explain a whole world of brand building online, and he's built a solid house of brands as well. I don't know if he loves this term, but we'll dive deeper into that topic with him. Let's welcome Raven and get straight into the questions with him. Raven, welcome to the show.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): Hey everyone.

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Bring the Monday energy Raven.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I'm just I don't know if your viewers or listeners know this, but I just logged in and they just started. I have no clue what's going to happen. So that's why the energy is more concerned than anything.

Utsav Somani: We'll go easy. And I mean, all of this is stuff that you already know. So for our listeners who are hearing about mosaic wellness for the first time, why don't you describe the business in two minutes?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): Okay, this is tougher than what investors asked me to do. But yeah, if you're a five and a half year old business trying to change the way India looks at health and wellness broadly, we have multiple brands for different consumer segments. We have one for men's health, one for women's health, one for kids health, one a unisex supplements brand and one in sports nutrition. So, we're trying to figure how does India invest in self-care and what can we do to enable that.

Utsav Somani: And you mentioned so many different brands and verticals as well. Thrasio and many of these roll-ups came to India as well and globally. I think they've not seen too much success. So, how are you different from them? That's a good point.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I think Thrasio was built on a buy model, right? So, like, if you're doing anything, you have two options. You can either build it or you can buy it. Like software is built or bought. Similarly, they thought that we could buy multiple brands and sort of run them together. The big difference is we've built everything. We've never, till date at least, never say never, till date, not bought anything or not done anything inorganic. Even Honasa, which is actually the biggest success story in the house of brands, actually bought B-Blunt from Godrej. They have also sort of acquired brands over time because building brands is hard. But broadly, India has been so heterogeneous and the health and wellness market is so new. We knew that nothing exists in the market except for maybe HealthCart, which had Muscle Blaze, the largest brand in sports nutrition in the country. There was nothing much that had been built for India. And that's why we started building. Maybe in 10 years, you will see a bunch of brands that can be bought and latched together. Though that model still has question marks, considering the synergies are not well known. What Trusty also ended up doing is buy brands across multiple segments. We also operate across only one category, which is health and wellness, which is largely supplements. So there has to be some synergy between the brands. And for us, the synergy is our R&D, our product development. The science behind supplements requires depth of thinking. And that's what we have built over time. Now, whether that science is being applied for a six-year-old or a 70-year-old, at least that's the nuance that changes by brand. But otherwise, the capabilities are being built with a lot of depth. I think most house of brands, like even if you see Homasa, largely it's in the personal care space, skincare actually being the single vector on which they have innovated for different consumer segments because they went really deep in skincare as a segment. So their R&D, their formulation, their thought process. So I think you need to be deep and have a very structural right to play and right to win in one particular field. Most of the Thrasio copycats also try to do this across segments where the synergies are very hard.

Dhruv Sharma: Priyant, is there a common backbone between these brands and also what sequence did they come to life in?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): So the common backbone, as I said, is the R&D. So we have our R&D labs where we've gone very deep into the science of what the human body across different stages in our lives needs and how do we enable that with the right supplementation that may or may not exist in the right form today in the country. We started with men's health because when I was, when I started this, I was 36 and losing my hair. I still do, but I use our own products. So I'm still OK. Not as bad as it would have been. I mean, people don't see the bald patch usually, but it goes away because I keep using our products. Happens with most middle aged men. Be body wise and women's health followed. Little joys in kids health followed. We actually realized that the market was deepening a lot, much sooner than not, than what we anticipated. And therefore a unisex supplement brand followed and we have just entered into the sports nutrition category. So I think the sequencing is more about. You know how the market is also evolved when we started in 2020. The health and wellness market was sub $2 billion in India. Today it's almost four to $5 billion. The expectation is that in the next five years it will become like $15 billion. So the market is also expanding so fast the categories will keep deepening and emerging as we play along. Also, India is now so deep digitally where you have an India one, you have an India two, you have an India three, you have a blanket that talks to India one, you have a me show that talks to India three and each of these are also becoming large platforms. So the. The categories and segments are so deep that you could end up needing a different brand for each of these segments like a tier one male while there's enough homogeneity in let's say Gen Alpha, at least in millennials, you still see a big difference in how someone in a Belasco will look at their lives and want to invest in self-care versus someone in Google. A Gen Alpha is much more homogeneous in that sense, mostly single child, mostly bought up on Instagram. So their behaviors are a little bit more homogeneous and hopefully over 10-15 years it will become more like China or US where everybody has a single will still be differentiated by language. But I think the community and upbringing that used to happen more what we saw around us and how we grew up in a house in Gurgaon or in Belasco is now changing because in Instagram it's actually a common factor for everyone. So we still have enough of a heterogeneous India for let's say the millionaire and above generation. Gen Z also some ways is a little heterogeneous but the homogeneity is increasing. So over time the categories and segments will also evolve.

Utsav Somani: Amazing. You've spoken about Instagram. Is the Indian consumer wellness behavior in line with global trends or is there some lag?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I think this has been discussed enough where you know Sajid and Bloom have this report where they talk about India 1, 2, 3. India 1 broadly follows global trends. So if longevity is a problem in the US that is being talked about suddenly you will have the let's call it the blanket audience the India 0.1 also that will start talking about longevity which is why when Devinder sent out his post over the weekend the entire X exploded with oh this is so cool right and that's the chatter amongst all the India 0.1% if you can call it. I think broadly we follow those trends. India 1 beyond 0.1 would in at least beauty personal care now want to look at what is happening in Korea and what the latest trends are that way. So we sort of follow the trends of aspiration that are linked to also some sort of economic prosperity in that sense though again if I look at it the Instagram feeds of each of these folks is more aligned to the demographic age group is different like for a million what I said works for millennials but if I look at a Gen Z or even a somewhere who's close to between Gen Alpha and Gen Z their likes are now becoming more and more specifically global right and that's why I seen the homogeneity coming in over time.

Dhruv Sharma: Riven then over the five and a half year long journey I think you said Man Matters is the most mature brand right and the sports nutrition brand is the youngest one.

Dhruv Sharma: How has discovery evolved in this journey? Like from your first brand to your most recent brand from a customer standpoint?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): It's actually the same because we don't like people don't know like each of these brands speaks to a completely new consumer segment so there's no I mean Man Matters talks to men above the age of 28 largely. Me Body Wise speaks to women in two segments we have hair loss which is largely 28 plus body care which is sub 28 right Little Joy speaks to mothers who are above the age of 35 so these of these consumer segments is so different and so deep that we don't actually depend on any it's actually like almost like a new business being started out right and that's also the advantage because they don't cannibalize each other they don't compete

Dhruv Sharma: which is so

Dhruv Sharma: Yeah, which was kind of my question like the first thousand Man Matter customers where did they how did they discover the brand versus your newest brand here?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): Yeah, that's also been one of the reasons why people get a little scared with the model because every brand needs its own go-to-market strategy every brand needs its own marketing dollars even today to even go deeper right and luckily digital is so deep in India that you are able to replicate the same go-to-market strategy forever if you know your consumer segment if you stand for something unique it's not that hard to actually reach out to them digitally and as long as your proposition appeals to them you will have decent unit economics. I think the problem that happens with most businesses is they realize too late that their proposition is not unique enough or is not something that stands out for the consumer over time. The LTV CAC framework doesn't sit. You know I was one of the founding partners at rebel food so having built brands digitally before I mean the playbook is sort of clear to me to have how to do this without losing a shitload of money and therefore we just rely on it.

Utsav Somani: And I mean talking about rebel foods and your strategy of hiring EIRs I think it originated from there as well right. Hires EIRs all those LinkedIn posts I've seen EIR at mosaic wellness this thing. Describe that strategy a little bit more. As somebody the new founder who goes into this world of brand building as a house of brands or different brands under the umbrella how do you recruit EIRs how do you manage them and how do you make them prosper within the company.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): So you're right. Jaydeep sort of took this Silicon Valley concept of Entrepreneurs in Residence and started the fast-forward Entrepreneurs in Residence back there in 2012 which is where a bunch of us joined. Today Ankush leads the entire business as CEO. It was sort of a training ground on how to build business. I realized actually if you think about it this is already being done at scale though not as an EIR concept but what's a Unilever management trainee or what's a Amazon day one manager right or a McKinsey junior associate in India or an associate in the US right. Every institution over time needs to figure out its playbook as to how to build that institution and you need to train individuals and if I get a Dhruv Sharma or Utsav Somani today laterally I will anyway need to train them on how my organization works and unlearning is far harder than learning so it's just easier to get in young folks and teach them as to how to build in this organization. So we started with a bunch of years but now I have multiple programs. So I have something called a mosaic fellowship which is for fresh undergrad. So if you are a Shahid Sukhdev Singh pass out or an MMS pass out BBA BSC doesn't matter right and you're just tired of the usual jobs out there you can come join us. There's a batch of people who join every year between June July number in between 10 to 20 and we train them as to how we work. How do we build business? Then we have something called a mosaic Mavericks. What I used to call EIS is now just a bunch of Mavericks who are between 1 to 4 years of experience and who are either in consulting or in banking or even in VC and who are tired of their usual mundane roles and want to learn how to build a business. Come on right and we invest in training these people. Now the obvious problem that happens is you can train people and then they leave and they either become entrepreneurs themselves, which is great. I just love it when alumni become entrepreneurs, but sometimes they also use that training and get much better paying jobs, but that's part of it, right? If you think about it, there are so many people who join a McKinsey or Unilever and then go on to start their own business or become a VC or want to do their MBA, but that doesn't mean that the process is flawed. It just means you're doing the right thing. If people are joining your organization and developing personally and professionally so well that the next phase of their career is even better. You're doing the right thing and we've just programmatize these and realize that over a period of time. I think a lot of startups remain startups, but if you want to become a large institution, which if you want to become a great business overtime, you need to have a very core philosophy as to how will you get people in and train them to make sure that they understand how to build business more specifically how to build this business. And even if 20% of them stay overtime, not only will they create a large part of your business, they also have disproportionate wealth over a period of time because we incentivize them with stock options and stuff like that. I think this institutionalization is not. Thought enough thought of enough or taught enough in the entire entrepreneurship game. At least my realization is. For the first four or five years, you can keep grappling around trying to understand how to build business, but then you have to create this playbook and then teach like my biggest. My largest amount of time I spent today is creating these playbooks and then figuring out how to teach them. And then you need to just keep hammering that and that's how an institution will get built. So I know maybe long winded answer, but something that I think overtime we realize as founder CEOs that. Zero to one is great. Creating new things is great, but institutionalizing them and creating these playbooks and making them replicable is where the long term compounding happens.

Utsav Somani: And how much of this did you learn or crystallize when you were an investor at Kalari?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I don't think see unfortunately as investors we go in and we come out and we have we context switch a lot, right? We never go really deep. It's only when you have to go deep and realize that you have to go from a output backward thinking to an input forward thinking which only building can teach you. See most of investing is OK. There is a goal. This is an output that we want to gun for. What are the three inputs that I can? You should solve for and if you don't have an answer, I will either advise you or I will point you in the right direction as to let's say what's up can help you on this XYZ, right? So it's always a point in time and it's always output backward. What I'm talking about is very input forward that you have to build the inputs and say that invest in people, build the right culture, build the right playbooks and keep teaching and don't worry about the score in five years. The score will take care of itself. I think this is unfortunately a reality that comes when you start seeing gray hair and realizing that if you run this company for five more years, you can't be firefighting every day. You need a more sustainable play where you are able to come and everyone says this very clearly or find five more people like you. I don't think five more people like you exist because everybody is a very unique individual, right? But you can teach people as to how you think and the right people will take advantage of that and learn a few things and find their own way, right? I'm sure the next five people who I train in the way I think will have their own unique personality mixed with those learnings and come up with maybe different, better answers. Both philosophical.

Utsav Somani: And many process business like I mean anything that you can share publicly. Let's just say we are doing OK.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I won't complain. FY25 numbers not out or filed? We have filed but thankfully Interact has not picked them up yet otherwise it's like 20 people will come and say what have you done?

Dhruv Sharma: I think they will pick it up and start fetching it. But Rewan tell us how you spend time and what you spend time on, how has that changed from year to year? Right? Maybe it's part two of the question.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): Yeah, so I think yeah, I think for almost 20 years now since I started my career to till I started the business was about 15 years and the first five years in this business was. I relied on my strength of being a first principle thinker and being great at zero to one. I just love doing zero to one, which is why you can see the business model right? The problem is if you have to build a lasting institution, the leader or the CEO in this case has to also, as I said, figure out a replicable playbook. Like if you remove Rewan out of the equation, what happens and that unfortunately is not a very sustainable strong organization, right? Which is the hard part I am learning today. So again, I started leadership coaching about two years back for the first year that I was in denial. You know, I love doing everything myself, but how do I? It's not easy for me to trust because people have to meet a certain bar and stuff like that. Then the second year was more. There are three phases, right? You first become aware because somebody makes you aware of the obvious things you need to do that you are not doing, but it takes a while for you to accept it. And then is when you start actioning it, right? So this is my year of how maybe I'm actioning some of these things and I'm finding peace with the fact that it's okay for me not to do everything, which is super hard. I mean, I've been question. Some knows me for the last 10 years, right? Like if I'm not in the thick of things, I feel that there's something wrong in life, but I mean, it takes a while. I think the hardest part of a personal journey is getting feedback. I think self-building self-awareness is easier. Accepting it and internalizing it is much harder. I think once you do that, then actioning part is easy because it's again a very logical problem to solve.

Utsav Somani: Raymond, we have to switch gears a little bit. So you host the asymmetric podcast also, right? So you've done, I mean, amazing deep dives in different topics as well. So we're going to pick a few topics. Maybe you can share the main takeaway from that particular topic. It can be across episodes, but maybe it's mostly related to one particular episode. So creator and celebrity led brands, do they work? Do they not work?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I think they are working today. There's a big question mark as to do they continue to compound same problem, right? Like if you take the creator out of the equation, how much do they compound and how much is the brand dependent on the creator? Not only time will tell. I think so. It's an evolving model. We should be able to get a sense in the next couple of years as to how do the economics back up and how do they work? But today at least they work very clearly.

Utsav Somani: But they probably only take you to a certain like ceiling, right? I mean, in the sense that the creator also does have a shelf life also.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): Interestingly, I would argue that. You know, creators actually have a long shelf life as long as they are very authentic. Like take a look at Tanmay Bhatt, right? And he's been a influencer, creator, a voice that people listen to for the last decade or so. I think what what really helps is you need to separate the creators. Who are trying, who are also authentic and what trying to be someone, right? I think as the market has evolved, everybody had to take some take up some positioning and say, oh, this is a gap. There's maybe a gap in finance is a gap in stock market. There's a gap in beauty creators and you know, so on so forth. But and then you try to be someone who you are not. But if you're just authentic to yourself and you've built a following with that, I don't see a reason why they would be a shelf life because your audience will continue to like you over time for who you are versus who you're trying to be.

Utsav Somani: It's very hard to be authentic over time across multiple years and world of AI brand building content living up to the hype.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I think it's getting much harder now because there's just so much content as an absolute deluge of content, right? So in fact, it was so much that meta had to change its algorithm and make sure that ads and content almost look the same because people are getting really annoyed with the fact that as the cost of content replication came down, people's ability to create 100 ads in one hour just became a reality, right? So I think it's very for a very interesting future. I strongly believe that we'll get to a situation where the top 30-40 million in India or maybe even 100 million over the next decade will just say I don't want to see ads and I'm going to pay you $10 a month or $20 a month. Just don't show me any ads, right? And that's why that's what the algorithm that that's what the platforms are scared about. So either they'll monetize like what YouTube is doing, which is saying here's a subscription model or at least because Instagram or Facebook don't have that, they'll at least try and make sure that there's no that you will not do to differentiate between an ad and the content like that's the only reality that we'll have to live.

Utsav Somani: Do you have any final ones for Raven before we bring Sahil on as well for a joint quick 10minute segment?

Dhruv Sharma: What are you most excited about in the coming year, Raven, 2026?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): Survival. There's nothing else in this world of like with AI being so pervasive. I think we are at a I think five years back people used to say that India is a unbranded country. There are so few brands, so many people. I think we have too many brands now because starting a brand was never easier. The number of platforms that are there, I think there's enough capital in the market. I just think there's a deluge coming and you just have to be paranoid about surviving and doing the best for your customers. So I remain excited about that that five years back also the problem was same next year also the problem is going to be same.

Utsav Somani: Wise words, wise words. Let's bring on Sahil as well. We'll spend 10 minutes with you both together. Sahil, welcome to the show.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): Hey folks. How's it going? Thanks for having me. Hey, Sahil.

Utsav Somani: Sahil, what are the hair products you're using, man? Working very frequently. Thank you. Awesome. So let's do a quick this thing where we sort of before we let Raven go, let's get some D2C insights from you for our listeners. D2C scaling, quick commerce, how important is it? Is it working? Do you see your brands doing well on quick commerce or advice for basically D2C founders looking to get into the world of quick commerce?

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): Well, it's nice that you're asking me. I should be here asking Raven. I think he's the sort of expert, but I'll do my bit. So as some of the listeners may or may not know, I'm the founder of MyMuse, co-founder of MyMuse. And for our category, I would say quick commerce is working extremely well. I think if you think about, you know, exactly what we're selling, we're selling massagers and the product is lightweight. It's small. It's sort of easy for the quick commerce players to store and to sell. And I think that's done wonders for our demand. I think also there was, especially in the initial days of selling online, there was always the question, are you going to need to eventually go into retail? And obviously our category presented one of the biggest challenges with that, right? You can imagine why. And I think what quick commerce has done for us is that it's almost leap frogged the need for retail. I think the idea of someone being able to get I mean, it's pretty crazy if you think about the fact that you could have one of MyMuse's products by the end of this conversation sitting next to you. I think that sort of helped us a lot. I think initially the idea was that we would try to scale MyMuse only on D2C. But eventually you do hit that sort of ceiling that everyone talks about. And I think it has become important to think about different channels as part of your strategy. And I think quick commerce has just become a good part of our strategy. I can see, again, the margins are very different. I think you have to be able to figure out how can you scale sustainably on that channel as well. It's no different to D2C. And what I would honestly encourage other founders and new founders especially is think about your CM2, your contribution margin to after marketing. You have to think about the payoff between direct to consumer and quick commerce. And my rule is that if it's not at least within a 10% band, right, we should not be selling that product on quick commerce. Because I just don't see why you should be okay to seed margin on one platform and not on another platform. And yeah, I think that may be a trap on certain categories. Interesting. Rehman, for you?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): No, I think Siles actually hit the nail on the head on every aspect. We actually went pretty late. Our business model is a little different because the health and wellness category was new when we went in. It's still new. If you take a 15 year period, we're still at the cusp of like in 2030 we'll look back and say maybe 2025 2030 is when the health and wellness category exploded in India. So we went a little late. We only went on quick com last year, which was two years after it sort of started becoming big. And it's still not a big channel for us because again, it's not an existing behavior like soaps and shampoos and groceries and existing behavior supplements is still not a day-to-day existing behavior for most people in India. So in some ways, as we created the category on D2C and as we created it on Amazon, we are category creators in most of the categories that we are in. We will have to create the category on quick com as well. But we see the compounding and category creation happening at a much faster pace on quick com. India was never a subscription market. Everyone said India is a low trust nation. We don't like to put our cards and we like control in that sense. It's almost pseudo subscription. It's no different than a subscription business. We see the compounding happening in the fastest way. I think over the next five years, health and wellness will become largest on quick com. I don't know if that will happen. But I'm pretty sure that health and wellness as a category in 2030 will be largest on quick com. Which is why we went last year and said let's create it here.

Dhruv Sharma: Because the audience is so broad, they don't much they need.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): So let's go ahead Thank you. I think honestly anything can work on quick com at 30% marketing budgets. I think anything can work anywhere at 30% marketing budgets. So I totally agree with this philosophy of like quick com is a very specific channel that helps you achieve a very specific goal. And I think every product needs to be thought of in terms of its unit economics vis-a-vis the channel it's being sold on. So I think that if you are launching there's a lot of products for example our handcuffs which we launched based on demand directly from quick commerce. Now that was a backward worked out problem. We understood what was the price point and we manufactured a product based on those necessities. I think that can work. However we've also had products where we launched it on quick commerce because other products were doing well and those were launched in cities where the willingness to pay may not have been as high. There's actually a cost to your inventory there. It's easier to work out your inventory holding cost in your own warehouses. I think it's a real catch 22. Again, at the end of the day, you've got to think about how incentives are lined up. I love working with our quick commerce partners. Any business that's making margin off your products is going to want increased sales. I think of it as you're getting bulk orders from a target in the U.S. If you think about it like that, you never want target to return your inventory at the end. You don't want to have built up orders and done the hard work and have a huge return at the end of the day. I urge founders to be careful and build for habits on the channel, which may be more helpful.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I think it's an excellent point, Sahil. To your point, Dhruv, when you said, I don't think you can get any false PMF on quick commerce. I don't think they will list you if they don't think there's demand. It's a B2B business. They need to agree to list you. They are a very scientific way of knowing whether your product or more clearly your proposition. You may be entering a category where there are five players who do well and you may be the sixth player. Unless your proposition is unique and they think there is an audience for this. That's the first level of check. Then they launch you only in one city. Even if they are confident, they will tell you let's see how you do there. Then only when you get to a good category market share in that city, they will tell you we will expand to other cities. I don't think the problem exists because they have such a high bar on inventory turns. They can't deliver a return unless they are able to turn inventory fast enough. The business model solves for the fact that it's unlikely you will get listed unless the metrics change. Instamart and Blinkit are part of public companies. I think everybody's OKRs are clear. It's list things that will sell at a fast pace. Don't keep inventory. They will not list you or take you across the country unless you do well in 21st. The business models have been designed that way effectively.

Utsav Somani: Talk to us about the cost of customer acquisition. Has it gone up? What does it look like? Can you give us numbers?

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): I can go first because we have been doing this for five years. Interestingly, everyone expects the cat to go up, which is a fair logical thought. When I started, Instagram had 125 million users in India. Now it has 800 million. There is significant high penetration. If you look at it as an overall level, it would not have gone up. If you look at Bombay, it has gone up. If I say I want to talk to the gym goer and sell him protein, compared to six months ago, it has gone up. Usually, digital businesses have a luxury to say that there is a high The LTV will reflect that. India has an interesting nuance. The perfect proposition also, in that way, there is not enough arbitrage left. You can decide where to play and how to play in that market. When does this stop? I think we are getting to that stage where at some point of time, the penetration will start tapering off. More interestingly, unless the income levels go up in India, the wealth levels in the top 1-2% are going up. If you go beyond the top 2-3% of India, who are now doing real money gaming, they are doing stock market, which is good fun for them. At some point of time, they will start doing commerce. As that evolves, their incomes need to go up. The spending power is only that today. Unless that spending power goes up, tax will continue to rise. I think the next five years will be much harder than the previous five.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): I agree. The main point I couldn't agree more on is the idea that I don't believe CAC has necessarily gone up. At least for my muse, I think instead what's fluctuated for us is this AOV or this concept of LTV. I think depending on what business you are in, because we have longer sales cycles, we think a lot more about AOV over CAC rather than just LTV over CAC because those tend to be relatively close together. I think what we saw was this explosion of brands that Rayvon's talking about. As the same set of consumers had more access to these different brands, I think AOVs went down a little bit because people were given more optionality. I think recently though, it's changed again. That's why it's so important to keep yourself really keyed into the market because of everything Rayvon's saying about AI ads and authenticity being important. I actually think things like brand mode are starting to become even more real. I think there is this idea of compounding and brand creation. I think again, we've started to see that while CAC isn't changing, the same set of people are willing again to pay a different or increased AOV for things like better advertising, better branding, better product promise. I think again, when there's a reduction in AOV, what a lot of customers don't realize is that it's actually getting reduced in the product as well. You're skimping on the product somewhere. I think people are going back to this concept of wanting good quality product at the right prices. Brands may not any longer have to discount so heavily in order to get your initial customers into the door once you are somewhat of an established brand. People are willing to pay a little bit more. I think that's been really promising. Again, instead of thinking about CAC so much, we think about blended MER. That's honestly how I try to operate as much as possible. The idea is you're just thinking about your total marketing spend over your revenue. As long as we can keep that in check, we just believe that that's the true way to measure is your company going to be able to scale sustainably.

Utsav Somani: All right. Solid joint segment with you. We've kept Raventh long enough. Thank you so much. Folks, anyone who wants deep dives from Professor Raventh, he hosts this show called Asymmetric Podcast. It's him, Chirag and Shantanu doing deep dives on amazing topics. Thanks, Raventh. Thank you guys for having me.

Revant Bhate (CEO, Mosaic Wellness): Please, all of you who listened in, don't worry about too much philosophical gyan. Building is easier than I make it out to be. Take everything with a pinch of salt. Have fun, guys.

Utsav Somani: Too modest. Thank you, Raventh. All right. Sahil, I mean, we didn't give you a chance to introduce the business and yourself properly. Why don't you tell our listeners what you do at MyMuse.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): I'm Sahil. Thank you so much for having me. I recently joined offline and I'm one of the cofounders of MyMuse. MyMuse is a sexual health and wellness company. We make lubricants, massagers, and really banging content about what to do in and out of the bedroom. I cofounded the company with my wife about five years ago. She was then still my partner sorry, still my girlfriend. I think we were engaged when we started. yeah, now, you know, five years later, we were one of the first to set up this industry. It has become a well food industry, right? We're doing well.

Dhruv Sharma: So let's talk about content for a minute. Yours appears to be a category where awareness was important but not at the cost of overeducating the customer or talking down to them, I guess, and being tasteful at the same time. We'd love your thoughts on how that's shaped up over time.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): Yeah, you know, Dhruv, that's such an astute pickup. My cofounder would be super happy you caught on that. I think especially in our segment, right, in the sexual wellness space, you really don't want to be prescriptive. You're not trying to tell someone, hey, this is, I think there is an approach where you say this is a problem you have and it needs solving, but I think what we learned was that people didn't generally like that and instead we took the approach of we wanted to be your best friend or your pen pal, someone you can write into and ask your like your sort of there was this Mumbai Mirror article, Ask the Sexpert by Dr. Mahendra Watsapp. So we wanted there to be that idea that this is, because again, when you think about how and who you ask your questions to when it comes to things in the bedroom, you either ask your friends or ask the internet. And I think that's not the best sources. So I think we worked really hard to try to, like you said, just be inclusive, not talk down to individuals and act as a value giver and just try to bring conversations onto the table. One thing that we realized was the more we were able to talk about something, the more it made other people okay with talking about that same thing as well. So a lot of times people needed that spark in conversation which we were trying our best to provide.

Utsav Somani: How has society's attitudes changed towards these products?

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): I think that's honestly been a really big surprise for all of us at my muse. I think there hasn't really ever been that negative sort of backlash. And I think again that's because of the way that this has been approached. We never really tried to sell sex. I think the idea has always been that you're selling better intimacy and you're selling better relationship connection. And I think that has allowed us to go onto the line of like, you know, that's allowed us to stay on this line of, you know, just making sure that we're not trying to push a product on someone. And, you know, I think that's what ends up breaking the trust with the customer. I think as a brand, you honestly today have the responsibility to do your best to bring the best product to the customer. And I think if you can prove to deliver that promise again and again, there's no reason that that customer shouldn't continue to trust you.

Dhruv Sharma: Could you give us a sense of the demographic we're talking about here, how young and how old?

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): Yeah. So it's really interesting. When we started the sort of demos that, you know, the ICPs that you write up and you hand over to your investors, it was the 25 to 35 year old female living in a metro or an urban city. And how wrong we were. When we first launched our sales were 50-50 men and women, even though we didn't have a male product. We were selling a female massager as one of our first massagers. And we realized that a lot of men weren't able to bring their partner to finish. And they were super happy to take the help of massagers. And it made so much sense then that my muse wasn't supposed to be a male or a female brand. It was supposed to be more of a couples brand. No one is building for couples or folks in relationships beyond the chocolate and the chocolate and the chocolate and the and the chocolate and the chocolate and the chocolate and the chocolate and the chocolate and the chocolate and the chocolate chocolate and the chocolate and the chocolate and the And so ideas that have been really crucial to how I run things or help with running things here at my muse, they say I'm the guy who gets the train to the station on time and Anushka is the person that gets it to the station on time. you know. And I think the way I do that is by looking at the unit economics of any product that we're selling and just having like very, you know, strict rules that, hey, under this specific, you know, net margin, gross margin, whatever you want the rules to be, we're just not going to take this product on or sell it through this channel. And then, like I said, this concept of like a blended MER, right? So I think MyMuse's goal is always to have your blended MER at around like a two and a half to three, right? Now, as long as you're able, so as long as you're able to spend less than 35% on your marketing, you know, you should be able to run a relatively profitable book. Again, just depending on what segment you're in. Obviously, if you're in segments where your gross margin is 50%, then you won't be able to do that. I think if you're in segments where your margin is closer to like a 60%, then you will be able to do that. I think the idea of profitability is more about knowing, can you on an individual product level be profitable? Because if you can't do it on an individual product level, you're never going to achieve it otherwise, right? So I think if you start there, and you know, we try our best to be profitable on an individual product level. I think if you start there, that's how you can then ramp up. And I think again, the revenue versus profit trap, I think a lot of the one of the hardest things for me to do as a founder has been to balance the line of revenue versus profit, right? Because no matter how good a founder you are, I don't think there's anyone else who can do it. But like, you're always giving one up for the other, you know, it seems, right? So I think once you're able to really understand what you're better at, I think that's when you can sort of truly start to ramp. So I feel like my muse is in our innings where we understand that this is probably what we're better at. And this is what we can sort of sort of ramp, you know?

Utsav Somani: Awesome. Dhruv, any final closing question?

Dhruv Sharma: You know, so I actually have three, but because we're nearly out of time, Sahil gets to pick which of those three he wants to answer. And I'm not, yeah, so really quick, quick. So one is Sahil, I really like thinking about when we talk about consumer products, right? About packaging, you know, the how you pick the material, how you color it, how you write copy in it. That's one. The second is for people who have to, you know, who build and scale businesses where it's inevitable at some point you're going to have to set up a factory. Do you have thoughts on that? How far can you go with just contract manufacturing? And when is the right time to start doing your own thing? And the third one was, you know, the way search engines index the web is just very different from how AI chat interfaces interact with the web and how should brands, you know, reorient in light of that. So pick any one of these.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): And that's, you know, we should get exchange WhatsApp numbers because I want to reply to all of those. But I will say that maybe I'll take the last one just because AI and B2C is something that I am sort of super interested in and I have spent a lot of time thinking about. I think this concept of like GEO, like, like, like optimization or AEO, agent engine optimization, whatever you want to call it. I think it's super interesting. I don't, if I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think SEO in and of itself is changing. Right. I think the same principles. So what are we talking here really quick? Right. The idea is that even at my news, about seven to 8% of our traffic, we track how much traffic is coming from chat GPT. And the one thing I would, I would strongly recommend everyone to do is get a tool that can help you do that. Right. So we track how much traffic is coming from chat GPT and it is increasing. And now we're at about seven to 8% of- Feel free to give a shout out to the tool you use, by the way. Yeah. We use Asva AI and it's very small. You can, you can, you can look them up, but I go for Indian tools where I can. But, but, but yeah, the idea is that theoretically winning that interface, especially with the Shopify connection that chat GPT and OpenAI are working with is going to be extremely important. Right now there's going to be a slew of companies that come across and tell you that, Hey, you need to do this or do that, or I can give you the advantage in order to make your better. I don't think that's what it is. I think you have to go back to the way SEO foundationally is, which is how do I think someone is going to search about my brand on the internet? That fundamental question is not changing. Right. So when I'm going to a chat interface now, I'm still asking the same questions. If I'm a supplement brand, Hey, what are the best supplements to take? But this time I think there's a highly specific addition to it because you know that the chat can answer it. So what supplements can I take for disjointed knee pain or XYZ? Right. And I think all you have to do as a brand then is make sure that your content continues to be nuanced. I think if you look at the work of Sajid Bhai, for example, so brilliant, what a guy, dude. Right. And if you just read what he wrote about writing for AI, right. I think the more you, you just can imbibe this knowledge and concept that like, if you are just open about how you're writing in the world, the job is to pick it up. Right. So rather than trying to build backwards, just build forwards and do what you're doing, but with a more specific nuanced lens and being truer and truer to yourself, because like Revan said earlier, being inauthentic for too long is just impossible in today's day and age. So sorry, that was a little long, but I do have a lot of thoughts on this.

Utsav Somani: Super insights. Super insights, Sahil. Thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us your time.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): Thank you guys for having me. Take care.

Sahil Gupta (Co-founder, MyMuse): Thank you, Sahil.

Utsav Somani: All right, listeners. I hope you've had a good time listening to these two D2C legends. We've learned about very different industries, but I think they bring such unique insights to the table that I'm feeling energized. So thank you for tuning in. We'll see you on Wednesday at four o'clock. Bye-bye.