Meet the SHEROES - Krutika Katrat

“We want to make health and wellness easily accessible and affordable for the women of India”, says Krutika Katrat, Co-Founder & Chief Acquisition Officer, OoWomaniya.com

OoWomaniya is primarily an online consultation and counselling platform that’s safe, private and as the name suggests, exclusively for women. Krutika tells us about the venture and what inspired her to start-up.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I have an M.Tech in Biotechnology. While I was studying I pursued internships in Research and Development (R&D) departments at Cadila Tissue Culture Lab (where I worked on Plant Tissue culture and micropropagation plant growth techniques) and Zydus Research Centre (where I worked on recombinant Erythropoeitin hormone – a human hormone facilitating oxygen transport).

I was a very active child and raised to be an individualistic, confident and independent person.

How did the idea of OoWomaniya come about?

I along with co-founder Sneh, started our study by understanding day-to-day issues faced by women. As a part of one of our first experiments, we conducted a workshop with 25 odd females and collected their day-to-day issues anonymously. These issues and feedback from women led us to create a simple sharing platform for women. This platform was meant for providing safe and non-judgmental space where women can freely speak about their issues being anonymous. As majority of the issues where related to lifestyle, relationships, emotional wellness, the platform gradually started receiving questions from women. In a way, women were asking questions and taking their own health decisions. To mark this independent and self-reliant behaviour, the platform was named OoWomaniya.

What are the core products / services you offer through this venture?

OoWomaniya is primarily an online consultation and counselling platform – safe, private and exclusively for women. These consultation are available through our mobile friendly website – www.oowomaniya.com and we are about to launch a mobile application.

This core service is complimented with searchable health information and preventive measures for different issues. This content is curated and verified by prominent doctors. We also offer packages for the universities and corporates.

In the long-term, how do you hope to shape and grow the site?

OoWomaniya is accepted and loved by our users and we are shaping it the way women of all age groups and from all regions want it to be! It will be a one-stop solution for women to their all kinds of needs related to health information services.

We want to make health and wellness, easily accessible and affordable for the women of India.

What challenges did you face when starting the venture?

Women Health – we chose a difficult domain quite consciously. We were often perceived as an NGO initially. We had two way challenges – bringing behaviour change in women as in how they access health related information and services and the second was to establish it as a sustainable business model.

Individually, when I began as a cofounder of OoWomaniya, which is an IT enabled service. Owing to my background in biotechnology, core science and paramedical domain – I had hardly any idea about IT, IT services, Analytics, digital marketing or content marketing. I learnt all of it from scratch with the help of my colleagues, by iterating, reading and working upon it. And I am glad for the trajectory and growth I could achieve on this front in past 2 years.

Even, when as a start-up when you plunge into fund-raising for the 1^st time, the “Investor and Investment” lingo, the financial and legal aspects was also something that our core team had to get abreast with, by diligent learning and conversation with the industry experts.

On a personal front, as a 22 year old when you tell your family that you want to “start-up”and build your own company on something which is just an “idea”;   it obviously brings some resistance and doubts from family, friends and peers because a lot like your career and youth is at stake. But gradually, my family and friends have turned out to be my biggest supporters, advisors, critics as well as fans!

Can you leave our readers with a few thoughts?

There is nothing like RIGHT TIME to start what you always wanted to do. Although, right amount of evaluation of opportunities and adequate planning is needed before you take the plunge! Starting up can be exciting but keeping up with the grind of this career and life choice can be challenging and yet satisfying.

Also, it is important to have conviction and passion for your “idea”. But falling too much in love with your idea can prove negative at times. Making iterations or changing your idea should be dependent not just on your personal choice, but on the basis of evaluation of user/market needs and trends.

Lastly, I would like to convey something to young entrepreneurs that what we may lack in experience, we can make up for by being agile, fast grasping, being open to ideas, adapting and learning skills essential to achieve our tasks and build an effective organization and become flexible enough in terms of changes we may need to make in our personal and professional perspective.