Hosted by ACT, UnHerd brings you the unheard stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt the social impact landscape. From social entrepreneurs to venture philanthropists, dive into real-world conversations on what they’ve experienced and learned about changing the status quo.

Our ninth episode of UnHerd features Bindu Ananth (Founder of Dvara Health Finance), in conversation with Anam Sherwani (Manager, ACT For Health). Bindu shares her journey of building NEEM, a subscription-based platform connecting rural patients to trained health workers for doorstep care and medicine delivery. 

Tune in on Spotify or watch the episode on YouTube to learn how Dvara Health Finance is  using tech-enabled innovation to transform access to affordable healthcare for Bharat.

Anam:  

Hello folks and welcome to the penultimate episode of UnHerd, a podcast hosted by ACT that delves into the extraordinary stories of individuals who are challenging conventional principles to disrupt India’s social impact landscape. Today, we’re diving into an issue that impacts millions of families across India – the rising cost of accessing quality (health) care. Every year, about 10% of Indians are pushed into poverty due to hospitalisation costs, and countless others skip essential healthcare altogether because they simply can’t afford it. 

Our guest for the day is Bindu Ananth, a social entrepreneur committed to enhancing the access to affordable quality care for patients in rural and underserved areas. As the founder of Dvara Health Finance, Bindu has developed the NEEM program, a tech-first subscription-based platform solution that provides patients access to a network of trained local health workers who deliver quality care and aid medicine delivery at their doorstep.  

Bindu, welcome to UnHerd! Thrilled to have you with us!

Bindu:  

Thank you Anam, pleasure to be here.

Anam:  

Bindu diving right into it, you come from a finance background. You’ve worked with companies like ICICI, chaired Northern Arc Capital, and have been a member of three RBI committees. How did you land up on public healthcare as a problem statement? Why did you decide to solve for it?

The spark that lit the fire: Identifying gaps in access to healthcare financing

Bindu: 

So most of my career has been focused on financial services for the poor. And I have done this within different institutions – first in ICICI Bank, where I was part of the wholesale banking team. I think ICICI was a real pioneer in some of this work – this was about 20 years ago – and then I had the opportunity to set up, along with my co-founders, an organisation called Dvara.

And there again, continuing with the same theme of what will it take for India to make its financial markets deeper, make formal access available to every last village in the country, what are the new innovations that are needed? And it was also an exciting time because at the same time that we were doing Dvara, you had all of these wonderful, bold experiments happening in the background of Aadhaar. And so, I think it was just a wonderful confluence of many entrepreneurs doing interesting work in this space, but also terrific policy work, terrific regulatory work by the RBI. But the common theme in all of this is thinking about, what are low-income households (facing) in India? What gaps are they facing? What are the shocks that finance is helping them deal with?

If finance works well, it should absorb a lot of the uncertainty, the anxiety in people’s lives and that state is what one might think of as being financially included rather than having access to product A, B, and C. 

And so, if you think about finance more broadly, we’ve done very well, I would say, in the last 20 odd years in terms of just physical access. But if you think, if you dig deeper and you think about, “How is people’s financial well-being? What are people doing with the money that they have access to?” I personally started to see many more gaps in that picture. For example, the fact that a lot of borrowing that our clients do essentially finds its way back to healthcare and hospitalisation, either for themselves or for a loved one. And that’s at least a good 25-30% of what probably constitutes all of lending to the poor. Now, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think if you have a loved one in hospital, really any source of money that helps get them the best treatment is fantastic. But if you think about what happens afterwards – hopefully the relative does well, comes back home. But there is a period of recovery both for the person who was hospitalised as well as the caregiver. And it won’t be an instant going back to things as they were. And now the additional point is that you have this sword hanging over your head, of this loan that has to be paid back pretty soon, starting next month onwards. That creates a very different sort of pressure. We find that borrowing for healthcare typically triggers a set of reactions that creates a lot more financial stress. And then to repay that loan, people potentially have to borrow from elsewhere or they have to sell assets. So all of this is somewhat of a negative spiral.

And so for me, the motivation was really that, well, a lot of the foundations of financial inclusion etc. seem to have been done well. Let’s think about what are some of the unsolved problems. And for me, certainly, this struck a deep chord to say that, can we think about better ways for people to pay for healthcare such that it does not end up creating this much financial stress? Surely there must be better ways to do this than the emergency sort of borrowing. What might that look like? How can we structure it? How can we deliver it at scale and offer it as a meaningful alternative to the microfinance type model that happens today? So that was, and I would say really for me, an important sort of starting point. 

Anam:  

As an organisation and as a founder, you’re really building a tech-first healthcare solution. There’s a massive behaviour change that you have to address, right? Underserved communities do have a preference for in-person consultations with doctors and they do believe in restorative rather than preventative healthcare. When one thinks of subscription-based models for these households, the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is very high, and the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is not as high, initially at least. So what were some of the (early) failures for Dvara, and what were the learnings that followed which allowed you to build better as an organisation for these households for this specific customer segment?

Bindu:

Let me just start with the fact that, yes, each low-income household or each informal sector household perhaps individually represents a fairly modest spending power or purchasing power. But if there’s one thing that financial inclusion, some of the other successful models in social enterprises, have taught us, it’s that the real power is in aggregation. So, if you put together the total spends of these households, it’s really in that sense a volume game. You cannot make this work by working with a modest number of households. It’s really about small amounts multiplied into millions and hundreds of millions. That’s what creates the magic. For our work right now at Dvara Health Finance, we are fairly focused on, I would say, the missing middle in the context of, let’s say, health insurance, which is to say people who are not working in organisations like Infosys or Wipro or ICICI Bank and hence covered by corporate insurance covers etc. Neither are they employed in the government, whether it’s railways or State Bank of India, and therefore covered by government funded insurance schemes. Neither are they poor enough to be eligible for social insurance programs like Ayushman Bharat. Because often some of this is confusing because you have so many different pieces of the puzzle. There’s really this large missing middle, you know, 200, 300 million people, who are not poor, who have enough cash flow, so to speak. 

Let’s just put a face to this person. Think about this as somebody who in town of Satara is running a shop, is running a stall near the temple, is somebody who’s on his feet for 12 – 14 hours of the day. The number one issue that this individual running the shop is facing is that he’s time poor, which is to say that if he’s not at the shop, he has to put the shutter down. It’s literally a one-person enterprise. Now if you tell this person, “Listen, travel 4-5 kms away, there is a friendly neighbourhood clinic, go wait for an hour and the doctor will see you,” you’ve lost the person’s attention. So I think the thing to appreciate is that there is a very large segment that values convenience enormously, because time is money for them, as much as it is for a person running a much larger business. And therefore services that are conveniently delivered, ideally at the doorstep or at the shop front. This is the core insight that microfinance tapped, because there was always this puzzle to say here are banks willing to provide loans at 8%-10%. How come customers are borrowing money from microfinance lenders at 24%. That just seems irrational. But I think the missing piece was the one that was available at my doorstep, whereas in the other I had to travel, I had to wait. And these are real costs. So that’s the opportunity that we are going after.  

But if you think about the total spending that this group does on healthcare out of pocket, it’s a pretty large number. So in India, the overall out of pocket expenditure is roughly in the region of three lakh crores or three trillion rupees. That’s a pretty big chunk and a lot of that comes from this segment that doesn’t have insurance. 

But I would argue that the bigger problem is what are they spending that three lakh crores on? 80% of that is curative in nature. And within that, specifically spends at hospitals, typically specialty type centres. Very little of it is primary preventive. And even within that 80% of curative, there’s a lot of unnecessary diagnostics, expensive medication that I didn’t need. I had a headache. I went to a nearby doctor and the doctor just immediately sent me to get an MRI done, so there is a lot of wastage. Clearly, there’s a large number of people who today are paying out of pocket. However, that is not yielding any meaningful results for them in terms of good health outcomes. What if we really focus sharply on that market and deliver a consistent, reliable, convenient service. Our experience on the ground is certainly very, very encouraging in terms of adoption. I think a lot of the things to figure out is about how do I deliver it consistently and at scale. Those are the real challenges. 

Traversing tough roads: Pivoting from a financial service to a health product

Bindu:  

I will say that one of the things that we did early on which did not work and probably because of my own background is that we approached it too much as a financial services problem. The first version of our offering was actually something called a health savings account in which we said, “Let’s just help people instead of borrowing at 30% rates of interest for health. Why don’t we help people save for emergencies?” And savings represents a kind of lower cost for the household. And so we built a lot and we created a fintech type proposition, all of it of course aimed at health. And that simply did not work out at all because in some sense, it did not resonate with the customer.

Health as an issue was well understood but savings specifically for health that just did not, I think, feel right to the customer. So we, in some sense, completely pulled back from it. And instead of a health savings account, effectively we then launched a health subscription product. And the big difference between the two is that the first one feels like a financial product. The second one feels like a healthcare product, in which I’m subscribing to NEEM, what do I get in return? I get actual access to a healthcare team. I get a health worker who comes to my home, takes my vitals, monitors me, delivers me affordable medicines, all of that, which feels a lot more tangible. And of course, in the process of accessing the subscription from us, the household did save quite a bit. Because, for example, we provide generic medicines for chronic diseases, which are a good 50%-60% cheaper than what they would buy from the local chemist. So the intent in both cases was the same, to bring down the monthly expenditure on healthcare for the household. But the first version of it was the financial offering. And this is given that my experience and my lens tends to be financial.

Whereas the improvement on that spoke to the customer a lot more because it felt real, felt tangible and felt like it had a services component, not just a financial component. So that pivot was critical for us.  

Anam: 

How did you build out the user-centricity within NEEM as a program? 

Bindu: 

We have to be deeply focused on the customer and as we already talked about, even rural India for that matter is many many segments all bunched up. So it’s always helpful to have a clear sense, like in any company that you would do, to say exactly who are you building for, what problem are you solving. But going with the hypothesis and keep iterating to say, okay, maybe this segment is already well served by government schemes and it would be hard for them to get a good value perception of what NEEM is. So for example, we’ve crystallised many things such as the fact that our typical customer underneath would be somebody with a monthly household income between let’s say Rs. 18,000 to Rs. 40,000. But the question is, is NEEM the right solution for them? If you bring in a fairly low-income person into a subscription program, then the month on month payment is soon going to become a challenge because of income uncertainty. 

Start with some clarity, refine it as we go along and then start to crystallise many of these things for the team at the frontline. Because I think one mistake that many of us founders tend to make is the assumption that we operate sometimes at 30,000 feet and it’s all clear in our head, of course. But if your execution is happening, let’s say, through a frontline sales team or a frontline service team, who’s local, you owe it to them to provide them clarity in terms of this is a criteria for people who you want to bring into this service or this offering. These are the five benefits that we will provide. These things we do not provide because there’s also a fair bit of confusion in terms of what does the government do versus what do you do, what do private hospitals do. So I would say that’s really important and as much as possible, we’ve tried to write these down and document it so that people when they go out have a sense of exactly what to do. I think that’s really important for scalability.

If you listen carefully to your teams, make sure that your teams are listening carefully to customers, then that whole feedback loop starts to build, which is fundamental for any organisation, particularly anybody in the social impact space. 

Anam:  

That’s super interesting, Bindu.From a founder’s perspective, what really keeps on driving your conviction?

Bindu:  

Yeah, I think 2-3 things. My team and my conviction in subscription is coming from, I would say, almost a conceptual angle to say that, can we take the one-off, Rs. 1,00,000 payment to the hospital, which is what we think of as a problem, and instead of that, break it into small chunks of 100 rupees, 200 rupees paid for every month so that we don’t end up with that Rs. 1,00,000 situation. So our approach to this is very much rooted in the customer and what will make sure we produce good outcomes there. But that’s my point of view. Now the whole challenge in all of this is to say what does the customer think about all of this? And particularly in healthcare, it’s very well known behaviour that people would much rather pay for things that are curative when it comes to that, rather than demand for primary care services.  

I think by going on the field, talking to customers, listening deeply to customers, you figure out what is the right balance to strike. So the focus area for NEEM, for instance, given this constraint is to say, it’s going to be really challenging for me to work with a person who feels completely well, whose vitals are normal and then say, okay, pay me something every month to make sure you remain in the pink of health and so that you don‘t get hospitalised. But the customer’s point is, “Who’s thinking about hospitalisation anyway? I’m not going to get hospitalised because I’m in the pink of health.” So that would have been a very hard challenge. And we realised that quickly.

Bindu:  

And we said, okay, maybe the real opportunity here is to focus on people who are newly diagnosed, let’s say, with blood pressure, newly diagnosed with diabetes, a stage one or stage two. And now it’s not about preventing diabetes from occurring. The conversation really becomes about, if you don’t do anything about your health, you could end up with a significant event like hospitalisation etc. Work with us so that we can keep you managed at your home and so, maybe closer to thinking about it as what one might think of as secondary prevention rather than primary prevention. And again, that’s where I think all the detail comes in because healthcare is such a vast space.

Somebody could be working on smoking cessation. Somebody could be working on health or weight loss. All of those are valid. You have to figure out where the circles intersect in terms of where you can make an impact, where it’s meaningful, and what is the customer willing to pay for. 

So back to your question Anam, around what makes subscription tick. I think one is making sure that your offering speaks to a real felt problem of the customer, not something that I think is good for the customer to do, but the customer has to feel it. One of the things we did, for example, again, based on feedback is that we were initially doing only diabetes and CVD, cardiovascular diseases. A lot of patients told us, “Listen, one of the things that I’m spending a lot of money on is pain – lower back pain, neck pain.” And remember, we talked about our typical customer being somebody who’s on his feet for 12 hours a day or a woman who’s working on the farm for long stretches of time. So just the physical wear and tear. They said, “If this is about us, then why not include that in your offering rather than talk about things like diabetes, which frankly, I don’t right now care a lot about.” And you know, health workers brought that message back to us and we’ve now integrated chronic pain into a subscription because it felt widespread enough of an issue. So one, think, get the kind of core segment value proposition right to the specifics of what is included in your subscription has to be the right mix of things that affect the customer here and now, versus things that are more sort of medium term impact because the longer the time frame, the less salient it feels today for me, right?  

And then finally, the number one most important thing Anam, is the front line. I think one of the most differentiating aspects of NEEM is the fact that it’s delivered by a local trained health worker, the name is Sakhi. She is somebody who is the face of the program. This is not, at least for this market, a pure tele-medicine type approach or an app based approach. We are convinced it’s not the solution at all for all the reasons that we talked about. There needs to be a strong, obviously, technology backbone, but it has to be what one calls an assisted model.

So the health worker is really driving a lot of that action. She’s driving a lot of the adherence because, in chronic diseases, there is no magic. I mean, what has to be done is very clear. The medicines have all been around for many, many years. But the key question is, can you persuade your patient to stay on medication for extended periods of time, even if she feels better? That’s where a lot of the programs go off the rails and that’s where the health worker engagement is so critical and at least in our case that those set of reasons seem to be contributing to pretty good retention rates on the subscription.

First principle lens: Raising the bar on what trained healthcare professionals can do

Anam: 

That is very fascinating, Bindu. How did you approach integrating this component of a NEEM Sakhi into your tech based model?  

Bindu:  

Before I started Dvara Health Finance, right before that, I worked with this wonderful company called Niramai (another ACT For Health portfolio startup), which has a unique technology for breast cancer detection using AI and thermal imaging. Working in that setup, one of the things that surprised me early on is that we do these Niramai screenings for a whole bunch of women. And at that point, it was not a diagnostic technology, it was a screening technology. So, for every 100 people that we screened, perhaps for 6 or 7, we’d say, “Listen, it seems that there is some suspicious activity, a suspicious looking lump. Please get it confirmed using an ultrasound was the typical recommendation.” And that would be signed off by a doctor. To my utter surprise and shock, almost nobody would go on to do that confirmatory ultrasound.

So they do the screening, they take the trouble to come do the screening with us, take that fairly troubling report to say there’s some suspicious activity and then disappear. And during my early days in Niramai, I would tell Geeta (Founder, Niramai) to say, “I am going to chase these women down.” I said, okay, maybe it’s just that travel is a problem, planning is a problem. So we’d get appointments for them to do their ultrasounds. And I personally said to a few women to say, “I’ll come with you. Let’s go do this ultrasound. Can I pick you up from the passport office?” “Yes, yes, madam. I’ll be there at 10 a.m.” And they would simply not show up. So it was a surprise for me. But if you talk to people who are veterans in healthcare, in cancer care etc., loss to follow up is a very widespread phenomenon, which is just people who don’t pursue the next logical step of whether it’s diagnosis or treatment. And all of these things remind you that, gosh, how in this context then are you going to go in with a pure tech solution? Because you need to have a muscle around persuasion, kind of getting the job done, right?

Your first instinct is to say that in all healthcare, the human should be a doctor so that you have the least issues with respect to expertise, compliance of law etc. But again, the penny drops that listen, if you want to serve the vast parts of our country, not just tier one, tier two, tier three locations, there are simply not enough doctors who can provide that sort of coverage. And there are, again, many people before us who figured that out. When we scanned the space, we saw fantastic examples of health worker-led models. What we did notice was that there was a distinct difference in the level of ambition that Indian programs had for their health workers relative to some of the global exemplars. If you look at the Indian health worker experience, it’s fairly low skill, low trained, often unpaid volunteers.

I think what helped us is that we went in with a little bit of that clean sheet of paper and said, we are going to push this as hard as we can within what laws permit us to do so I think we approached that health worker role with fresh eyes. We did not think that this was some low-level unpaid work, we immediately said this is full-time work. This is not an individual who’s a volunteer. I also walked away from this notion that the health worker should be some sort of entrepreneur, generating sales to pay for her salary to say, why would we do that? The service is conceptualised by us. She’s the one delivering the service. If we are confident that what we have designed is good for the customer, it will be adopted by the customer. We should not let the health worker take that revenue risk. So we pay the health workers like it’s a full-time job, because it is. And then this revenue risk is taken by us. That freed up the health worker. 

And we found them not surprisingly, immensely trainable, very hungry to pick up new skills. Manisha Adkari, one of our best health workers – she comes from a small village in Mhasward in Satara. She used to work at a wonderful local bank called Mandishi Mahila Bank, who was one of our early partners. She used to be one of their savings agents. And remember I told you our initial sort of product was a health savings account. So the initial cadre were people who were encouraging people to save, leaders of self-help groups. Again, no clinical background at all. But what does it mean that they really knew how to do well? It was to connect with people. It was to sort of understand what their anxieties are vis-a-vis themselves, their kids.

What are your fears with respect to this medicine, why you’re not taking it regularly, what’s going on?

So we are not going to spend any time training Manisha Adkari on, “These are the body systems. This is the left ventricle. This is the right ventricle.” If you think about clinical education, there’s a good reason why doctors take at least 10 years to get to a minimum level of training. But that’s not what we’re trying to do here. We are trying to get this health worker well-versed in using, for example, an electronic health record system. She has to be well-versed in taking accurate blood pressure measurements. Tomorrow, we’d like her to be well-versed in taking a blood draw and preparing a sample. So these are very different skills. You’re not creating a mini doctor or a low-skilled person, you’re really creating a new set of skills. So I think the fact that we were able to approach it without any of that legacy around how health workers usually behave helped us a lot.  

Anam:  

I want to shift the gears a little bit here and really understand what your journey has been like as a founder in the social impact space. Because you’ve been at it for a while and (having spent time with) a lot of time with social entrepreneurs and founders in this space, it becomes more about how they’re always looking for a silver lining that keeps them going without really having a (silver) bullet in the hand. What has that journey been like especially given the multiple pivots, the new learnings and deeper insights that you’ve uncovered? What has really kept you going at it?  

Future Forward: Staying aligned with your mission and with happenings on ground

Bindu: 

I think most people in this space are here because of a deep sense of mission. And I think that’s a given. Otherwise, you would not be here trying to do these things. And if you’re one of the people lucky enough to assemble a team around you, that shares that mission. I mean, I think to me, that’s really critical. And that keeps you going. It can be a co-founder but it can also be, I think the rest of your early team. And that’s something that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have. 

It’s the health workers, it’s the sales team, it’s the program management team. And one of the things we consciously do is to make sure that you’re very tightly connected to that team.  

So I would say, you know, always surround yourselves with people who give you that energy. And that’s the fuel that we need because none of these problems, if they were all easy they would all be done by now. So we do need to build that mental energy for the marathon. Ultimately, in some sense, how do I, how do the teams have a sense of progress? Typically, it’s customer volumes, transaction volumes, etc. but I think for enterprises like us, it’s good early on to start to measure outcomes much more directly. So one of the things that I’m very grateful for is that our medical advisory board pushed us on is to say that, “I want to see you publish almost in real time your data in terms of what’s the change in status on blood pressure, what’s the change in status on diabetes, what’s the change in status on chronic pain.”

Make the data very visible, right from the CEO down to the health worker, to our partners, so that there’s a sense of this is what drives us. So we recently celebrated the fact that at the end of September, we had achieved 70% control among all our hypertensive patients, which means that when they came into the NEEM program, they were hypertensive. Anything over 140 by 90 at the time of entering the program. And in the most recent home visit that the health worker did, 70% of people were below 140 by 90, which is what represents control in the context of diabetes. So, 7 out of 10 people and the balance 30% may not have achieved control, but are starting to show significant improvement. And I think aligning everybody to that kind of north star, that in my experience also provides just more enduring motivation of the type that’s very different than a quick win. You do need some of those.

Anam:  

Thank you for sharing that Bindu and honestly couldn’t agree more on that one. How do you see the financial inclusion space within the public health care system evolve? What do you feel is something that needs to evolve for meaningful impact to get created at scale for India? 

Bindu: 

I would think about it as how do we deliver financial protection to all Indians, which is to say, you often hear this in our circles, that most Indians are one hospital visit away from poverty, right?

That’s really what I think we need to change. How is that going to happen? It’s going to happen when more and more people have that safety net of saying, if something happens to me, I don’t have to draw on my own personal resources to pay for that event. It may or may not be insurance, but some pooling that’s happening so that it’s not literally just me left to my own devices to pay for that one lakh rupee hospital bill, right? And like I said, it’s not just a problem of poor people in India. We saw during COVID how vulnerable we are even in terms of the upper middle class, how one would think of it. If the hospital bill jumps from one lakh to three lakhs, you’re another 20% of the population that will go into poverty. So that’s the overall kind of problem statement in terms of how we solve that at scale. I think certainly organisations like Dvara but many more people are working at the primary care level.

Bindu:  

We need, I think, hundreds of organisations relative to what we have now working on primary care. And using interesting payment models – we are big on subscription, but there surely are other models out there. But the whole point is to say, don’t wait for the patient to walk in and pay every time they see you.

The problem with fee for service is that you will come only when you fall sick. We want to figure out payment models where the patient is incentivized to come to you with everything. I have a cold, my kid has diarrhoea. The more you come to us, the happier we are, right? It needs to be that sort of approach at the primary care level.

So that I think that has to evolve a little bit. There is a fantastic role for technology to play there to say, how can that layer of primary care organisations now start to do a lot more? I certainly see in the not too distant future, our health workers being able to do a fair bit of cancer screening using mobile ECGs etc. So a lot more information action can happen at the primary care level. That starts to become substantive.

I think a significant piece of digital public goods infrastructure that needs to get created is between players like us and where the hospitals and the insurers currently sit. Today, the links between these two simply don’t exist. We are doing our own thing. They are doing their own thing. Is there a way to build the connectivity between these two layers such that only

people who pass through a primary care organisation, they get referred to a specific hospital, let’s say for surgery. So that it starts to rationalize some of these flows a little bit more, rather than people directly ending up at the hospital for something that could have been resolved at the primary care layer. So I think about this more broadly Anam, you need to build a little bit more middleware that helps connectivity between primary care and secondary tertiary care. And the middleware is typically around protocols for payments, protocols for referral, insurance, sort of participation, claim settlement. I think the path to scale is in leveraging the work of primary care organisations, but making sure that the handshake to the rest of the system is also getting built out properly.

Anam:

With your journey in perspective, what would be your advice that other founders can also keep in mind as they try to build for this problem? 

Bindu: 

Rural healthcare is a tough nut. There is no willingness to pay. CAC is too high. I personally think that you got to go deeper and solve for this at a segment level. And hey, this is India, right? Any micro segment you take is a hundred thousand plus people. So we should not be afraid of going deep.

And the second piece of it is what are you bringing to this whole problem statement? And in my case, I’m acutely aware that I am not a health expert.

You can think about my lack of health background as a disadvantage. I think of it as an advantage because I’m able to look at it with a different pair of eyes. Having said that, you do need genuine expertise, if you are offering a healthcare program. So build a personal advisory board that will give you that guidance, be willing to give you tough, harsh feedback early on. Because you may not always get that from investors. So I think building that group around you is always helpful. 

And then I think the third thing Anam, that you had asked me earlier on, is around keeping the veil of motivation always running deep. Which is getting in knowing that there is not going to be a quick win, right? So build stamina to stay in it for a while and pivot as needed, driven by customer feedback. But you know that the payoff when it happens is going to be huge because that’s the nature of the problem. I do think thinking of it as a marathon rather than a quick sprint is really important.

Anam: 

This, Bindu, has been an incredibly inspiring conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today! 

Bindu: 

Thank you so much, Anam.  

Anam: 

This brings us to the end of our episode of UnHerd, a podcast presented by Team ACT. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube  channels, where we’ll bring you more unheard stories of people who are passionate about creating impact at scale in different ways. People who truly stand apart from the herd. Follow us, like, subscribe and share.