How Zoom helped Shyft scale 10x by encouraging global users to adopt a healthier lifestyle

Shyft (formerly Mindhouse) is a popular global wellness platform based in India that offers interactive yoga classes and nutrition plans to help customers with specific health conditions and health goals. Their services focus on providing symptomatic relief from chronic ailments (diabetes, hypertension, back pain, and more), women’s health issues (PCOS, pre-natal, post-natal care, and more), everyday wellness, and mental health.

Making health an interactive and personalized experience

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs who were a part of the core team that built Zomato, Shyft began with a unique value proposition – a huge focus on meditation-based mental health services besides broader healthcare areas. The company launched its services in an offline mode with meditation studios in December 2019. However, within a few months, as the impact of the COVID-19 crisis brought the country to a standstill, it quickly pivoted to an online model.

Initially, the company started by offering meditation and yoga content on its app that could be consumed anytime by the user. Yoga classes were also delivered in the form of live classes in addition to pre-recorded audio and video content.

Over a period of time, Shyft realized that health and wellness was also about personalizing the experience, where people wanted to talk to health experts and professionals regarding their specific health issues. While recorded content worked for some, overall, a significant percentage of people wanted specific classes and consults for their conditions. To address this issue, the team started conducting online classes where people could interact with their trainers in a much more personalized experience.

The search for a convenient experience platform

Shyft wanted to ensure that the online experience was smooth, easy to use without any major bandwidth constraints. As most of its customers would access the app only from their mobile phones, the company wanted to ensure that the online experience was suited for every possible device and across all user groups.

Shyft started evaluating several web video conferencing options, with ease of use and accessibility being the most important factors for consideration. After carefully testing out various video conferencing options, its unanimous choice was Zoom.

The Zoom advantage

Zoom was the default choice considering the solution’s already well-established popularity among professionals and people at large. From school-going children to office professionals, every segment of society was well-versed with Zoom and had used the platform in some way.

“We felt that if we have to move to a video conferencing solution, it must obviously have the least amount of resistance among users,” opines Pooja Khanna, co-founder of Shyft. “The solution needed to be intuitive, which meant that we did not want to spend time telling people what to do. We found Zoom to be the most popular option as it was already being used by many professionals. Zoom also scored high in terms of factors such as ease of use, reliability and flexibility.”

The company has integrated Zoom with its app and other platforms, which makes it extremely convenient for users as well as the company to receive and send invitations for sessions. Using Zoom, Shyft was able to replicate the near-physical experience through an online medium. With the ability to see all participants in one session at the same time, and answering specific questions, Shyft was able to create a truly interactive experience.

Zoom helps Shyft scale up effortlessly

Today, Shyft has made its presence felt in almost every corner of India. As the company provides specific services for specific health goals, the demand has been extremely strong. For example, yoga classes that cater to a particular objective – yoga for diabetics or yoga for those suffering from PCOS, etc. In these sessions, user interaction becomes extremely important as participants are keen to get specific and personalized advice. Thanks to Zoom, users are able to get this experience seamlessly.

“Trainers and users are both extremely comfortable with Zoom, which has helped in increasing the popularity of our platform across India,” Pooja Khanna said.

Starting with six to eight sessions at the beginning of this year, the numbers have gone up more than 10x with close to 80 to 100 daily sessions today. Shyft has also found great acceptance among corporate users, with an average of six to 10 corporate webinars a week. In terms of retention, the company has also done well, with an average user staying for a minimum period of six months.

Thanks to Zoom’s ease of use, the company has managed to expand its reach in Tier II cities as well. “Right now, about 60% to 70% of our users are coming from metros. We have 30% to 35% users coming in from Tier II cities,” Pooja Khanna said.

Going forward, the company plans to aggressively expand in other regions across India, as health is a high area of interest for most Indians today.

Shyft’s unique value proposition coupled with Zoom’s unparalleled ability to connect, irrespective of bandwidth or device constraints, has allowed the company to do well across all important parameters.

The potential for the curative wellness market is huge, and Shyft is well-positioned to take a leadership position in this space.

“Today, there are more than 700 million patients in India and the U.S. alone with chronic health conditions,” Pooja Khanna said. “Sixty percent of all wellness spending goes toward curative wellness, where lifestyle solutions are needed in addition to medical solutions. There are over 77 million diabetics in India, and one in seven Indians is pre-diabetic. One in three women have PCOS, while one in three adults suffer from hypertension. There is, hence, a huge need for personalized help and support, which we are able to provide today with the help of Zoom.”

Zoom’s popularity as well as the ability to integrate seamlessly with its in-house platform, made it a viable option for helping Shyft scale effortlessly and tap the huge market of wellness. The future is extremely bright for Shyft, as it can use India as a global remote hub for providing online wellness services that can be delivered anywhere and to anyone with just an internet connection.