Interviewer- How did the idea of setting up a med-tech start up come?
Ashutosh Dubey- The motivation of setting up a med-tech start-up company came from my personal experiences and from seeing how so many people suffer from medical or health problems. No one wants to fall ill or get any kind of medical/health problems, but today people suffer just because of lack of appropriate technologies that can help prevent many such problems. With this motivation we invented our first product named Hynto which is a baby-care or preventive health care product for newborns to 6 month old babies who are kept in diapers. Studies show that up to 87% of such babies suffer from numerous medical problems because the parents or caretaker often fail to change the baby's (dirty) diaper on time. These health problems include Diaper rashes, Bacterial infections, Fungal infections, Yeast infections, Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) and so on .. Every pediatrician worldwide strongly recommends that a baby's skin, especially in the diaper area, must always be kept clean and dry. Diapers offer certain level of dryness, but does nothing about exposure to the dirtiness. This is the reason that pediatricians recommend to change the baby's diaper as quickly as possible after it is dirtied. However, today the parents/caretakers do not have any effective, scientific and medically tested method that tells them about the dirtiness conditions inside the baby's diaper.
Our product Hynto is the world's first baby diaper dirtiness monitor that signals to the parent/caretaker at an appropriate time to change the baby's diaper. Timely diaper change goes a long way to prevent pain and suffering for such babies due to several infections.
Hynto is absolutely safe for the baby, extremely comfortable for the baby, and very easy to use.
Interviewer- What difficulties are you facing in this field to set yourself apart in this competitive environment?
Ashutosh Dubey- As a start-up company with limited budget, and with a product that is the world's first of its type, the biggest difficulty is in terms of explaining about it to the people. Hence typically our conversations with general people go pretty long and it takes time for people to appreciate the product and its technology. However, this challenge also helps us a lot because all our conversations with people are very engaging and involved. There are lots of questions and answers, and many ideas that we never thought of comes out. It also gives us deep insights about the decision making thoughts and unsaid expectations that people have from us and our product. Even large MNCs struggle to get into deep conversations with people despite offering incentives. So our biggest challenge is also one of our biggest strengths are it makes us among the very few companies who are really in touch with people at the ground level, which is an excellent place to be, especially for a start-up company.
Interviewer- As you are just an year old recognized start up , what are your future steps you will be taking in this long run ?
Ashutosh Dubey- The last one year has been mainly about setting the right base. We spent almost an year to perfect the technology, apply for patents, get trademarks, get tax exemptions from the Indian government, work with regulators in India and abroad for this product, get the product quality to an international grade, get appropriate certifications. do the relevant 3rd party testing including medical testing, and so on.
The coming time is all about leveraging this base for sales and scale. So, in the long run, we plan to scale up rapidly in India and abroad.
Interviewer- What are the goals you hope to accomplish within next year?
Ashutosh Dubey- Like I mentioned before, the coming times is all about two words - 'sales' and 'scale'. So, in the coming year the goals that we have in mind is to expand sales that covers all major cities in India such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, etc. We are also targeting to start exporting the product to the USA and a few countries in Europe (incl UK) in the second half of the coming year.
Interviewer- What words of motivation would you like to say that you have learnt through your experiences so far?
Ashutosh Dubey- Never ever give up - no matter what! and The best is yet to come!