Now&Me: A Platform to Share your Feelings

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(No Transcript)
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NowMe A Platform to Share your Feelings

• Today, we have with us Drishti Gupta from NowMe.
  She, along with Bani Singh, started NowMe,
  providing a free platform to encourage catharsis
  and break the associated taboos.
• How they managed it, what challenges they faced,
  and where are they headed are few of the queries
  we had, and Drishti cheerfully answered them.
  Talking about their motivation to start NowMe,
  she said, People talk about their happy stories,
  but nobody talks about their struggles and mental
  health openly because of the persisting stigmas.
  Thats when we knew that we want to create a
  platform where people can come and talk about
  their issues, be their true selves, express
  whatever they are going through, share their
  feelings and emotions without the fear of
  judgement, and connect with other people who
  might have been through similar things.
• Read ahead to know more about NowMe!

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• Insellers
• Who all were there in the founding team, and what
  was your motivation to start NowMe?
• Drishti Gupta
• NowMe started while we were in Lady Shri Ram
  College. Bani and I were classmates studying
  statistics. Thats when the idea of NowMe came
  about, and we started working on it. We realised
  that people talk about the good parts of their
  lives. They talk about their happy stories, but
  nobody talks about their issues, struggles, and
  mental health openly because of the persisting
  stigmas. Thats when we knew that we want to
  create a platform where people can come and talk
  about their issues, be their true selves, express
  whatever they are going through, share their
  feelings and emotions without the fear of
  judgement, and connect with other people who
  might have been through similar things.
• Insellers
• How do you segment your market? Whom do you
  consider your target customers

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• Drishti Gupta
• We are looking at the young population, which is
  having mental health issues right now. In India,
  there are about 200 million people who are going
  through mental health issues right now. And
  according to WHO, only 30 million of them end up
  seeking mental health care. We target the
  remaining 170 million people who dont even
  accept that they have mental health issues. We
  are trying to integrate the concept of mental
  health in their lives in a simple and easy to
  understand manner through peer-to-peer support.
  Peer-to-peer support comes naturally to people,
  and there is no stigma attached to it. People can
  talk about their issues and their problems freely
  with the option of anonymity on the platform. We
  feel that through this segment, we can target and
  capture a major market share that other
  solution-focused companies cannot do.
• Insellers
• What is NowMes Go-to-Market Strategy? Is there
  any difference in your approach and your
  competitors approach?

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• Drishti Gupta
• Primarily, we look at organic reach and
  marketing. So, a lot of content marketing is what
  we look at because we want to build a community
  here at NowMe. We need to engage with our users,
  followers on social media platforms and provide
  them with valuable content. This way, along with
  capturing the users, we can provide them value
  and spread awareness about mental health,
  self-care, and mental well-being in general. So,
  content marketing is one thing, and then organic
  search engine optimization is what we look at
  when acquiring users. If you Google I have no
  one to talk to or Share my feelings online,
  NowMe comes on top on Googles first page. So,
  we are targeting through content marketing, SEO,
  partnerships, and PR.
• Insellers
• All the sales/ marketing would be online only,
  right?
• Drishti Gupta
• Yes, its all digital as of now.

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• Insellers
• NowMe is free right now. So, do you have any
  revenues from NowMe? If yes, then what portion
  of it is spent on sales and marketing?
• Drishti Gupta
• We are spending no money on marketing. All
  acquisitions and marketing are organic.
  Currently, we are in the pre-revenue stage and
  not generating any revenue right now.
• Insellers
• Being from a statistics background, sales/
  marketing must have been something entirely new
  for you. Did you face any challenges in sales/
  marketing?
• Drishti Gupta
• Not really, as such! We are attached to the
  product that we are building, and we feel a
  connection with the people we are targeting. We
  feel that being young, we can understand our
  target market, which is the young people, the
  millennials, and the Gen Z. We can connect and
  relate to the problems they go through, and we
  can provide them with the content and the value
  we might need ourselves.
• One of the challenges, I think, would be in
  trying to find the same passionate and ambitious
  team members who would help take NowMe to
  another level and work with us in this mission.

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• Insellers
• Are there any other competitors or any other
  substitute services that customers can cater to
  instead of NowMe?
• Drishti Gupta
• In India, nobody is providing peer-to-peer
  support. All the platforms that are there are
  solution-focused. Either they are targeting only
  therapy, or they are targeting meditation. They
  have specific target areas in mental health. We
  are looking at peer-to-peer support and community
  support, which none of the companies is focusing.
  So, we dont have direct competition with any
  other companies.
• Insellers
• Do you feel that there is any technological
  change that has helped NowMe in any way?
• Drishti Gupta
• After COVID-19, media publications are talking a
  lot about mental health. They feature a lot about
  it in PR and news and people are promoting it a
  lot. They look at NowMe as a resource, and they
  end-up promoting that as well. That is something
  which has helped us in the past couple of months.

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• Insellers
• Do you have any growth plans for NowMe in the
  future? Where do you think that the industry is
  headed in the future?
• Drishti Gupta
• We are at that stage where we want to build
  NowMe to be the one-stop solution for mental
  well-being and not just a community. We want to
  provide content resources and counselling and get
  people on-boarded on the platform through a
  simple peer-to-peer support service.
• Insellers View on NowMe
• NowMe aims to be a one-stop solution for mental
  well-being. It provides a platform to share your
  feelings online and get peer-to-peer support from
  the online community that it has built over time.
  It majorly focuses on organic marketing and SEO
  and does not have any direct competitors as of
  now.
• Data Privacy to be invested upon and this point
  is to be marketed.

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• One of the key factors for the success of any
  early-stage venture is the presence of committed
  founders who are driven for a cause. In the case
  of Now Me, its founders are not the
  conventional business-oriented entrepreneurs but
  are empathetic individuals who are passionate
  about helping those who are experiencing mental
  health issues. The aim has been to create a
  conducive virtual environment where people
  support each other in achieving mental
  well-being. Instead of focusing too much on
  marketing and revenues, they have spent most of
  their initial efforts on perfecting their
  offering and making sure that the prime focus of
  NowMe remains on making a difference for its
  users. This approach with genuine concern for its
  users has made all the difference, and NowMe has
  been able to make a mark in such a small time,
  mainly leveraging organic digital marketing.

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• But as any venture grows it becomes imperative to
  create certain revenue streams in order to become
  sustainable. It can either be through finding
  innovative ways to increase the share of wallet
  or through increasing ones user base by
  additional sales and marketing activities. In the
  case of NowMe we feel that the core service
  should always remain free so that more and more
  people can get support but going forward there
  can be an addition of certain benefits which
  people can avail at a nominal charge, be it
  innovative mental well-being related events or
  certain solution-based offerings with the help of
  experts, the users can be given an option to get
  more out of the platform at a fair value. Ads are
  always a possible revenue stream in case of
  digital platforms as they scale out but NowMe
  can also become a great platform for the mental
  health professional to interact with people who
  need their assistance instead of the users,
  these professionals can also be asked to pay a
  premium in order to utilize NowMe as a platform
  where they can interact with a larger audience
  who are in need of their services and support.
  For marketing, it would be a good idea to
  organize/sponsor focused events so that the
  target audience becomes more aware of the
  platform, we also hope to see NowMe roll over to
  different platforms so that the users can access
  its services across all devices even more
  conveniently, this will increase their reach and
  help generate positive word of mouth. Apart from
  a rollover across various platforms, we also feel
  that robust data protection policies will also be
  crucial for NowMe as they expand, but as long as
  NowMe remains true to its core values they
  should easily be able to sail through such
  challenges

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• With the help of NowMe we just have tried to
  give indicative pointers to those dynamic minds
  who are looking to create a sustainable digital
  platform. NowMe is already quite ahead in this
  journey and we at Insellers wish them all the
  success. We also hope that NowMe soon becomes a
  ubiquitous name making it easier for people
  across all spheres of life to share their issues
  and find the support they are looking for.
• We wish Drishti Gupta and Bani Singh good luck
  for the future and hope they accomplish the
  targets they have set for NowMe.
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