261. Scaling a Cross-Border Care Tech Startup w/ Anthony Jacob | CEO at Nila

0:00So we're in eight cities, but for us to launch a city only takes 10 days. Within 10 days, we'll have a care team, partnerships, ready to deliver care. We help immigrants living in the UK and the US provide care for their aging and elderly parents back home. And right now we've focused on the Indian corridors, the Indian diaspora specifically, but broader vision is to help Filipinos, Nigerians, anyone that has this problem. So we closed our seed round and it was$3.4 million. US dollars. It was led by a fund in the UK, Local Globe. They're like a tier one fund backed like Y.

0:34Amardeep Parmar:That's Anthony Jacobs, founder of Neelacare. His dream is huge. We want to tackle that niche of cross-border elder care where the person paying for the services in one country and the delivery is in a different country. And we want to be that like categorical company in that specific niche. We've had extremely like really, really good customer feedback. So customers love us. they refer their friends. I'd say like about 30 to 40 % of our customers spend more money once they start. So they start on like the cheapest plan and then a couple of months in, they upgrade themselves because they want to use it more.

1:08Amardeep Parmar:So if you're sitting here again in two years time, 200 episodes later, what would you love to say was like the greatest achievement? I think it would be saying that we've cared for 5 ,000 families and be in like at least three or four different countries. Anthony breaks down his pricing and operational strategy, plus closing a seed in seven weeks for startups, Inside Out listeners.

1:35Amardeep Parmar:Can you tell us what is Nila Care? Yeah, for sure. So Nila, what we do is we help immigrants living in the UK and the US provide care for their aging and elderly parents back home. And right now we've like focused on the Indian corridor, so the Indian diaspora specifically, but broader vision is to help Filipinos, Nigerians, anyone that has this problem. And Sri Lankans? And Sri Lankans, yes. So can you tell us about your journey as well? Because I know you've lived in a few different places and obviously that's what makes this problem so interesting to you. Yeah, for sure. So I think for context, I have not lived in the same continent as my parents for the last 10 to 11 years.

2:14Parents of Sri Lankan, they moved to Botswana. I was born there, spent the first 18 years of my life there. then went to Cape Town in South Africa for uni, then ended up in Canada for work where my startup bug got picked up and then from Canada moved over to the UK. And in that journey was always trying to coordinate stuff for my parents. So my parents actually retired in Sri Lanka now and in COVID, my sister was based in the UK. I was in Canada and we got stuck in lockdown and we were trying to get vaccines for our parents. But if you remember the hype, there was like, no, don't get AstraZeneca, get like Pfizer or something.

2:51So we're like, we've got to get a Pfizer for our parents in Sri Lanka. But because my sister had a stronger network, she tried to coordinate with friends to get a concierge doctor. Once we found the doctor, I tried to pay them for my Canadian bank account. And this whole process took us like two to three weeks because it was just like super painful. There's nothing available online. And that's where I started thinking about elder care. And whenever I spoke to any of my friends, whether they were Indian, Bangladeshi or Filipino, you know, everyone had this problem. And that's kind of where the idea for Neela started.

3:20Amardeep Parmar:And obviously with elder care, right? It's not your background beforehand. So how did you get yourself up to speed in that new environment? Yeah, so I mean, I'm always been a startup, but mainly on the growth side of things and mainly in FinTech. So I was in the Remington space, worked at a company called TapTap Sense, like a unicorn, most of the teams in London. And my job was finding ways of acquiring Indian people and South Asians and Africans living in the UK and the US. So that's where I got motivated to build Nila. But when I got started, I obviously had no health tech background. I didn't, you know, I'd never built anything like this, but I did have founder market fit because I understood the problem.

4:02I experienced the problem. So that's where I got the motivation to build it. And in the early days, I got connected with Founders Factory in the UK and through their Aviva studio, they were exploring healthcare remittance. And through the network, we got connected and they were kind of like, hey, we kind of want you to explore this with us. So they provided the initial capital. And my very first hire was someone in India from a health tech background. So they could actually help with the health tech side, I think some more the growth and the fintech side.

4:35Amardeep Parmar:You mentioned Aviva there as well. And obviously, with the different places you've lived and in new environment, and how did you find like this uk startup ecosystem and how the rules are compared to what you're doing elsewhere yeah so even though i was based in canada i always worked for american startups or like startups where which were led by an american management team and it's very different to the uk so like i moved here and i struggled a bit because i felt like whenever i emailed someone i got a out of office bounce back because they were on vacation somewhere in europe and I felt like I'm used to like big ideas and like trying to change the world and I felt like here you had to kind of get there like it's very hard to get that narrative so that was a bit of an adjustment so I had to like tone down I don't want to say tone down ambition but I almost had to be more quantitative and be like okay we're gonna do this for the next six months and then if we get there we'll do this for the next 18 months whereas I feel like with the American way it's kind of like a 21-year-old dropout.

5:40It's like, I'm going to go change the world and build the next Tesla or something, right? So I think that's the biggest adjustment period here.

5:46Amardeep Parmar:And with the storytelling aspect too, right? Did you have to change the story from the initial idea to get people to back it? Yeah, so the challenge I had was because our go-to market was India. So we're selling to Indian diaspora, living in the US and the UK, and we're delivering care operationally in India. I had a strong, I had a big challenge pitching VCs that were not did not resonate with the problem so if the VC was an immigrant they didn't have to be Indian but if they were like African or Latin American the moment I said care for your parent back home they were already like lit up and they would tell me about their personal story and I wasn't pitching anymore they were telling me their story I'm like oh yeah but we can solve it like this whereas when I was speaking to your John Smith from like New York or from Berlin, I would spend like 20 minutes just describing the family dynamics in South Asian culture before arriving at the problem.

6:46So I had to change the story for the person that I was speaking to on the VC side.

6:52Amardeep Parmar:And when you started it now, so it was early last year, right? Yeah, it was like early last year, but full time July of last year is when I quit my job and jumped on it. So in that period there, what was it that gave you that confidence? Okay, now it's time to jump on full time. Yeah. So the early days, what I was trying to prove was, can we actually get people to pay for this? And can we actually deliver care in India while being based outside of India? So we didn't worry about tech. There was no app. I didn't even have an engineer on the team. So the first like two or three months, all I focused on was, can I find five families in London who are willing to pay me to care for their parents back in India.

7:33So we just went to a bunch of events and we were trying to focus on Mumbai as a city. So we were trying to tap into the Marathi community. And basically, I got three families in London who had parents in Mumbai agreed to pay. After pitching them this big story, once they agreed to pay, we told them onboarding was two weeks. And then in that two-week period, we tried to find a nurse in India. we offered her like one month up front to quit her job and start like the next day and then we trained her in that one week period and we basically just put her in a whatsapp group with each family and that was like the product and then the moment i had three people willing to pay

8:14Amardeep Parmar:that's when i have the confidence to like quit the job and we can talk about pricing at the beginning as well right when you like you said you've got you're you're finding a nurse to put WhatsApp group how do you know what to charge or how do you know yeah so we we did a bit of uh market research before joining so we I think I interviewed about 150 or 200 NRIs living in the UK and just tried to gauge what they're willing to pay for a service like this before we even like had the first product and the price range people gave us was like 50 pounds so that a month so roughly 600 pounds for the year.

8:50So that's what we charged the three customers. And what's interesting is the business was always supposed to be a monthly subscription similar to SaaS. But when I got those three customers to pay, I didn't have Stripe set up. And Stripe takes like a couple of days to set up. So I had to get them to wire me the money. But it didn't make sense for me to just ask them for like a 50 pound like wire fee. So I said, hey, like, if you pay for the year, I'll give you a month off. So everyone was like, yeah, that's fine. So everyone paid me like 500, 550 pounds. And since then we just stuck with that. So now we don't do a monthly subscription because people are willing to pay for the year.

9:26So everyone just pays us for the year. But one thing we realized after the launch is we were priced too low. So we've increased our price, I think twice now. And we still think we're underpriced because people themselves during our interviews are telling us, hey, we would pay more for what you guys are doing.

9:43Amardeep Parmar:it's interesting there about their monthly annual site right because obviously right now you see lovable all these guys right 100 million arr yeah but it's them extrapolating their monthly time as well yeah yeah and it's like obviously there's churn involved with different things whereas when people are paying annually your churn is a lot well hopefully a lot less right yeah yes and when you're saying to people like okay we're only off annual subscription is anybody really even challenging that no so like i would say because of the demographic it's like high income owners paying for the service, they care less about what they're paying.

10:17And they're more concerned about the quality of the care on the ground in India. So they want to know, can I trust this person? Are they going to show up? Can we trust you as a company? And if we can check all of those boxes, like they're willing to pay however much, because it's the care of your mom and dad, right? So we haven't had any friction on that. And what we offer is we offer for full refunds so if you pay for the year and let's say in month three you're like you know nila's not for me you can get a refund for that remaining nine months touch wood it hasn't happened yet no one's asked for a refund so something's working for us and

10:55Amardeep Parmar:how's that onboarding process change because one of the things i'm learning as well is how with the churn right is that people always try to emphasize like last month and it's like by then it's too late if somebody's not happy they're gonna quit right yeah how are you making sure that people once they start now the onboarding process to keep them here keep them happy and hopefully avoid that three month period yeah so for us um because it's like a high touch elder care service so once the person's onboarded um depending on the plan the the nurse on the ground or the caregiver on the ground um visits the parents either once a month twice a month or four times a month.

11:30So what ends up happening is the parent in India builds a bit of a relationship with our caregivers on the ground. And even if, let's say, the person paying for it in the US is like, I don't think I'm getting value from it. Usually their mom and dad's like, no, no, no, I want to keep it. And then you're not going to say no to your parents. So making sure the parents are happy and engaging with our caregivers on the ground in India helps reduce the churn on the side and i kind of you've got people working in india as well and you've got a team out there

12:00Amardeep Parmar:how are you able to make sure that obviously there's so much depends on the caregiver right yeah so if the caregiver is not friendly or is rude then you've lost a customer yeah so how are you trying to train and get the right people involved there yeah so this is actually like how we differentiate ourselves so a lot of people have already tried to find care in india and the problem is it's extremely fragmented there's no regulation so like if you got on a flight and went to India tomorrow, I can bring you on as a caregiver and send you into a customer's home tomorrow. Nothing will happen to us.

12:31Whereas in the UK, the company has to be regulated. The caregivers have to go through certification. In the US, every state has its own requirements. So what we've done is we copied the CQC, which is the Care Quality Commission in the UK. And we're like, what would we have to do to deliver care in the UK? We copied all those things, Indianized it for like cultural context. And then we're working with the college in Pune to actually train our nurses. So it's like a 20 hour training program the nurses have to do. And we teach them stuff that they don't learn in India. So things like safeguarding, detecting signs of abuse, which is like everyone here has to do it.

13:09And then once they do the training, they have to do an assessment. It's like a multiple choice thing. And only if they pass, they're allowed to like be onboarded. But even before that stage, we double check that, you know, they have no criminal record we've done the background checks and then in the interview process like we're trying to test for empathy so basically trying to test like are you going to be nice to an older person um and then only if they pass all of those things they become a caregiver

13:37Amardeep Parmar:for nila random fact i mentioned before so when i used to have a job cqc was my first client for about two years oh yeah all the different inspections all the different standards like i was the guy behind the scenes like updating the website and placing the the systems there so But actually, when you say CQC, I don't have to describe what it is yet. So you've got that side of things, right? And how is it with scaling that out, right? Because obviously, the more customers you get, the more nurses you need. Do you find there's a huge demand for the kind of roles you're offering out there? Yeah, so there's a huge demand for the roles because the working conditions are actually better for the nurse.

14:12So instead of working a long 12-hour shift in a hospital or a clinic, now they're working from home. and they're just going on the road to visit elderly people and help them with mobility tasks and checking blood pressure. So you're doing like two visits per day, six days a week in India. So the working conditions are better, that's one. Second, because of our business model, we're charging in the US dollar and in the pound, we're able to pay our nurses more than they would locally. So if a nurse makes like, let's say, 50 ,000 rupees, we can pay them like 60 ,000 rupees. So they make more money for better working conditions.

14:52So getting the talent is like super, super easy for us. It's more training them and upskilling them is where it takes a bit of time.

15:01Amardeep Parmar:Hello, hello. I hope you've enjoyed the show so far. I'm Amadeek Parma, co-founder of BayHQ and the host of this show. For those of you who don't know, BayHQ is the community for high growth, Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. over 7 ,500 people have attended our events 200 people have been for our impact programs and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast if you want to join us and take part in the programs and come to the events go to bayhq.com forward slash join we also just released our first ever book called startups for outsiders which you can get amazon now and the link is in the bio hope to see you soon at event hope you enjoy the rest of the episode And you mentioned your first three clients, right?

15:49Amardeep Parmar:Where it was going to events and talking to people and trying to convince them. As you've grown, how has your strategy changed in how to acquire new clients? Yeah, so we're still like at this stage, 90 % B2C. And a lot of it is, I would say, like influencers. So NRI influencers in America talking about immigration, talking about getting a job, visas. They've been like a big acquisition channel for us. and a lot of online communities. So there's a lot of existing threads on Reddit and there's WhatsApp groups of like Indian people talking about caring for their parents back home or trying to find insurance.

16:29So those have been like our biggest like B2C channels. And right now what's starting to work a lot for us is like a bit of thought leadership. So like myself, the team posting on our personal social media is getting us a lot of inbound. and that's I would say like 90 % and right now we're trying to explore B2B2C so I'm from a Remittance background so speaking to Remittance companies like hey you have 300 ,000 people sending money to India can we work something out and do like a partnership where we distribute to your customers and then banks as well there's a lot of banks that have bank accounts specifically for NRIs and Indian expats and trying to add this as a service so those are like more longer term six to nine month projects that we're having early conversations with we were both on the

17:16Amardeep Parmar:hcbc south asian heritage month yeah event last year and i just remember we both like did a little bit and then all the questions were you yeah all the questions like oh my mom back home my dad back home so all right i'm just gonna chill now and it was just so obvious so quickly just how much that product market fit is there right because you only have to explain what you did for a couple of minutes yeah and then half people are like oh we're like okay i need this my mom my dad right and you mentioned about banks and all these different areas where are you finding most of your customers like what's their backgrounds is it because obviously nris is quite broad yeah people is it tends to be people professional backgrounds is it more entrepreneurs what you find yeah so it's mainly white collar so we actually did this exercise i'd say like three months ago like as we were fundraising we were like just in case we're not able to close the round we know we have customers who love us maybe they can race so we tried to like map out where they worked.

18:09We stalked everyone on LinkedIn and tried to estimate their salaries to know what probably the check would be. And we found like most of them were like software engineers. A lot of them were bankers, but they're all like very senior. So it's like your average customer for us is like someone in their forties living in the US, like they have a professional degree. So a lot of them were like directors of engineering that like series B to C and up startup so they were like working for Morgan Stanley as a VP or Citibank as a VP or director so that was the profile was like people making like really high six-figure salaries was like

18:45Amardeep Parmar:oh almost all of our customers at the moment and you mentioned a lot about India is the first customer you're targeting yeah how does expansion plans do you have kind of milestones based here and like okay once we get to this point then we're going to go to other countries or how are you thinking about that yeah so yeah we started with India because it was the language is English. I have a better understanding of the market and just the sheer number of NRIs is just easier to acquire Indian customers versus other nationalities. And the goal is for the next 12 to 18 months, just double down on India.

19:16So right now we have a really good playbook for launching a city in India. So we're in eight cities, but for us to launch a city only takes 10 days. So if I need a new city to go, I'll tell the team on the ground, hey, we want to launch Coinbatore. And within 10 days, we'll have a care team, partnerships, ready to deliver care. And I think over 12 months, we'll have a playbook for a country launch from India that we can use to model in other cities. So in terms of milestones, I think for us, it's using the fundraise proceeds to get to maybe 1 ,000 to 1 ,500 families in India. And then that would be enough of a proof point to replicate in other countries as well.

19:57Amardeep Parmar:And you mentioned about the fundraise, which by the time this comes out, we'll have announced it now. So can you tell us about the most recent fundraise? Yeah, for sure. So we closed our seed round. It was$2.4 million. It was led by a fund in the UK, Local Globe. They're like a tier one fund backed likewise in a lot of them. And then we had a couple of family offices join the round and some angel investors, both here and in Canada, joined the round as well. And how did you think about that fundraise? Because obviously you said that if you weren't able to raise a round, you might try and go to your customers and raise in that way as well.

20:31Amardeep Parmar:What's the main thing for the fundraiser for you? What's the main ambition behind it? And what do you need the money for? What are you going to spend on? Yeah, so the main ambition for us is like, we don't want to just be a small mom and pop shop. Like anyone can start a care home, hire a bunch of caregivers and do like caregiving. for us it's we want to tackle that niche of cross-border elder care where the person paying for the services in one country and the delivery is in a different country and we want to be that like categorical company in that specific niche and the only way we're going to get there is by growing really quickly and to do that you need like resources because um you the only way you're going to because it's an operational business the only way you can make it efficient is by using technology to make it easier.

21:18So you're not necessarily adding headcount every time you get new customers, but finding creative ways of, for us, it's a lot of the tech we're building is actually helping the caregiver on the ground do less admin. So it's like, instead of spending like three hours filling out forms on like the history of a patient, like how can you have like a co-pilot where they can just like dictate and what happens. Another example is a lot of them are in India, They're conversational in English, but they're not fluent. But they have to interact with the customer in the US who's generally text-based. So a lot of our caregivers, they would speak in Hindi or Tamil, dictate what they want to say.

22:01But then it gets text-based, formatted in English for the NRI. So it's things like that that we need to double down on.

22:09Amardeep Parmar:So is a lot of the tech side of things, those tools for those caregivers, right? Yeah, it's for the caregivers because it's really operational and we want to make that side more efficient to allow us to scale. And when you're talking to VCs about that kind of model, what was the feedback like? How were they, what were the questions they were asking and what are they like? So one, it depended on the VC. So because of the nature of the business, I pitched both VCs in India and VCs here. And when I pitched VCs in India, they didn't believe it could be done. because there's already existing players in India in the elder care space that say they're tech, but in the background, it's just like 10 people doing things manually.

22:51So I think a lot of VCs got burnt in India, so they just didn't believe it could be done. Whereas here, there's already companies like Sarah and this Papa and on in the US that are scaled to unicorn status. So for them, for the VCs here, I was like, hey, it's already been done here. I'm trying to do it there. And that's kind of the narrative I used to help us get there.