302. Meet the Optometrist Who Built a Multimillion Pound Eyewear and Health Tech Brand w/ Dhruvin Patel | Ocushield

0:00Amardeep Parmar:Great to have you back here again Dhruvin. So you came on here what two years ago? Something like that. And then after that I became a little angel investor in your hand. Yes, yeah. So all of your success now is partly due to me right? Exactly, thank you to big up Amar and all his participation in Occhishield. So tell us like what's Occhishield done in the last couple of years? Yeah, so we've been on a bit of a journey ourselves. So we started as a consumer brand creating products to help people alleviate digital eye strain and help them sleep better after screen use. So things like medically registered filters, lighting, glasses, et cetera.

0:34So consumer-related brand. Two years ago, and when you got formally acquainted with Ocfors for your investment, we set out a new strategy because we were selling our physical products to corporate companies. And I interviewed two dozen stakeholders in HR. And I said, what do you do when it comes to your employees for eyes? and a lot of them came back and said all we do is provide an eye test in the UK for employees and I was right how many people you know take that benefit up and the answer was pretty surprising or not not surprising now but then I was like very surprised because it was a quite a low percentage engagement number from the grand grand number of employees they have and actually those employees that engaged were people that only wore glasses as an optometrist I go right there's maybe a third of the population that wear glasses and there's two-thirds of the population that don't wear glasses but what are we doing for those employees who are now eight hours a day behind screens you know their eyes are struggling digital eye strain is the number one symptom that is affecting employees 90 of them have eye strain fatigue headaches and they don't know what to do about it they just take time off work right they take a break but they don't have a solution so it started getting me thinking what can we do for this kind of corporate market and yeah two years ago we said why don't we do something about this and at that point I decided to create an online eye screening solution which will allow employees in the UK to screen their eyes from a smartphone or laptop in on average four minutes and to understand things like vision contrast sensitivity depth perception color vision and a few other tests and then give them the the output they need to know right do i need to do something about this or have i got some of the reassurances i need to continue in the way i'm i'm doing at the moment so um yeah that that that started out as an idea and i'm pleased to say you know built that executed that and we're working with corporates now to deliver that solution into their workplace like aig insurance aon and wider and um yeah that's what i'm really excited about and where where the biggest business change has

2:48Amardeep Parmar:come the irony of today me having conjunctivitis as i'm interviewing you as well it's kind of crazy so with the new business as well because it's so different to the previous side right so you build a consumer product business over like many years and then you're into a new market how like how's it worked in terms like how does the consumer product side help what you're building now yeah so it's um it's really tricky to try and build two different businesses within one I found initially I was like oh it'll be a piece of cake right you build this whilst you're managing the other side and you know as a founder you bring such a unique energy to the team and to your organization that if you are focused in a different area naturally the area which doesn't have your focus it can somewhat struggle to have that same oomph right and that's a challenge for me personally that's that's what i've had to you know understand myself i figure out a solution within the business because creating a digital solution creating you know a sas software as a service product versus hardware goods has been a new learning for me and um you know i've had i've had to kind of learn from the ground up there because i've had no experience with it as well um but most of my time has been focused there whilst the consumer goods side the team who are in place are capable of managing that business you know and I can kind of prod them to do what they need to do but effectively yeah the digital side is is a different ball game effectively and you have to treat the two businesses differently whilst at the moment they operate under the same brand which I believe it should continue and you know the benefit of consumer good side has been actually because we've had a brand that's been somewhat known and present it's helped with our go-to-market strategy so when we're going to corporates or health insurers with a digital solution they're not going oh this this business has just come in the last 12 months there's no trading issue they don't they don't have anything about them you know if you're selling to enterprise one of the biggest caveats for them is risk right so it's helped having that consumer business where we've been trading now for you know more than five six seven years to have that and they go okay right it's kind of a green tip there and open those doors in that way um so that's how it's benefited and you know benefit from the research side as well speaking to those corporates and doing that research.

5:05Amardeep Parmar:I guess obviously as well, the sales are so different, right? You said like enterprise having the track record really helps. Whereas on the consumer side, you're obviously selling products which are like, they're fairly affordable. So it's a very different type of customer profile as well. How has it been trying to like navigate that new sales process and what have you learned since you've been doing that? Yeah, it's completely different. And there's so many, you realise with enterprise there's so many more touch points. I'd like to think that with the consumer goods a good comparison is retail and with the software side enterprise because retail has the same complexities in in one in you know one realm as enterprises because they both have you know you've got to get a stakeholder interested so for retail it's buyer for enterprise you know our our demographic is HR let's say and once they're engaged they go right we want to go ahead with this then you get handed over to procurement on both sides and then procurement of course their job is to bring the service in based and negotiate the terms right so go through that and then through that you've then got legal and then you've got launch right and then both sides you know you're you're figuring out product market plan and here again it's delivery of service and internal market so those two two journeys are somewhat similar but there's different requirements on both sides so for example of the digital side we've had to make sure all of our um gdpr and cyber essentials and governance from that perspective is is looked after you know because enterprise companies again risk from from a risk perspective they won't want to work with you if you've not got any of those areas looked after so we've had to make sure in advance okay we're gonna have to work with this enterprise but we need to get that in order and we don't have that yet so and it's the same like with you know we're expanding with corporates in America so they've got HIPAA compliance over there so it's all it's all these um unfortunate compliance things that you've got to get um you know accustomed to which has been a big bigger learning curve for us um as a team because we've we've just not been set up to understand um you know data and governance in that same way as you do with a consumer business and like with these different things going on right now right what's been at the proudest moment so far the last couple of years since you else came on here proudest moment um i think for me i'm i'm a like i'm a i'm a creator at heart right so my proudest moment is going actually creating a digital solution and then finding customers for it like customers that are willing to pay for the service and you know now we've done it for two years but we've got customers um being retained right they're renewing so i'm going all right it's not just a it's not just luck right they're seeing value in the service so for me it's always like i just love creating stuff and then knowing it's helping people right um like we do the consumer side always read i read our reviews every day because they come straight into my inbox and it gives you that little lift every day go okay you're working on something that's impactful in the same way with our digital solution we've got um like a 15 question type form server that goes out to each user and we've got qualitative and quantitative information that comes off the back of that for example employees go through our eye screening software and they say they take less time off work um after doing our solution if they had issues due to eye strain and fatigue and for me i'm like wow that's great right because that means you can spend more time doing your job be more productive potentially get a promotion and you have a better healthier day so um yeah for me it's like creating a new new product or service is it quite validating too because obviously like i showed your first major business right and you've done well in one area and i guess almost going into new area there's was any like fear about what if i go into this new area and it doesn't work out and what i mean to your identity why it's like how did you approach that um it's it's quite interesting was it similar to how i approach the consumer side is i didn't ask too many questions i literally asked those asked those 20 stakeholders and from there i was just set on i think i can create something and for me it's like i know that works for me because i'm i'm convinced on if there's a problem there if i create a solution nine times out of ten i know i can sell the solution all right but secondly we're going to create the need for it um because there's a you know i read a lot on market research and surveys and with customers and sometimes the customers don't know what they want right like the solution we created they would not have been able to articulate the solution we created for them that will support their employees right so so for me it's kind of um yeah going in with what you know and building yeah there's no consideration of if it doesn't work, you know, oh no, what's the perception going to be?

9:52It's going to be, well, let's create it, it's going to work, right? You know, I didn't even consider it not working. Yeah, and that's what I did with the consumer side. I literally started a business when I said, oh, let's give it a go and see what happens. Well, did you think that was easier than you thought?

10:08Amardeep Parmar:Was it easier than I thought building the... Was there anything that was easier? So you might have been like, okay, this might be a challenge for us and actually it was a lot easier than you thought on the flip side of, um i think when when you're in business and you've you've you've created something i think the problem is you build resilience over the years so you know my my radar of understanding what's easier now to before is like it's it but the ceiling is so much higher because i'm just like there's so many things that come at you as a founder that you know to to me five years ago would have maybe consumed me as stress or a problem whereas now i'm like it's like it's just i i know there's gonna be things that happen so it's really hard to say you know was there something that was easier because now yeah my understanding of like challenge is completely completely different so nothing comes to mind but yeah that that journey as as an entrepreneur and a founder going through I think you just you just become a little bit more resilient to a lot of things so you actually seek out challenges because that gives you a steer in the right way to go actually that means someone else hasn't worked on this challenge because it's been too hard so actually you should lean into that um yeah where do you hope this will go on the digital side well now now we're starting to um scale that up because we've we've understood our go-to market with corporates and health insurers we think the future for us with that is how can we how can we give people insights about our health that they currently don't get and what i mean by that is you know vision is our most coveted sense but it's our least looked after sense right and research has actually shown if you speak to individuals and you ask them what their most favourite senses that they least like to lose however you know hearing, taste, smell, vision most people say vision right they don't want to lose their eyesight and you know 52 % of eye disease and sight loss in the UK is preventable but if we come back to those stats where two-thirds of the UK's population don't engage with the optician might not know what their eyesight is like and you know because they feel they can see you well they're like yeah my eyes are great right um but it's always funny because when when patients come into testing chairs and optometrists they don't realize one of the eyes are weaker you know when we have binocular vision the dominant eye takes over and it gives you into a false pretense that you can see well right and you're watching on youtube now i'm testing my eyes yeah yeah you can you can do that as well it's a good good way to check if you've got um a weak eye in one one capacity but there's so much more to the eye and eye health right you've got the back of the eyes you've got binocular vision you've got dry eye disease etc so what we want to build in the future is how can we give users of our solution whether it's in the corporate space or consumer because we could diverge into a freeman model as well the solution how can we give them more insights about their eye health which then allows them to feel more empowered and look after their eye health because the reason we're going down this route is we believe eye health is at the start of where sleep was 10 years ago so sleep now everyone cares about right and rightly so sleep is super important gut health maybe three years ago began and the gut now you know everyone's taking a pro or prebiotic right they're like right we've got to focus on gut health vision is now at that that start of that journey and i say that based on what we're seeing in the media as well for example dr ranjan chatterjee the number one podcast for health and wellness in the uk recently did a podcast episode with an optometrist from the usa he talked about you know vision controls not just what we see but our critical decision making um longevity consciousness because it all starts in the eyes where we've got our you know our kind of um brain neural pathway that starts the eyes and we want to we want to be on that journey to then provide users insights into right if for example we have hardware that picks up the lighting around you that impacts how you perform on a daily basis right um you've got also can it pick up how many times you're blinking for example when you're based behind a screen because when we look at a screen we only blink three to five times in a minute we should be blinking 15 times in a minute and blinking what that does it lubricates your eyes uh prevents the dry eye disease right um so can we provide those insights to to use so i think in the future what we're going to be building is a mix of software and hardware which can you know let's say you know let's aim for data like whoop gives you for for sleep right we want to build something which can bring data from other hardware like your iPhone etc and give you a bit more of a consensus about your eye health.

14:34Amardeep Parmar:Hello hello I hope you've enjoyed the show so far I'm Amarit 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 through our Impact programmes and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the programmes and come to the events, go to vahihq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called Startups for Outsiders, which you can get on Amazon now and the link is in the bio.

15:15Amardeep Parmar:Hope to see you soon at our event. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. So I feel like you're making me very self-conscious about how much I'm blinking now. So I'm now counting to four and then blinking each time. But it's crazy because I probably barely blink. And if like anybody who knows me can see my eyes are pretty much always red. They're more red right now because of conjunctivitis. But I think it is one of those things that people take for granted a lot, right? And it's only when you have a problem that you get something seen to. Whereas also what you're talking about here is like, why wait till there's a problem, right?

15:42Amardeep Parmar:You don't want to wait till there's a problem. And I think you mentioned like Dr. Rangan's strategy. So much of the healthcare industry now is going towards like the preventative side. because like if you might be NHS how much money that would save is people rather than waiting because it was a problem with their eyes or it's gone too bad and they need to get like loads of medicine what about if they do it earlier as well and obviously I know for example you had the big personal brand as well that you've been working on different things you're doing there how when you're having these conversations people as well do you try to bring that awareness and do you find that the trend is shifting are people asking you more what's happening there yeah it's it's so interesting because um one of our segments that we sell to is health insurers um so you've got two types of health insurers you've got private medical insurance which is your bupers access vitality and then you've got something known as cash plan providers so you've got companies like bennett and health bhsf and what they do is they um if you're a polysolder you pay maybe 30 to 50 pounds a month and you get expenses for let's say glasses dental treatment expense in the whole year so you know you can put 200 pounds toward your dental and not to call through through those cash plans so it gives you some money back right um and these these kinds of um entities allow um i guess the uk workforce and consumers to engage with health care in the uk right but what what we found as a challenge is as you've said is vision is something that we need to now start thinking about preventively but before especially with the NHS it's all about acute care so when you have a problem then it's being taken care of but I think times are changing now where we're having to think about the prevention piece but health insurers and cash plans have traditionally always they've always focused on what's in front rather than what they can do in the future and it's the same reason why politicians don't invest too much in prevention right they're only there for four year term true prevention takes a long time um to change but i think we're starting to see some of that but you know the debate is is up on how much of that um will help health insurers and cash plans really push to the future but i've had to yeah utilize personal brand but also for us as a business is we've had to try and extract that data to show people the problem that's there and i think it's starting to pay off now because actually Bupa in the last three months they put they put a report out which they surveyed with YouGov about 5 ,000 employees and they asked them what's your biggest pain point in the last 12 months right and to our surprise because no one's been speaking about it we opened the document and they listed out the four biggest pain points for employees in the last 12 months that are in tech companies so the number one was eye strain and fatigue 38 % of employees have suffered with a problem with that in the last 12 months second was um mental fatigue which was 31 percent um 30 percent was physical aches um and there was one other which which raised my mind at the moment but we were like wow like people are now start like big entities like bupa are starting to speak about this which is perfect because we've been kind of banging the drum silently or not silently in the background but so much of you know of this is how much is how much are people talking about the problem to then find a solution um so yeah we've had to somewhat create a demand for it and tell people look there's a problem here look at all our data points um but yeah i'm pleased to see now it's it's coming out other third parties are you know credible third parties are talking about the problem as well on the consumer side who are you seeing as the people are most likely to buy the blue light blocking lenses and the products you offer there are you seeing like a trend of who's like the most health conscious about it yeah so we've got three key um segments so i like the first is health health optimizers those you know people that go to the gym that maybe also want to look at optimizing their one percent you know you've got biohackers in that category um so people that are really looking at how they can optimize various parts of their their day-to-day right so they're the health optimizers secondly you've got parents so those that are looking to look after their children's eyes because they spend so many time on devices either for fun or school and then also go actually I need to I need the product as well because my eyes are fried and then last you've got working professionals right those that are screen based that you know as I said nine times out of ten they are suffering with a symptom of digital eye strain that need something to support them day to day so those are our three biggest segments that we serve and today from a consumer side awesome because yeah it's like I always know that I have this my eyes are generally red so I feel like this conversation is going to make me take action myself as well so it's like it's good intervention it's your reminder yeah let me do something and as you put the company the last few years too so obviously you've like got more data from the customer side so you understand what they want there then you're now seeing the trends in the business side too in the internal side like have you shifted any of your mentality around how you approach different things or is kind of the framework been in place for the last couple of years.

20:45So do you mean like how the business operates internally?

20:48Amardeep Parmar:Yeah, have you been made more efficient? Are you using AI? Yeah, so I think for us as a business as well, understanding where we can make the most impact, both from a, I guess, a mission perspective, and then also what do we want as a business, right? So when I started the business to where we are now is two different two different points right so I think from a consumer side we've been actually more confident in the last 12 months so we've been profitable for the whole of last year which is fantastic whilst growing in the way we needed and actually as a business we've said we're quite happy to operate in a way where we have profitable growth without growth at all costs because we realized that actually we we see ourselves as now moving forward as a technology business versus a traditional consumer goods brand and the value for us as a business is continuing to build technology and insights that help you know a future business that potentially acquires the business which is you know important to us because we have investors and shareholders that gone right we've taken your money we want to provide a return right this is our mission but along the way we need to say thank you for for those that have supported us so we're quite conscious of how do we generate value for I guess the business as we move into this new new part of the business digital side and that that for us is where the exciting piece is because we can impact people in a greater scale of digital solutions you don't need you can you can find people with a click of a button or you don't need to send a product to them so actually the scalability is is is far greater all right so global screening solution which can work in any country which is great right and the second is the technology bit ip piece and the value piece that we can create from that so yeah i think as a business we've just changed our mindset perspective to go right let's understand we've got two different businesses we don't need growth at all costs let's let's build organic growth and actually now especially in the last two years as fundraising and the markets have changed people are starting to respect again businesses that built on fundamentals rather than just trying to buy customers and go for growth at all costs so let's build a fundamentally strong business both on both sides um and i think there's value in that and um yeah i'm pretty happy with where we've got to in terms of the perspective internally and when you were in here last time right so i know we didn't we didn't play the episode back right so we don't exactly you said you could have said anything is there anything that you think maybe like you probably disagree with yourself with the person back then or do you think you're kind of fairly consistent yeah so it's hard to say without knowing what i said back then and And I don't want to, you know, counter, I don't want to slip myself up in that way.

23:39But I think most of the stuff I would have said probably would be consistent. I don't think I've had any drastic changes in thought. But again, you know, we met and you asked me, you know, what's been happening recently? And we both wrote it's a blur. I think you know that founder life a lot of it does become a blur because you're always context switching you're always going off the next thing right you've done a win here right all right let's what does this mean you've got an output in action so it's um yeah it's it's hard to hard to think back then but yeah you might you might have to watch your back and see what do you think that

24:14Amardeep Parmar:founder Blair is more intense now that you've got the two sides of the business or is it always been there before the new launch do you think like you were kind of getting where things are fairly smooth pretty routine i think i think there's probably less of a blur from a because now there's two different parts to it you can kind of you can kind of um understand different milestones and different uh i guess work in progress um so you know i think from that perspective there's less of a blur from um the high level stuff but when you get to the granular details that the blur remains right it's just like right what did you work on last week you know you'd have to check my to-do list right i would not be able to tell you right and was it just constantly going at you know trying to achieve those milestones and objectives that you set yourself mentioned as well so like we're talking as well about you're a patron for us right so you're supporting our you start us programs like massive thank you for that about how when you're growing up too about some of these kind of support systems really helped you and you're mentioning about like when you're growing up in Croydon could you share a bit about that like how do you think that shaped you and the person you are now yeah totally um yeah so for me growing up in south london croydon um you know it's a it's a tricky place to grow up in right i went to state school and it's very easy you know when you have first generation immigrant parents they don't really know how to really look after you apart from go to work make sure there's food on the plate and make sure you go to school right and make sure you have good good grades but apart from that they didn't you know be allowed to roam the streets kick up you know I don't think this happens anymore right kids that don't don't roam the streets play football whatever right back then that used to happen a lot so I'd spend a lot of my time out and about and even in secondary school as well I was doing the same thing but when you're when you grow up in a place like South London and Croydon there's so many different pressures around you where you can easily get involved in different you know negative areas let's say um and for me like i had a youth center that wasn't too far from my home and i used to go there once or twice every week and i just found that it was you know looking back now i'd say it was transformational because one i if i if i wasn't there then i i don't know what i might be spending time with the wrong kind of people and do the wrong kind of things right but two it gives you a sense of community you know you're with other kids in the same surrounding and you understand people going for the same challenges but you don't always have to result in doing things that are not let's say on the straight path so yeah youth centers just and they also gave you lots of experiences you went on like excursion trips and whatever else and you just think wow what a great like what a great organization and people that were there you know there was there was three or four youth supervisors there you know that you know i still remember their names from ruby samir etc um that just gave us those opportunities and i thought that that's fantastic and you know saying to you earlier i think i'd love to do something like that in the future um because we know youth centers you know a lot of them have closed at the moment i don't know what the young population has for them to engage in this way you know at the moment all they have is school and social media um i don't know what's you know maybe i'm out of the loop but at the moment i don't know what uh what's out there for for kids of the next generation so um yeah i think if we can somehow bring bring that element of use centers back to communities i think that's going to really support the uk and um yeah wider yeah i think it's happening now where there's all the talk about ai and how it's affecting people's jobs and it's like a big part of it like if especially for the younger generation had those opportunities to be creative and it's like oh see we've got our program we're trying to help but then you've sent us in all these different ways because i just said how do you get the influence to people to try and help them and what it's having there is like i think a lot of us who are where we are today or whatever we're doing we had people like i did like karate i did different next clubs when I was a kid that you could go to and that affected me so much and if children today or students today don't have the same opportunities then how do we bring that back isn't it yeah totally and I think what you guys do is great for the same reason right is like gives gives kids a different insight different perspective and kids you know you can leave an impression on them very quickly but all it takes is maybe a 30 minute presentation or engagement with someone from a different walk of life or different career, whatever it is.

28:47And I think that's what's really powerful for those kids now, which might be looking at the wrong things on social media. Manosphere comes to me, well, it's quite timely at the moment for that new documentary, right? How do they see those real-world life kind of models for them in person versus online?

29:11Amardeep Parmar:So looking forward to you before we go to the wrap up questions. So obviously you were here two years ago and we can't remember what you said. One of us should have watched the episode first. Sorry about that. But if you are, it's a reason for you guys to go and watch the previous episode. Please do you want to call us out if you find anything. If you are back on here again two years time, so it would be episode like 500 something at that point, right? What would you love to say in these two years you've been able to do or how you progressed? I'd love to have created a personalized engine for for individuals right we've got now the consumer and the screening side of the business I'd love to connect the two so what I mean by that is can we bring in let's say Ammar from doing an online eye screening test and then give personalized recommendations where we have products and solutions that fit his lifestyle because we know he has very red eyes from working behind his screen five six seven days a week but how can bring someone like you into that journey to give them actual insight so i think connecting the two parts of the business but really providing that impact to that individual and i've been able to measure that at scale right so i think that that i think if we succeed on that path i think we have something really powerful that i think we've got in two years we we should be able to to do that awesome so wrap up questions now and normally i check with people before we start recording but because we're more mates i forgot to do it so we'll see you on the spot so you did this last time so who are free asians in britain you think are doing incredible work and you want to shout them out okay and if you see a long pause here it's because we've cut the camera so that you've got time to think yeah i want to think about this one was that obviously you go to who you know you've seen the most um so i think about this one because i don't want also want to give the same answers from last time i can check who you've got last time cool so yeah there's three um asian entrepreneurs that I think are killing it, doing a great job.

31:09First, Joel. Joel from MindUp, who's an investor in Occhishield, but also doing fantastic work in coaching for employees, mental health platform. Yeah, he's awesome with what he's built and now trying to build that out in the UAE side of the business. I know they work with massive clients like Jimmy Sharp, so really, really, yeah, inspired with the work they do. And he's actually a great mentor for myself in the b2b side for the digital screening element as well so he's he's awesome um second uh vishal from until um so i had the opportunity to meet him not too long ago and actually um yeah he was just talking about uh the positives and challenges in in growing that that business and now that you know they're going international with physical presence is is i think that kind of business is is really tricky when you've got leases to negotiate people on the ground um you know making sure shop is open i think it's a different ball game i couldn't do it but big respect to vishal and what he's creating there and then lastly um varan from magic eye um again you know he he's done awesome work with what he's building out with the hardware solution and hardware and software together is also no easy feat but i know he's um he had the part of this q1 so um yeah i can't remember if it was us they did this but did we introduce you to joel back in the day or did you Who introduced me to Joel?

32:32I definitely met him at a Bay HQ event for the first time. Came in it. So, you know, that might have sealed the deal. But I can't remember how we and Joel connected.

32:46Amardeep Parmar:So all three of them have been on the podcast as well. Yeah, yeah. You can check out their episodes. So next one is if people want to find out more about you, more about Occhishield, where do they go? Search my name on Google or LinkedIn. I should be findable. there's not too many Druvins in the UK and there are a few based in India watching there are a fair few, especially Patels or just search OkuShield and again you should find our handles, most of our handles are get OkuShield on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. And is there any way that the audience could help you? Yeah if you're listening and you work at for example a corporate entity and you feel they look after their employees and they invest in supporting employees through health and wellness and other benefits and they might be interested in you know supporting their employees with an eye health solution like online eye screening then yeah please reach out and we'll be happy to speak to the organization if you can connect us up.

33:39Amardeep Parmar:Thanks so much for coming on again. Any final words? See you in tears.