Building for the Masses: How a ₹1 Decision Led to a ₹10 Million Vision

In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.

For any product we build, there must be a potential target audience, people who are ready to pay for the value we provide. But the big question is: who are they?

After we decided to build an app that helps people improve their daily lives and feel better, the very next question that came to us was: Who will pay for this? And how much?

At first, we thought we could approach doctors and clinics, pitch them our product and they could recommend the app to their respective patients.

But then we asked ourselves:
Why would they entertain us? Why would they recommend another product to their patients when they already charge their own consultation fees?

So why would the patient pay again?

And the biggest question remained:
How much should we charge?

Analysing the Market

We began analysing the doctor-to-patient ratio.

It became obvious that physiotherapists, the very professionals we were targeting are relatively few in number. And because of that we'd have to charge them a bit more just to break even.

That’s when a new idea came to us:

Why don’t we target the patients directly and keep the price as low as possible?

📊 Price Comparison

🎯 Target Audience: Doctors

Suppose in a given area there are 10 specialist physiotherapists.

Now, if we offer a yearly subscription plan between ₹2,000 to ₹5,000, we’d make somewhere between ₹20,000 to ₹50,000 in annual revenue from that area.

To scale this, we’d have to target more doctors, probably across different regions.

But to achieve a revenue of ₹10 million (1 crore), we would need to convert around 5,000 doctors.

That’s when we hit a wall because the total number of physiotherapists in Maharashtra alone is around 7,000 – 8,000. The numbers simply weren’t adding up.

The only option left was to increase the price of our app.

But then again, why would anyone pay more than ₹5,000 per year, especially if there are cheaper and better-known alternatives in the market?

🎯 Target Audience: Patients

That’s when we decided to flip the table and focus on patients instead of doctors.

• Mumbai alone has a population of around 18–22 million.

• If just 1% of that population used our app and paid only ₹1, we’d generate ₹2 lakh/year.

Of course, 1% is a vague and optimistic number, so let’s be more conservative.

• If 0.5% of the population used our app and paid ₹100 annually, we’d generate ₹10 million/year.

• If that same 0.5% paid ₹500 annually, the revenue would be ₹50 million/year.

• And the numbers get even more attractive if we price the app at ₹1,000 per year.

✅ Our Final Decision

After all the brainstorming and back-and-forth, we finally decided:

👉 Instead of charging doctors, we’ll build the app in such a way that patients themselves will be happy to pay for the value we offer.

This approach allows us to scale faster and more sustainably.

Our final pricing might still evolve once the app goes live. We may introduce limited-time offers or attractive bundles to make it easier for users to onboard.

But the core philosophy and business direction as detailed in this blog will stay the same.

📢 What’s Next?

I’ll continue to share our product decisions, architecture choices, growth experiments, and more in this series.

Stay with us for more updates.