Dharmil Sheth, co-founder of PharmEasy, a leading Mumbai-based pharma aggregator, which connects patients with local pharmacy stores and diagonistic centres, giving a talk at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad on How to Start a Startup, said the main reason why he initiated startup was, he “wanted to make money”. 

Sheth, a Forbes Under 30 persona, who had earlier fouded 91 Streets, a shopping search platform and BoxPlay Sports, claimed to be a world-class sports infrastructure set-up for teams and individuals to play soccer and cricket, ironically, is President of Ekagrata Foundation, an NGO, which works towards the welfare of underprivileged children.

Sheth said, the “cribbing” about the low pay of IT industries led him to begin thinking in terms of a startup, and after meeting a school friend, Dhaval Shah, who introduced him to healthcare industry people, he found that having stock of all medicines at every store was still a problem. 

Starting by delivering medicine to customers at doorstep with 20% discount, his mobile application PharmEasy was of great help, he said, as it made it was “easy to use wherein a customer had to merely upload a photo of the prescription and the company would decode the prescribed medicines.”

He added, “When the number of installs peaked from 10 on the first day to 15,000 on the tenth day without a dollar spent in marketing, we realized that the app addressed a genuine problem.”