About Zifcare

Our story

The idea of Zifcare seemed simple enough - I wanted to build a mobile app that would act as a self-help tool for depression.

Initially, I gave the contract to a small IT outsourcing company run by a friend - within a few months had the first iteration of the app. We used the Ionic framework for the app development, Node.js for the server code and MongoDB as the database.

Over time, we grew into a team, mostly composed of interns who were able to initially manage and then build on top of the infrastructure we’d set up. These are incredible people who I’ll be grateful to - for doing far more than could be expected of them and definitely far more than what I thought was possible for Zifcare with a team of interns. Some of the people who left their mark on Zifcare’s technology are:

• Sameer Ashra

• Nrujal Sharma

• Brijesh Bhalodiya

• Sangeeta Muleva

• Himanshu Patel

Once we had the technology infrastructure, needed to get users for our fledging app. I got the first set of users by talking to people outside cafes and college students in Ahmedabad and messaging people directly on LinkedIn + Facebook. It was initially extremely discomforting for me to approach random people and get them to download an app, but eventually, I even started enjoying the process a little.

Over a period of a few months, we acquired about 1,000 or so app downloads and this period was a great experience for me in terms of collecting and understanding user feedback. Obviously, this wasn’t scalable so then the search began for a sustainable way to acquire users.

I talked to a friend of mine - Neeraj Ramnani, who works in digital marketing to understand some quick basics of digital marketing over FB/Instagram over a meet. I then set up Zifcare’s FB ad account - it was a long, painful and frustrating process, but eventually, I was able to optimize the campaign(s) to get downloads at a rate that was sustainable in my opinion. This is how we got the next 10,000 downloads. All the while, we were collecting user feedback and improving the product and content continuously. We had an aggregate rating of 4.5 on Android and iOS.

In the meantime, we also had a team for content creation and design. Some of the team members that left a mark are:

• Paridhi Laddha

• Anshita Gaur

• Aashkaa Nair

• Shreya Raj

• Ishika Majumdar

Another growth experiment we tried was creating a campus ambassador program. Starting with 3 of them, I learnt a little about promoting Zifcare to college students. Over time, this evolved to a cohort-type 4/6 week remote program that had about 100 campus ambassadors or zMHAs (zifcare Mental Health Ambassadors) at a time.

I also learned Google Ads to try and find one more channel for growth, which also worked pretty well for us for Android downloads.

Over time, we built Zifcare as a self-funded passion project for self-development with 45,000 email subscribers; 25,000 mobile app downloads (rated 4.8 on app stores) - this was also my first experience building a tech product and helped me learn about user experience, growth, metrics and technology.

All this while, we’d never made a single rupee in revenues and Zifcare was still completely free. I’d never even tried to monetize it and by now the opportunity cost had become extremely high.

We did create a few weeks creating audio and video courses for self-development on topics such as self-confidence, meditation, etc. For its sale, the only channel I relied on was ad campaigns, which in retrospect, was not a good idea. But by then I was extremely tired and confused and the lack of sales online hit my confidence hard. I was convinced that I needed to take up a job in order to keep working on this and found one at a Series B startup in Bangalore.

In parallel to my hectic job, I kept working on my startup with a small team - trying to turn it into a SaaS platform in parallel. However, at one point it wasn’t making sense anymore and it was impressed upon me that I was not doing any favours to my team by keeping them tied up with false hopes at Zifcare. Over a week (which was probably the worst one of my life) I was able to convince myself that it was the best thing for the team and myself.

Over individual video calls, I spoke to my 5 team members and told them we would need to shut Zifcare down and I cried in every single one of them, quite uncontrollably. My team members were really understanding and they gave me the courage and motivation to think that one day we would start Zifcare again - maybe with a different name and a different purpose, but for sure we would start again.

The best is yet to come.