In today’s world, when almost everyone is struggling to lose weight and eat healthily, Yoboshu has come up with a brilliant idea to help people manage their weight, obesity, diabetes and other health-related issues. This unique behavioral healthcare and wellness platform uses psychology and makes people trick their minds to lose weight. This Chandigarh-based startup focuses on the prime requirement of weight loss, and that is a behavioral change. Regardless of a gym membership, personal trainers, or food journals, what really helps in weight loss is a behavioral change. Founders Shivanshi Sharma and Sandeep Kumar’s startup Yoboshu works on this core aspect of philosophy in their health tech startup. Let’s dive deeper into Yoboshu’s business model.
About Yoboshu
The COVID-19 pandemic presented operational difficulties for the platform Yoboshu, which the couple had launched as an aggregator of fitness centers in 2019. In 2020, the founders of Yoboshu changed the company’s bootstrapped business model to become a platform for diet and nutrition.
Yoboshu was built on the core concept of using psychology and technology to help people manage their weight. They use scientific reasoning to understand the underlying mechanisms of human behavior and change it for good. Artificial Intelligence is cleverly incorporated into their app to take assessments and create a personalized perfect plan for each user.
As per Yoboshu’s research, poor lifestyle and behavior lead to 61% of deaths globally. Harmful lifestyle patterns lead to economic losses amounting to $6.2 Trillion. Customers desiring to lose weight invest heavily in gym memberships, healthy foods, or dieticians, but find it difficult to sustain any healthy habit. Yoboshu has managed to carve a niche for itself in the healthcare industry by bridging the gap between leading a healthy lifestyle and sustaining it.
The Initial Journey
According to research, eighty percent of people who significantly reduce their body fat are unable to maintain their new weight for a full year. They will also probably regain more than half of what they lost in less than two years.
According to the app’s creators, users learn skills that allow them to lose weight without engaging in any dieting or exercise. Shivanshi said in a recent interview, “You cannot go on a diet forever but can implement simple skills and remain fit. These skills are backed by scientific studies and have proven to help people lose and manage weight. These aren’t big steps but habits that are long-lasting,”
When the duo were gathering feedback from clients and people struggling to lose weight, they came up with two most common feedbacks – clients could not sustain the weight loss and they were frustrated with fad diets.
This motivated them to come up with Yoboshu cares that would change the very mindset of people. “Quick fixes don’t work. We needed to have a long-term solution for losing weight while keeping in mind the overall health of an individual,” she added in her interview.
In order to create a focused “habit-building” program, the pair assembled a team of behavioral therapists, psychologists, nutritionists, exercise physiologists, lifestyle coaches, and physicians by 2021. The app was then released in March 2022.
How does it Work?
The program works on a holistic approach toward health and food. Users of the four-month “habit building” program learn a new habit each day that they must incorporate into their daily routine. The app evaluates the user’s body metrics, sleep pattern, stress levels or trauma, regular eating habits (triggers like late-night snacking, boredom eating, stress eating, etc.), and general body goals once the user has logged in. It asks users to rate how much they relate to statements like “Do you find yourself rushing to the pantry when feeling down or multitasking while eating, is portion control tricky?” on a scale of 1 to 10.
It generates a report on what benefits users and where there is room for improvement based on the assessment. It uses a similar evaluation of activity to ascertain a user’s psychology with regard to their routines and triggers. After that, users must spend 10 minutes per day using the app, which offers reading material and entertaining games to play. Here, the goal is to help users develop new habits. These “habit-building exercises” are meant to be used while performing daily tasks.
One of the key habits taught in the program, for instance, is portion control, where users are instructed to follow the “10-5-10 rule.” It’s a straightforward exercise in which one consumes food for ten minutes, takes a break, and then, if still hungry, consumes the remainder of the meal. Another habit is known as “divide and conquers” instructs users to divide their meal into four portions and consume each one slowly and with pleasure. Users must attempt to stop using it when the tank is 80% full. According to Yoboshu’s analysis, the majority of users feel satisfied after the third serving and avoid binge eating as a result.
The app stays away from metrics like calorie counters. To keep users motivated, it does, however, require daily self-weighing. On the activity side, it recognizes the user’s routine and recommends daily habits that could be put into practice. For instance, it advises users to take extra steps by parking far away or walking while on the phone. With the “3-week reset” skill, which encourages users to forgo adding an extra spoonful of sugar or caffeine to their diet, it even adds a few minor dietary controls.
The program’s third major emphasis is on managing stress and mental health. Each user is given an internal health coach when they first start the program, who keeps track of their daily progress and follows up with them to see if they are having trouble implementing the skills, are experiencing stress, or are having any other problems. The purpose of a personal coach is to assist clients in putting their abilities into practice through modest actions.
Yoboshu Cares startup currently functions with 11 in-house coaches. Each coach can serve around 100 users. They do not intend to increase the number of coaches at the moment as they want to focus on quality. The app has a cool feature ‘Pay What You Want for a 14-day trial period, where users can even pay Rs. 1. Since its launch in March, the app has seen over 2,000 registered users and more than 9,000 downloads.
