WoW Woman in HealthTech | Shiti Rastogi Manghani, Co-Founder and CEO at Breathe Happy
Interview by MarijaButkovic
Shiti Rastogi Manghani is an award-winning business leader with 13+ years of experience across 11 countries, 3 continents, and has managed multi-million-pound projects to success, leading cross-cultural cross-functional teams across the US, UK, Europe, and India.
She is an Electronics Engineer and holds an MBA. Having launched multiple products successfully in international markets, her skills lie at the cross-section of business innovation, people, and technology. Shiti strongly believes in harnessing the power of technology for social impact. In Nov 2019 she left her corporate job to start work full time on her own company Natlabs Ltd (whose flagship product is Breathe Happy) to give wings to her innovative ideas on making inclusive digital wellbeing solutions available for all.
Shiti has recently been nominated for the WomenTech Network Global Awards 2020 in the category ‘Women-Led Tech Startup of the Year’.
Shiti, what is the idea behind your project/product and how did you come up with it?
The idea is to make at-home fitness as fun, interactive and motivating as in-studio/in-gym. It however took 13 years of testing!
My career started in India but took me to the US, India, Germany, Portugal, Italy & Spain, and finally to the UK. In these 13 years of living out of suitcase, one thing kept me sane - my practice of home/hotel workouts. However, because of my habit of doing trainer-led workouts, it was getting increasingly difficult to find good teachers and good internet connection at the same time. Even when it all somehow worked, the experience never came close to in-person workouts (just how shopping for clothes online once was no match to in-store shop). I was already part of so many groups and communities locally, internationally, and in India and soon realized that it was not just my problem. While I researched the background and feasibility of talking to all these people for half a year, I finally took the big leap and left my job to work full time on Breathe Happy in November 2019. What started as a small WhatsApp group is now a 2000+ community. On International Yoga day we partnered with the United Nations. We got backed and endorsed by leading bodies including Medcity, Bethnal Green Ventures. We just won the InnovateUK project. We are growing our team. The desire to make a difference is an infectious thing. The journey has just begun and we are loving every bit of it - even the sweat and tears.
When did all start and do you have other members in your team?
It all kicked off in 2019 with just me. Then my friend of five years, who was helping me develop the product on the side finally joined me as co-founder full-time as well (lucky for me!). She comes with strong startup tech experience in the Impact sector across Africa and Asia. We have just hired a tech lead and are now hiring for two more roles in marketing and sales.
How long did it take you to be where you are now?
It’s been a year exactly though it feels we have lived a life of ten years in one!. Time moves at a different pace when you are a founder!
What was the biggest obstacle?
The biggest challenge has been to balance the need for product development with customer growth. We have been in an enviable position of having growing traction from day one! However, it also meant our energies getting split between servicing the need of this user base effectively and developing the next level of our product.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
I have spent a decade working across the US, UK, Europe, and India in various roles launching products and led global teams. I even managed a business with revenues of £175 million. But the highlight has got to be the last one year sprint of founding Breathe Happy. I am driven by a mission to use tech for good. In a span of a year, we’ve built a loyal user base from scratch, seen our logo next to United Nations, built partnerships with national players, won the Innovate UK project... This journey has led me to even be nominated for WomenTech Global Awards 2020.
What are the challenges of being an entrepreneur in the niche you are in? How about being a female founder/entrepreneur?
My founding journey overlapped with the once-in-a-lifetime event of a global pandemic! So things just got extra spicy with my startup-journey. One of the most challenging bits for any founder is networking (for recruiting, fundraising, customer growth, etc.) especially when the internal compass pulls them away towards product and tech. I need to solve for balance between them.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
We are currently working on using machine learning to build pose estimation models. This will enable posture correction like never before at scale. It is not a solved problem in tech. It is even more difficult for occluded postures. We are not only developing our own tech but also our own database to train these models on. Our first such study is going live soon and we couldn’t be more excited!
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
Industry statistics on various KPIs right from funding levels to the gender pay gap point to a serious systemic issue. The good news is that more people are looking than ever before. Change takes time but it also takes changemakers. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, it’s time for us to do our bit for the future.
What is the most important piece of advice you can give to all female founders and female entrepreneurs out there?
· It’s important to enjoy what you do, but not necessarily to only to do what you enjoy.
· Work in days. Think in weeks. Plan for months. Dream in years.
· Two types of people are essential in life: F & F - Ferment and Fuel. Identify people who will listen to you (let you ferment your ideas) and people who will fuel you (inspire/motivate you). Choose wisely.
What will be the key trends in the health tech and wellbeing industry in the next 5 years and where do you see it heading?
The future of fitness will be digital, social, and at-home. We have never before had an aging population like we now do now, especially in developed economies. We will need to put care before healthcare. And like always, the tech will be used to unlock doors at scale.
The speed of change is the most fascinating bit of technology. It is hard to digest the fact that the phones in our back pocket carry more computing power than the rockets that carried the man to the moon!
The last 100 years have changed the face of human history in a way that the previous 10,000 years didn’t. And now, our wildest fantasies can not even begin to capture what’s going to happen in the next 50 years - that’s the bit I love about tech!
Follow Breathe Happy Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter!
This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic.