Saurabh Bothra: mum’s the word | The yoga trainer and entrepreneur wants older women to prioritise their health and do it every single day

Saurabh Bothra, 32, is everyone’s favourite ‘son’. Maybe that’s because he has mastered the ability to get even the most inactive women to exercise and feel better about themselves. He lives by the ‘yoga everyday’ motto printed on his white tee, showing up for them every single day since he launched his self-funded online yoga startup Habuild, days before the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. “If you are expecting someone else to be consistent, you have to be the epitome of that,” he says.

His marketing team isn’t targeting that coveted 18-45 age group. Unlike most, he doesn’t invisibilise the women who quietly manage households across the country, prioritising their family’s needs over their health.

Instead, Bothra has figured out how to make them attend his online yoga classes regularly. For every asana, he offers an easy alternative for those suffering from the two common older women ailments of knee pain and back ache.

One participant described the classes as “me time”. Some testimonials of those who attend his classes sound as chuffed as the successful followers of a 12-step programme — “360 days so far”. Their gratitude and cheers fuel Bothra’s journey.

With a 14-day free challenge for newcomers every Monday, a twice yearly 21-day free challenge and the regular online classes that cost a modest annual ₹3,999, Habuild has trained 80 lakh people, making it the world’s largest online yoga community. It holds three Guinness World Records; some 4 lakh people log on every day, 70% of them women.

Building a community

It began when Bothra, a mechanical engineer who has been teaching people yoga since his IIT-BHU days in Varanasi, realised that though most people were aware of yoga, they just didn’t practise it regularly. Habit-building (hence Habuild) became the focus of his classes. Logging on every day is the one thing he wants from all who attend.

It wasn’t easy. People didn’t take free classes seriously. So he asked them to pay a monthly charge of ₹500, and returned it if they attended every day. You can imagine the accounting chaos. Next, he began deducting money from those who didn’t attend and soon realised another basic truth: “Nobody likes to be punished.”

That’s when he hit upon his hit formula: empathy and leading by example. “There’s no point scolding someone who already understands that exercise is important for them,” he says. His own mother, a chartered accountant, was inspired to sign up and gave him valuable feedback. “If you understand one mother, you understand every mother’s problem,” he says.

Saurabh Bothra with his Habuild team.

He’s likely improving the Internet knowledge of a generation. His team is gentle with tech-illiterate participants who may get upset when they are unable to log on to the class, not understanding that it might be their Internet at fault. “If we cater to mothers, we should be prepared to be shouted at like we are their children,” Bothra says.

That’s probably why his first lesson of entrepreneurship is that he doesn’t call Habuild a startup. “It’s a community,” he says, adding that his work philosophy is a mix of lessons he learnt from his businessman father and socialist grandfather, a rural doctor and sarpanch in the 1950s.

Daily motivation

Nearly five years into his journey, there are copycat classes but that doesn’t bother Bothra. He’s an open-source entrepreneur, happy to share details about how he did it with any competitor, even allowing them a peek into the way his technology is set up. In an India where WhatsApp is best known for its ability to spread misinformation and hate, Bothra has mastered the channel to positively motivate all his participants daily — and he wants others to do the same.

When he was living in the IIT coaching hub of Kota in Rajasthan, he realised that the education system and families didn’t equip young people to handle failure and negotiate emotions such as jealousy and anger. “The manual passed on has been wrong,” he says. “Communication is through hitting.” So Bothra encourages guests such as Sudarshan, whose Tiny Mic stories help parents and children better converse with each other, to interact with his community. If you sign up, you’re also likely to encounter experts who talk about alternative therapies such as marma (pressure) points and mudras (hand gestures).

While Bothra is not a believer of the 70-hour week for his team, he has dedicated the last five years to this work, even skipping bi-annual team retreats. He doesn’t take time out, and is always smiling and gently encouraging in his classes.

His co-founders are his younger sister Trishala, whom he describes as “an upgraded version of myself” (she quit a consultancy job in London to join Bothra), and his IIT batchmate Anshul Agrawal, who has been a believer since the first time he attended an early online class.

Bothra is skipping the upcoming trip to Manali too and his team has labelled the clean-shaven yoga teacher as “boring”.

In mom-speak, that’s reliable and the mark of a good son.

The writer is a Bengaluru-based journalist and the co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram.

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