BASIS

How We Launched A Finance Community For Women With 35K Monthly Users

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Hena Mehta

Founder, BASIS

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BASIS

getbasis.co

from Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

started December 2019

Founders

Employees

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I’m Hena Mehta, CEO of Basis, which I started with my co-founder Dipika Jaikishan. I’ve worked in fintech for the last 12 years - with Goldman Sachs and Square in the US, and Ezetap (a payments startup) in Bangalore, India. Post my MBA at Wharton, I moved back to Bangalore to start Basis.

Basis is India’s financial products and services platform designed for women. We are re-imagining, re-thinking, and re-engineering how women look at and manage their finances. Our platform boasts a community of over 1 Lakh women on a mission to learn, discuss and take action for their money.

We are targeting a multi-billion dollar market of insurance, credit, and investments that are hyperfocused on the urban Indian woman’s needs as we build a full-stack digital bank for women.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

The year was 2016. My dream of getting into one of the world’s top business schools had become a reality! The few months leading up to that event were intense - getting together the best version of myself in my essays, career stories, GMAT scores, and recommendation letters. And I had done it! I was admitted to the Wharton School for the full-time MBA program. But, literally 2 days after I received that acceptance call, it suddenly hit me - how was I going to pay for this? As you may know, an MBA program in the US is well - not cheap. We’re talking about over $200K across academic and living expenses.

To top this off, there’s the opportunity cost of giving up a monthly income. Basically, this was a huge financial event that I had failed to plan for. I didn’t want to take on a huge education loan because that would destroy my dreams of starting a company post my MBA. Seriously, why didn’t I make use of the 7+ years of working and earning a decent amount of money to plan my investments to hit this major life goal?

This stuck with me. Post returning to India after my MBA, I delved into this space. Why don’t more women take charge of their money? I realized I was far from alone in these challenges. Interacting with over 500 women across urban metros told me that 9 out of 10 women were in the same boat. We’re independent. We’re earning money. We’re choosing to get married - or not. But for some reason, our financial lives take a backseat.

To solve the massive gender-money gap, we knew we had to solve the knowledge, trust, and confidence gaps first. Hence, we chose a community- and education-driven strategy for the product.

Women’s lives are evolving at a rapid pace - we are fiercely ambitious, choosing our career paths, prioritizing our goals, and living independently. India is even witnessing landmark judgments by progressive benches of judges around succession and inheritance laws for women. Women are adding over 5 trillion dollars to the global wealth pool every year and will control an increasing amount of wealth in the years to come.

But still, somehow, this independent, ambitious woman is left out of financial services. Less than a quarter of stock market investors in India are women, Under 12% of women make their investment decisions independently. Even the most popular new-age fintech apps have 85-90% customers who are male.

Over 90% of loans disbursed in the country are to men. And the scarier part is that all these reported numbers are probably highly inflated - it’s also estimated that over two-thirds of women’s accounts are managed by men.

So I asked myself - what can we do to fix this massive gender-money gap? I teamed up with my co-founder Dipika Jaikishan, who has 13 years of experience in the wealth management, financial planning, and advisory space, and thus, Basis was born.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

To solve the massive gender-money gap, we knew we had to solve the knowledge, trust, and confidence gaps first. Hence, we chose a community- and education-driven strategy for the product.

In order to build a sustainable platform that will be relevant in the years to come, it is crucial to address all aspects of a woman’s financial situation, and it all begins with providing the right information. Every feature on Basis is built based on a deep understanding of women’s financial behavior.

The first version of the platform had just flashcard style learning modules as we started bridging the financial education gap first.

We had some capital from angels from Day 1, so that helped us hire a small team as we strategized the overall product vision and got our first version of the app live, which took about 4 months to build.

Today, the viral mobile app of Basis features:

The Knowledge Boosters came out of the need for jargon-free information that was relevant to women, so a woman doesn’t have to sift through scores of dense and overwhelming information to arrive at what she wanted.
The Advisory Section offers tools and recommendations to manage money better. Right from suggesting mutual funds based on the user’s financial goals, to insightful calculators that estimate corpuses for events like a career break (all powered by an in-house set of algorithms), the team at Basis is building for a woman’s financial requirements at every life stage.
An Engaged Community is something that is core to the Basis offering. By being part of cohesive communities that are supportive spaces to voice queries and share learnings, women are able to overcome the trust gap that is often a barrier to acting on money-related decisions.

We’re also all set to launch our first financial product: The Basis Power Card. India’s first credit product was designed for urban woman.

Describe the process of launching the business.

We were fortunate to have early investors for our business - right from Day 1. I had connected with our angel investors prior to launching Basis, and we shared a common vision. They were willing to back us. This gave us ample fuel to ideate, build - and most importantly, hire the right talent.

Since we are effectively creating a new category (finserv for women), our product development required significant experimentation as we built deep insights into the underserved market. A major experiment we did early on was around our community. Essentially we wanted to answer the question - is there a need for a women-only space to discuss money?

We started off with a gender-agnostic community, which grew organically with both men and women joining. However, we saw that men tended to take over conversations and women tended to be silent/take a backseat. We then converted the community to a women-only space, and the floodgates just opened. Women were more vocal, and comfortable and had no fear of being judged. That laid the foundation of our women-only money-focused community.

We then raised a Pre-seed round from both institutional funds and angels to further scale and experiment as we worked towards our vision of building a full-stack digital bank for urban Indian women.

The two hardest parts about building a business are acquiring the right talent and funding. The former is harder than the latter. For both, we needed to find the believers - folks who would stick by us and wade through the storms with us.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Our community-centric product has network effects built-in. By building a cohesive community of women who are looking to manage their money better, we were able to drive stickiness and retention on our platform.

Our growth strategies are content-driven. Deep compassion for our audience, and deeply empathizing with their pain points helped. We didn't want to be just another personal finance platform but curated our education and content using a women-centric lens. We took a deep dive into understanding what financial challenges women had.

Performance marketing via Facebook and Instagram has worked well. Furthermore, we work on B2B2C channels via corporate partners, content collaborations, and community tie-ups to get in front of our captive audience of urban women in their 20s and 30s. Lastly, a well-thought-out PR strategy has been critical for us to not only leverage media platforms for growth, but also to establish trust with our audience.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We are currently pre-revenue and have been working on engagement with our community through education, and discussions around money.

We’ve crossed 30,000 monthly active users
Users spend an average of 8 minutes per session on our app

As we will continue to build that part of our product, we are starting to introduce curated financial products for women, with the launch of The Power Card.

The Power Card is India's first card designed for women - and we are currently accepting women on our waitlist. The audience can expect a first-of-its-kind women-focused credit product, with customized reward programs and other features designed keeping women's pain-points, goals, and behavior patterns in mind. Only 12% of credit cards in India are owned by women, and Basis is changing that with its hyper-focused Power Card product, and education and community initiatives around credit.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The biggest learning as we’ve built Basis is that as entrepreneurs we need to be thick-skinned and have a strong appetite for uncertainty. While we work towards our long-term vision, the path to getting there can look very different from what we planned.

Being ok with rejections from investors, failed experiments, and challenges while hiring the right talent - are all part of the game. With Basis, we had no template to work off of (nobody has built anything like this anywhere in the world), and that makes the journey tough - but also super rewarding.