Shutting down BimaPe
By: Rahul Mathur
Tags: Startup Lessons, Startup

On 15.09, we announced to the public that we will be winding down our ‘BimaPe’ offering — one hub for your family’s insurance.

After focusing on this product for 8 months, we decided to pause development activity in early July for a couple of reasons:

(1) We were unable to reach our Market-Product Fit (PMF) metrics set in March 2021

Coming out of Y Combinator, we used three input metrics — Activation, Acquisition & Revenue metrics to measure PMF.

Over a 3 month window — we fell short of the targets for each of these three input metrics despite executing ~15 changes (one per week).

(2) Customer feedback

We spoke with 500+ enthusiastic customers who resonated with the problem which gave us the confidence to start up.

However, we’ve realized that many well-wishers and users care more about us (as a team) rather than us (as a company offering a product) — which is nice but not enough to build a real business.

(3) We found another (bigger) problem to solve — more details at the end of this post.

There are simply 3 mistakes which we made

(1) Thinking that Product Vision == Product Strategy

Before writing a single line of code, we created a Product Vision in Figma which was a prototype of what the BimaPe Wallet product would look like in ~6 months and ~12 months.

Sadly, none of us realized that Vision is only a goal. Strategy required us to convert that goal into a coherent set of actions (i.e. which feature to launch, when and why?)

We didn’t spend time planning the actions and jumped straight in from Vision into Execution (which led to sub-optimal Engineering decisons)

(2) Mistook a Design problem for an Engineering problem

A gradual realization for us was that the ‘Technical’ risk in our product was not Engineering related but rather Design related.

Since the underlying insurance product(s) are so complicated, Design is more important than Engineering. And, in fact, this Design problem is NOT something we can solve as an insurance broker — it is a structural issue in the industry.

(3) Stretched ourselves too thin

In the span of 6 months — we trained our PDA model and build customer journeys for ALL Term Life, Health & Motor insurance policies in India (including historic policies going back to 2005)

We learned a lot by launching fast but we also missed out on the focus that a gradual launch provides. As a result — we got bogged down with multiple feature maintenance (with a small Engineering team)

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Coming to where we are today — we haven’t returned our investor capital and shut down the business.

Instead, our team started working on the ‘Verak’ offering in July. We won’t be disclosing details of the same until March 2022 or later. The product recently crossed the US $20,000 monthly net revenue milestone.

Building, launching and scaling the ‘BimaPe’ offering taught us how to work best together as a team. Over the past 3 months, everyone at Verak has been doing their life’s work — we couldn’t be more excited to tell you more when the time is right!

For any persons who signed up to BimaPe and shared their PII — rest assured that we will continue to NOT share your data with any 3rd party without your explicit prior consent; more details of the same (including how we will dispose of the PII) would be available in the inbox of your registered email.

Please feel free to follow our journey on LinkedIn, Twitter or visit https://www.verak.in/ to learn more.

Thank you! 🙏