Column | Saurabh Bothra: mum’s the word

Saurabh Bothra, the yoga guru behind Habuild, builds a community of women through daily online classes and empathy.

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.

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.”