What women want: Insights from founders of digital platforms for Indian women

There is no dearth of credit cards in the market. Yet, when financial education platform Basis announced India’s first payment card for women, the waitlist swelled to 5,000+ in only three days.

Professional networking platform LinkedIn has been around for 20+ years with 100 million users from India. But in 2020, leap.club created a networking platform exclusively for women. Today, they have over 15,000 paying customers in 300+ cities.

The number of platforms built for women, often by women, in India is rising. From healthcare to education, travel, fashion, and money, they are present in every sector, catering to Indian women from diverse demographic and social backgrounds.

What unique needs and aspirations of women users do they address? We spoke to the founders of six women-focused digitally native startups to find out.

A safe, judgement-free space

Societal norms, biases and gender expectations play a big role in shaping women’s experiences. All too often, they leave women feeling judged, uneasy, and vulnerable. Ahead of a family wedding, I remember an aunt saying wistfully that she wanted a certain style of saree blouse, but her tailor refused to stitch it.

“He told me I am too old for this style and people would laugh,” she said.

Such accounts of masterjis playing fashion gatekeepers are aplenty on Instagram. If you consider instances of women being touched inappropriately during measurement, the horror stories are many more.

Binks, backed by Y Combinator, is an online tailoring service that solves this with an all-woman design team and the use of tech to make the measurement process contactless.

“Smart Measurement is an AI-powered feature on the Binks app. Customers need to take just two photos (profile and front) from which we capture 40 unique measurements to tailor the perfect fit. And no, these photos are only scanned, never stored. As women, our designers understand only too well the desires and vulnerabilities of customers. They act as friends, offering helpful suggestions and brainstorming outfit ideas, a complete contrast to the terrible tailoring experiences we’ve all had,” said Aamna Khan, co-founder of Binks.

The weight of scrutiny and judgement is felt by women no matter where they go. Often, this results in them not speaking up in open forums. In the early days of Basis, the team created a Facebook group to discuss personal finance.

“Though we had members from all genders, conversations were dominated by men,” said Dipika Jaikishan, co-founder of Basis. “But once we made it a women-only group, the floodgates opened. Women contemplating a separation and trying to put their finances in place, married women trying to build small savings for themselves, early-career women who’d been coerced into buying ULIPs by a family friend… they all had questions and stories that they were not comfortable sharing in a forum full of men.”

Ragini Das, co-founder of leap.club, shared a similar observation.

“When women walk into a meeting room, it’s usually full of males. Smoke break huddles are usually full of males. Even on online platforms, women have a tougher time to just be themselves. A platform like LinkedIn is great to get you jobs and distribution, but can you have honest conversations and be vulnerable there?”

This insight, that women need a trusted place where they can be the true version of themselves, is what led to the creation of leap.club.

“Women network differently, make friends differently, their hurdles in career growth look different—so it made sense to launch a network built only for women. Today, our members are cracking business partnerships, making career moves, and finding advisors, accountability partners and travel buddies by virtue of being on the platform together,” Das said.

By creating safe, judgement-free spaces for women where they can freely ask for help and speak their mind, these platforms are succeeding where others have not.

Rooted in empathy, understanding

Most digital platforms and solutions are supposed to be gender-neutral but their design carries gender biases. Take travel booking sites: while they have ratings for ambience, value for money and location, hardly any address the most fundamental needs of female travellers. Are there clean restrooms and sufficient breaks during a bus journey? Is the hotel located in a safe, well-lit area?

Priyansha Mishra, founder of On Her Way, a community-led platform that helps women travel fearlessly, shared an incident of her friends being harassed on a top-rated bus service. Even after reporting the incident and raising the issue on social media, all the aggregator did was offer a refund. The bus service continues to be listed on the platform.

“Men’s voices overpower those of women travellers on these platforms. No travel platform is slicing reviews or ratings by things that actually matter to women,” said Mishra.

On Her Way addresses this by connecting women travellers with a ‘local gal pal’ at their destination who can help with everything from personal recommendations to support in case of an emergency.

Another example of women being treated as invisible users is with credit cards, where most rewards (airport lounge access, flying miles) are geared towards the travelling male. The Basis Power Card caters to interests beyond these by offering more than 40 rewards curated for women through tie-ups with brands in food & beverages, beauty, wellness, home needs, baby and pet care, fashion, and more.

Healthcare is another space notorious for its poor understanding of women’s needs. Menopause poses a plethora of health challenges, from mood swings to hot flashes, fatigue, and urogenital issues. Hormonal changes at this time also impact cardiovascular and osteo-muscular health. Even so, many doctors take the view that menopause is inevitable and is something to be endured.

Swathi Kulkarni, co-founder of Elda Health, a digital healthcare platform for women over 35, corrected me when I referred to Elda as a niche platform.

“Menopause is a challenging, non-optional life stage for 50 percent of the world’s population and takes up as much as one-third of a woman’s lifetime. Yet, there is no dedicated ecosystem to support them or offer guidance,” she said.

Elda helps women tackle menopause by bringing together doctors, dieticians, yoga teachers, and health coaches trained in women’s healthcare to offer sustained support programmes. Elda’s design takes into consideration the everyday challenges faced by their users.

“Given their family and work commitments, most women are unable to login at a specific time every day, which is why all our video sessions are recorded for anytime access. To ask a quick question on our forum or chat with their care manager, users prefer to use their phones. But they need a larger screen when following a yoga class or fitness session. So we chose to build an app as well as a desktop interface,” Kulkarni said.

Women usually take care of everyone except themselves. Recognising this behaviour, Elda uses data to track users’ adherence to their health habits and send automated nudges when someone fails to meet them.

“But with the second miss, we have a care manager pinging the user personally. Just having someone check in on them is a novel experience for many women and it proves to be very effective as a follow-up,” said Kulkarni.

While an understanding of user psychology and behaviour is essential for any product, these platforms have discovered gender-specific nuances and tailored their UX (user experience) to address them.

Thriving female communities

Aspire For Her is a career platform with an ambitious mission: to help 1 million women enter and stay in the workforce by 2025. It all started when banking veteran Madhura DasGupta Sinha came across a dismaying statistic. Though India has more females graduating every year, the percentage of women in the workforce dropped from an already low 31.8 percent in 2005 to 20.5 percent in 2020. In the Global Gender Gap Index 2022, India ranked 12th from the bottom.

“Most young girls in India have no professionally successful female role models. We believe that if she can see it, she can be it,” said DasGupta Sinha.

Aspire For Her addresses the problem by bringing together over 225,000 employers such as IBM, Google and AWS, top educational institutions, entrepreneurs, and women in leadership on one platform. According to DasGupta Sinha, the real hero is Aspire For Her’s deeply engaged community.

“To bring together women role models and aspirants, we have created 15+ communities such as Girls in School, Women in College, Return to Work, EntrepreNaari, and HER Sports ki Champion. Depending on their professional aspirations and career stage, women find learning, coaching, and mentorship opportunities here,” she said. “Our learning programmes are also cohort-based. In these communities, we’ve noticed that the girls go out of their way to motivate and support each other.”

When a cohort of students from rural Jharkhand joined Aspire For Her but struggled with the basics of communication and Office Suite, their peers volunteered their time on Sundays to teach them.

Anand Sinha, co-founder of leap.club, echoed the sentiment.

“The biggest thing that has stood out for me as a co-founder and male is how much our members (women) want to see other members (women) succeed. They are here not only to find what they need but to genuinely put up their hand and help in every way they can,” he said.

Unsurprisingly, every one of the platforms I spoke to has a thriving community, either within their platform or on WhatsApp. Women going through menopause want to share their highs and lows and hear others’ experiences. Women planning trips prefer recommendations and opinions from other women. Women managing their finances want to know how others do their budgeting.

Fundamentally, women want to connect with other women. A UCLA study on biobehavioural patterns suggests that this is a genetic tendency particularly evident in stressful times. While males have a fight-or-flight response, females have a tend-and-befriend response. They gravitate towards social groups, particularly with other females, to protect themselves and reduce distress.

This is probably why even as the product side of On Her Way was wound down in March 2022, the platform remains active.

As Mishra wrote in her closure note, “This Saturday, a woman from our community pulled together another of our meetups in Bangalore. Our WhatsApp group is buzzing with women exchanging travel tips, ideas and even planning trips together. Our community keeps the community alive.”

In some of these cases, the product stemmed from the community. In others, the community was built around the product. One thing was evident: the success of the product depends on the success of the community.

More than just business

An oft-quoted statistic is that women drive 70-80 percent of all consumer spending, either directly or through influence. This is why they make lucrative targets for marketers. But how easy or difficult are women as customers? According to Jaikishan of Basis, they’re certainly more loyal.

“Women take their time to trust a brand. But once the relationship is established and their trust is won, they don’t switch for frivolous reasons. Whereas men are likely to have three different apps for anything, switching to whichever offers a more attractive deal,” she said.

Retaining women’s trust is a delicate balance, though. Aamna Khan of Binks said that women feel more passionately about their choices, be it love or hate. When actor Nitya Menen loved her first Binks experience, she sent the team a personal voice note several minutes long, thanking them over and over for her clothes.

“Most of the ratings we get are extremes—either a 1 or a 5. Our customer reviews are often personal and on average, about 250 words long. I haven’t seen customers take the time to write such detailed reviews at any of the other digital products I’ve helped build,” said Khan.

Women users also tend to express more vulnerability. At Elda, it is not uncommon for users to call their care managers to talk about a difficult day they’re having. When Aspire For Her held an in-person event, a participant made an emotional speech and hugged Sinha, saying how support from the platform had turned her life around.

Word-of-mouth and referrals are key growth drivers for these platforms, given that their users form strong personal connections with them.

By creating safe spaces, fostering communities, and earning the trust of women users, these platforms are paving the way for a more inclusive and empowering digital landscape for women in India. However, not every woman-focused brand has tasted success: some have shut down; others have pivoted.

So, we come back to the original question: what does it take to build a business for women? A gender-sensitive lens, empathetic design, and a deep understanding of the user's journey. And, of course, the ability to translate these insights into a product that effectively solves user problems.

Gowri Kishore is a freelance writer and content strategist.