u/sonianish29

My co-founder and I have spent the last few months building a 24/7 medicine delivery and refill service in the Tricity (Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula). Bootstrapped, about 80k a month, not live yet. Sharing what surprised us and looking for a gut check, because the hardest part was nothing like we expected.

The gap we found isn't access to medicine. If you're on daily meds (BP, sugar, thyroid) and run out at night, the local chemist is shut and the big apps are next-day. But the deeper problem is that nobody knows which nearby shop actually has your specific medicine in stock right now. That inventory is invisible, even to the shop next door. So instead of stocking medicine ourselves, we partner with existing pharmacies and route each order to whoever has it nearest.

The lesson that cost us the most time: pharmacies flat out refuse to run a second software or change how they work. Every model that asks them to dies on contact. The only thing that gets a yes is fitting into what they already do, and giving the ones with no system a dead-simple tool they can run for free. The tech was the easy part. The "please don't make me change anything" was the hard part.

Where we've actually reached, honestly:

- Verbal MOUs with two pharmacies, including the biggest 24x7 one in Mohali. Verbal, not signed.

- Informal demand test in another city; late-night demand is clearly real.

- Customer app and rider app both built, waiting on a DUNS number to list them.

What I'm unsure about and would like input on:

1. India is famously not a membership market (Zomato, Swiggy, Lenskart all struggled). We think health might be different. Has anyone made subscriptions actually work here?

2. Reliability is everything in medicine. One missed refill and trust is gone. How would you de-risk that in the first three months?

3. Onboarding the first 50 pharmacies is slow, manual ground work. Anyone who's done local-supply or kirana-style onboarding, what worked?

Happy to get into the model, the numbers, or the pharmacy side. Tell me where this breaks.

My co-founder and I have spent the last few months building a 24/7 medicine delivery and refill service in the Tricity (Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula). Bootstrapped, about 80k a month, not live yet. Sharing what surprised us and looking for a gut check, because the hardest part was nothing like we expected.

The gap we found isn't access to medicine. If you're on daily meds (BP, sugar, thyroid) and run out at night, the local chemist is shut and the big apps are next-day. But the deeper problem is that nobody knows which nearby shop actually has your specific medicine in stock right now. That inventory is invisible, even to the shop next door. So instead of stocking medicine ourselves, we partner with existing pharmacies and route each order to whoever has it nearest.

The lesson that cost us the most time: pharmacies flat out refuse to run a second software or change how they work. Every model that asks them to dies on contact. The only thing that gets a yes is fitting into what they already do, and giving the ones with no system a dead-simple tool they can run for free. The tech was the easy part. The "please don't make me change anything" was the hard part.

Where we've actually reached, honestly:

- Verbal MOUs with two pharmacies, including the biggest 24x7 one in Mohali. Verbal, not signed.

- Informal demand test in another city; late-night demand is clearly real.

- Customer app and rider app both built, waiting on a DUNS number to list them.

What I'm unsure about and would like input on:

1. India is famously not a membership market (Zomato, Swiggy, Lenskart all struggled). We think health might be different. Has anyone made subscriptions actually work here?

2. Reliability is everything in medicine. One missed refill and trust is gone. How would you de-risk that in the first three months?

3. Onboarding the first 50 pharmacies is slow, manual ground work. Anyone who's done local-supply or kirana-style onboarding, what worked?

Happy to get into the model, the numbers, or the pharmacy side. Tell me where this breaks.