Nidhi Saxena on Entrepreneurship, Wellness, and Building iShots from Scratch

Entrepreneurship, for me, has never been a “leap of faith” moment. It’s been a long habit of solving problems, learning how systems break, and then rebuilding them better. I’ve spent over two decades across corporate leadership and entrepreneurship, and what that mix teaches you is simple: ideas are cheap, execution is everything, and consistency is the only real advantage that compounds over time.

Before iShots, I had already started and scaled two ventures from scratch Karmic Lifesciences and Zoctr Health. That experience changed how I think about building. You stop romanticising the “launch”, and you start respecting the unglamorous parts: people, processes, governance, supplier reliability, unit economics, and the discipline of doing the same thing well again and again until trust becomes automatic.

It also shaped my personal standard as a founder: I’m not interested in building something that sells once. I’m interested in building something that earns a second purchase, a third, and then becomes a default. That’s what a real company is repeatable value delivered without drama.

Somewhere along the way, I realised wellness isn’t a separate category from entrepreneurship. It’s the infrastructure underneath it.

People talk about wellness like it’s a weekend activity or a “perfect routine.” But if you’re building anything teams, products, distribution, a brand your nervous system becomes part of the business. Your energy isn’t just personal; it becomes operational. And in modern life, the real issue isn’t that people have low energy. It’s because their energy is unstable.

You can be productive and still feel off. You can be successful and still feel wired, foggy, reactive, or constantly on the edge of burnout. Most people aren’t struggling because they don’t care. They’re struggling because life is designed to drain attention: screens, stress, deadlines, overstimulation, and constant mental switching.

That’s why I don’t like wellness that demands you become a different person. I don’t believe in shame-based wellness, or fear-based wellness, or wellness that only works when life is ideal. I believe in practical support things that hold up on a random Tuesday, not just on day one of a “new routine.”

This is also where my background matters. Building in health-related ecosystems before iShots taught me that credibility is fragile, and trust is earned through consistency. People don’t buy

“ingredients” or buzzwords. They buy outcomes they can feel, and they only trust what behaves predictably over time.

iShots came from the intersection of those two worlds: the founder’s obsession with repeatability and the human need for stable, everyday support.

Formally, iShots Beverages Private Limited was incorporated in Mumbai on 6 March 2025.

But the real “from scratch” story isn’t the date on paper. It’s what happened next: deciding what we stand for, what we refuse to do, and what kind of functional beverage brand could actually earn a place in someone’s daily life.

From the beginning, our direction was clear ready-to-drink, zero-sugar functional beverages in modern formats, built for real lifestyles rather than niche wellness circles and as Founder and Managing Director, I’ve been deeply involved in steering strategy, marketing, and corporate affairs because in the early stages, you can’t treat any of those as separate departments they’re all part of the same promise you’re making to the consumer.

The first hard truth I learned (again) is that “functional” isn’t a label, it’s a responsibility. If you’re building something people consume for a purpose, you have to respect how quickly trust can collapse. One inconsistent experience and the customer stops believing not just in your brand, but in the category.

So building iShots meant obsessing over the parts people don’t see.

It meant formulation work where you don’t just chase trendy ingredients, you chase balance. Taste matters because no one builds a habit around something they have to tolerate. Stability matters because what works in a small test doesn’t always behave the same at scale. Sourcing matters because consistency across batches is what turns a one-time try into a routine. Those aren’t “manufacturing details”; they are the product.

Then there’s the operational reality of beverages: shelf behaviour, packaging compatibility, vendor reliability, quality checks things that don’t show up in branding decks but decide whether a company survives. Manufacturing humbles you because it forces you to design for repeatability, not perfection in one controlled scenario.

And finally, there’s communication. In wellness, brands often choose either fear (“you’re broken”) or fantasy (“this will change your life”). I didn’t want iShots to be built on either. I want it to be built on respect, clear positioning, responsible expectations, and a product experience that does the heavy lifting instead of marketing trying to compensate for gaps.

If I had to summarise what “building iShots from scratch” really means, it’s this: taking the seriousness of health-adjacent trust, combining it with modern consumer expectations, and then doing the slow work of making the experience consistent enough that people come back. That’s the real game.

Because in the end, entrepreneurship isn’t about launching. It’s about earning belief repeatedly.