Meet Saurabh Bothra, IITian-turned-yoga coach who has built a 1 crore-strong wellness community — one habit at a time

Mint

20-06-2025

From a room in Nagpur, Maharashtra, to living rooms around the world, Saurabh Bothra has quietly but powerfully built a wellness revolution. An IIT alumnus and yoga enthusiast, he is the mind behind HaBuild. This "habit-building" platform began as his personal mission to help his mother fight frailty, and has grown into a community of nearly 10 million people. On International Yoga Day 2025, Saurabh Bothra says building consistency is the key to a healthy wellness routine.
The 33-year-old's tryst with yoga began when he was 19 years old. He started roping his engineering juniors to practice yoga together when he was in the fourth year of college himself. But it was only after graduation that he took to learning how to teach yoga properly from the Art of Living International Center.
What was the turning point? He says it was during Covid-19 when his mother asked him to suggest her four yoga poses for knee pain. He requested her to join his session, following which she would ask him to simplify terms like hamstring, glute muscles and more.
"Once we started the solving problem for her, it became so simple for me to reach out to other moms. Many women tend to think that they do household work and that is exercise enough. But we started reaching out to more women, asking them to join our sessions and see if it makes any difference. We were doing free sessions initially, and then it just became viral," Bothra tells LiveMint in an interview.
Today, his community has over 10 million users, who are gently nudged into making a habit of a wellness routine, not so much as a challenge, but as a lifestyle shift. Saurabh Bothra, also the face of the platform with a Yoga Everyday motto, eases you into the journey with guided yoga, breathwork, live check-ins, and community motivation, hoping people continue to simply "show up" day after day.
I had severe asthma as a kid. I used to fall sick every day. There was some or the other allergy I would catch, my immunity was low and I was not able to play sports. This was norm. When I was in college, I happened to attend a yoga program without knowing it would help me with my asthma issue. I liked doing the practices they mentioned. After a few months, I realized my overall health felt better. When something is going wrong, you notice it faster. But when things are going right, it takes time for you to notice. So, it took me some time to realize that yoga was helping me.
My grandfather had done his MBBS in 1955. So, there was already an interest around Ayurveda and naturopathy in the house. I happened to do engineering from IIT, but I was more interested in being a doctor or getting to know more about how the body functions. So there was an interest which got ignited when I started practicing yoga.
Yes, I think the combination of engineering and the learnings that my grandfather gave us, is very important. While we teach yoga online, there is so much that happens with the technology that makes it come to life. Otherwise, it is so difficult as we have almost 1.03 crore people who have signed up for our program. It would be impossible to be able to deal with this without the technology background. Saurabh Bothra says his wellness platform is aimed at mothers.
After teaching yoga for around seven years during my voluntary work, I realized that it was so difficult for people to become consistent with it. I was trying to make people more aware about the benefits of yoga, but it was not helping in any way. During Covid-19, I had enough time to understand how to make a habit out of yoga. I genuinely wanted people to make yoga a consistent part of their life. So, I started reading more about habits. I started experimenting with what I could do in the class so that people become more regular. We used the fundamentals of habit-building.
Our mind needs instant gratification. In my classes, we give that by measuring the habit itself by tracking attendance. People care whether they are doing it or not, and if you start giving gratification, you can actually hook them to the habit part. The second thing I realized was that for habits to form, there is something called as variable reward. For that, we avoid telling people what's going to happen in the next class, and maintain variety.
Education and awareness are significantly important. It is a lot of hard work to break the notion that a person has to be there for the entire 45-minute session. When someone signs up, we tell them that consistency does not have to be 45 minutes in a day. It can be also 5 minutes in a day. The focus should be on showing up. It is not even important to do it the right way or the perfect way initially. Just show up and do whatever your body allows. And most times, people actually end up doing the entire 45 minutes when they show up.
Frequency becomes important. Remember how we brushed our teeth as kids even if we didn't want to? The frequency of doing it so many times made it so ingrained that now laziness, lack of motivation, sleeping late at night, waking up late doesn't matter to us. We still brush our teeth. That can happen with exercise also, if the frequency is high.
Reading is one habit that I have struggled with. It is important for someone like me to read more to get more information, stay updated. So, I try to read blogs and shorter articles or summaries of big books. But it's very difficult for me to read. The moment I start reading, I go to sleep. That can work even if I have had 8 hours of proper deep sleep. There's only one book I genuinely feel made a big difference in my life, and I was able to complete it. That is Atomic Habits by James Clear. It gives me more ideas of what can I do for people to make their habits stronger.
I think the West had a role to play to make yoga cool again. I don't think I'm someone who's making yoga cool or the platform is making it cool. In fact, we would say that we are creating a space for people to embrace their imperfection, right? Everyone wants to be perfect in every form, and I think HaBuild allows people to be themselves. We don't intend to make yoga cool at all or that's not what our goal is. If it's happening by the way, it's great.
When you talk about Gen-Z, almost 20 percent of our audience is younger. We primarily intend to make our content for mothers. All our programs are designed to reach out to more moms, and when moms do something, they ensure that the entire house, including the husband, kids, parents and in-laws, are doing it too. A mom is usually the last person to do something consistently for herself. When she truly does something, it sets the right example for the entire house. That's how a whole mix of people are joining our sessions.
I don't think we have done a good job in terms of packaging. I genuinely believe that if something is good, the packaging becomes less important. When we talk about dry fruits, the packaging may make it look more interesting, but the real value is in eating the dry fruit. When people realize that the dry fruit is good even if it does not have a good packaging, it will still get word-of-mouth publicity.
I think what we have done is shown people that yoga is beneficial and more importantly how can you become consistent with it. When people see the benefit, they tell others.
There are days that really get to me. My best practice to deal with stress is to go to sleep. So the days I'm busier, I go to sleep early so that I can make sure that my next day becomes better. When things go beyond my capacity to deal with it, I simply go to bed.
Drink a lot of water. Get up from you seat and move around a lot more. Practice deep breathing. Sleep before 11 p.m. Workout for 45 minutes at least thrice a week. A sixth tip is - don't try to do everything together, otherwise we usually fail and go into the 'all-or-nothing' trap.