Medycin: 58 orders, 4 km, one bike

Medycin is what I’m calling my attempt at 15-minute medicine delivery. The thesis is simple: medicines should reach your door faster than pizza, at a price you don’t have to negotiate at the counter, with the option to refill predictably and store your prescriptions somewhere that isn’t a kitchen drawer.

This post is the story of the pilot. Four weeks. One pharmacy. One bike. Me.

The pilot

I ran the pilot in Channi Himmat, Jammu, J&K. A small 4 km service radius around the area I grew up in. No app, no fancy onboarding. Just three pieces:

A WhatsApp number people could message.
One local pharmacy I had partnered with for inventory.
A bike. Mine. With me on it.

I gave a flat 15% discount on every order and charged nothing extra for delivery or packaging. I wanted to see if the experience would land, not whether I could price it well.

How it worked

I’d spend weekday evenings and weekends inside the pharmacy. Take orders on WhatsApp. Pack them. Hop on the bike. Deliver. Average delivery time was 9 minutes.

Marketing was as local as the operation:

6 standees in the area: ₹12,000 (₹2,000 each)
4,000 pamphlets distributed door-to-door: ₹6,000 (₹1.5 each)
Bike petrol for 4 weeks: ₹800

Total cash burn for the pilot: about ₹19,000. The rest of the leverage came from people, not money. Friends put it on their WhatsApp status and Instagram stories. A designer friend helped with anything visual. A senior engineer friend kept me honest on the prototype.

The numbers

After four weeks of operating:

58 orders fulfilled.
19% of incoming requests went unfulfilled, mostly due to no stock at the partner pharmacy, operations constraints on my end, or addresses outside the service radius.
₹190 average order value.
Over 90% of orders were COD.

Category split:

70% over-the-counter
22% pharma cosmetics
8% prescription-based

What I actually learned

The interesting stuff doesn’t show up on a metrics dashboard. It shows up in WhatsApp threads and doorstep small talk.

People want subscriptions. More than 15 customers asked about monthly refill subscriptions for chronic medications. Once a household has a fixed list, the manual reorder loop is friction they’re happy to pay to remove.

Late nights and early mornings are gold. Customers were openly willing to pay a premium for medicines outside pharmacy hours, after 10 PM or before 8 AM. The child with a 2 AM fever. The grandparent who ran out of BP medication on a Sunday morning. The market has almost no answer for this slot today.

Nobody knows where their prescriptions are. Several customers asked if Medycin could just store their prescriptions for them, so they wouldn’t have to keep reprinting or hunting through drawers.

Reminders matter more than I expected. People wanted nudges to take their medicines on time. Adherence is a real problem and an obvious one to solve.

Late delivery is sometimes fine. For prescription medicines that aren’t easy to find at every pharmacy, customers were happy with a few hours of wait or even next-day, as long as someone actually fulfilled the order instead of sending them on a wild goose chase.

The honest takeaway: customers don’t think of “buying medicine” as one job. It’s at least four. Speed when they need it now. Predictability for chronic conditions. Knowledge of what to take and when. And certainty that the thing they need will actually show up.

What’s next: HSR Layout, Bangalore

A pilot in Jammu is a strong signal but a small data set. To know if this scales, I want to repeat it where the demand is denser, the competition is sharper, and the feedback loop is faster. That’s Bangalore.

If I set Medycin up in HSR Layout with a real (small) team, the action plan looks like this:

Tie up with at least 3 local pharmacy stores.
Hire 6 delivery partners, more if demand calls for it.
Hire 2 people for operations.
Spend on marketing across online and offline channels, with whatever moves the needle.
Build a proper web app so ordering doesn’t depend on me being awake.

Rough annual cost to run HSR Layout with this setup: about ₹80,00,000. That’s salaries, marketing, packaging, and miscellaneous.

I’m cutting the build cost where I can. The web app I’ll build myself, calling in favors from friends with engineering and design taste. And a friend has agreed to sublet me his flat. That’s my bedroom by night and Medycin HQ by day. Board meetings, samosa parties, and code reviews, all in one room.

The reference points are encouraging. Swish (10-minute food delivery) is already doing 300+ orders/day in HSR Layout. Pincode by PhonePe crossed 10 lakh app downloads. Farmako has a pharma store running in Delhi. There is a real market here.

Why I’m not worried about Swiggy or Zomato

Someone on X asked me a fair question: this is one product launch away from Swiggy or Zomato eating you alive. What’s the plan?

My answer:

The incumbents aren’t built for this. Pharmeasy and Tata 1mg were not designed as quick-commerce platforms. Their distribution centers, inventory mix, and unit economics all assume a 1 to 3 day delivery window. Retrofitting that for 15 minutes is not a feature toggle.

Pivot time is real. Swiggy and Pharmeasy already announced a strategic partnership for this exact reason. Building the right infrastructure takes longer than spinning up a feature flag.

The market is opening up, not closing. Amazon Tez is entering. There have been public talks about Amazon and Swiggy Instamart. The space is fragmenting before it consolidates, which is exactly the moment to enter.

But the deeper answer is that I don’t think of medicine delivery as a single feature. The plan is to use quick commerce as a wedge into something much larger.

The bigger picture

If quick-commerce distribution works, Medycin becomes infrastructure, not a product.

Quick-commerce distribution. Collaborations with local pharmacies, wholesalers, and eventually dark stores for the categories that lend themselves to it.
Franchise model. Think of it as OYO for pharmacies. Bring existing neighbourhood stores onto a shared software and operations stack. There is a famous Y Combinator request-for-startups for the clinic version of this same idea.
Strategic acquisitions. Roll up smaller players to expand the network without rebuilding from scratch every time.
Deep-tech R&D. Modern healthcare problems leveraging AI: diagnostics, manufacturing, supply chain.
Collaboration over competition. I’d rather partner with someone solving an adjacent problem than try to do everything alone. I met the Blinkit team about this last month.

A useful analogy: China has more than 100 EV manufacturers. The Volkswagen Group alone owns Audi, Bentley, Porsche, and Skoda, each pointed at a different segment of the same industry. Healthcare is at least that large. Selling medicines is not the prize. It’s the door.

The honest part

My biggest constraint right now is money. I have a full-time job and I’m building Medycin on evenings and weekends. That’s enough to run a pilot. It is nowhere near enough to run HSR Layout the way it deserves.

I don’t believe in doing two things at 50%. Half-effort never produces a real outcome. If Medycin is going to work, it needs full attention, not the leftover hours. So I’m looking to raise enough capital to run Medycin properly for at least two years.

This is, in the most literal sense, a hustle acquisition. I have put in the unglamorous work to prove the model in a small market on a tiny budget. If you’re an early-stage investor who likes founders who ship before they pitch, I’d like to talk.

Schedule a call: cal.com/arjunbharti/medycin-quick-chat.

Useful links

If you’ve read this far and any of it resonates, my DMs are open. Some of the best Medycin conversations I’ve had started with a stranger asking, “wait, how do the unit economics actually work?” I’m happy to be that stranger for someone else.