Before starting Yes Madam, Aditya Arya had spent nearly a decade in the Merchant Navy. Entrepreneurship, however, had always been at the back of his mind. The trigger came when his wife and his elder brother Mayank Arya’s wife developed skin irritation after using at-home salon services. When the brothers began investigating, they found a larger problem: customers had little visibility into the products being used. Premium products were often transferred from bulk bottles, leaving questions around authenticity, freshness and hygiene.
The brothers spent the next few months speaking to customers, salon owners and beauty professionals and visiting salons to understand how the industry worked. They saw a gap on both sides. Customers were paying for premium services but had limited control over the products used and often encountered inconsistent hygiene standards. Beauty professionals, meanwhile, were working long hours for monthly incomes of around Rs 10,000-12,000, with limited scope to increase their earnings.
The research also helped the brothers decide what they did not want Yes Madam to become. They were not looking to simply replicate a neighbourhood salon at customers’ homes. The idea was to create a more structured service, where the customer knew what was being used and professionals had a clearer way of earning more. This meant standardising products, pricing and service delivery while building a network of professionals who could be trained and deployed across locations.
That became the basis for Yes Madam, an at-home beauty and wellness platform that connects customers with trained professionals for services such as salon treatments, while using single-use, monodose products to improve hygiene and product transparency.
In December 2016, the brothers started with a small shop in Ghaziabad. Aditya had to make a difficult career choice. “They were concerned because I was leaving behind a stable career in the Merchant Navy, where I was earning around `8-10 lakh monthly,” he said. But he believed the industry needed to change. “I knew that stepping away from a stable career was going to come with major challenges, but I also believed that the biggest rewards come from taking the biggest risks.”
Grassroots Execution
The launch itself was anything but polished. There was no app and no booking on day one. Aditya and Mayank distributed pamphlets in residential societies, put up canopies and spoke to residents themselves. Their initial bookings came largely from family, friends and nearby societies. Aditya’s wife, Garima, handled calls and wrote appointment details in a diary. “As bookings gradually increased, those diary pages started filling up,” he said.
The early customer acquisition was deliberately local because the founders first needed to prove that people would trust an unfamiliar brand with a service that was traditionally bought from a salon. They used society-level activations, personal calls and word-of-mouth rather than spending heavily on marketing. It was also a way to learn directly from customers about pricing, preferred services and their concerns around hygiene. That feedback helped shape the service before the company began investing more heavily in technology and expansion.
The manual process eventually gave way to a website and then a technology platform, but the underlying proposition remained the same: make an often opaque service more predictable for customers while improving the economics for professionals.
Bootstrapped Profitability
The approach has since produced a business that has grown without external capital for most of its journey. Yes Madam posted operating revenue of Rs 195 crore in FY26 and has delivered 100% year-on-year (y-o-y) growth for three consecutive years while remaining profitable. The company raised its first institutional round only this year, a Rs 50 crore Series A from Info Edge’s recently launched growth fund, led by Sanjeev Bikhchandani.
For the founders, raising capital was not the starting point but a consequence of building the business. “We believed in proving the business model first rather than chasing funding early on,” Aditya said. The company now competes with players such as Urban Company and fulfils over 350,000 bookings a month across more than 55 cities.
Its network has grown to more than 10,000 service professionals, who earn an average monthly net income of around Rs 30,000. The top performers earn Rs 50,000-60,000 a month. The organisation, which began with one employee, now has more than 1,000.
The larger bet, therefore, was not simply to take salon services to customers’ homes. It was to standardise an informal and fragmented service around three things the founders felt were missing: transparency for customers, consistency in delivery and better earning opportunities for professionals. The business has taken nearly a decade to reach scale, but the original idea has remained largely unchanged.