Radhika Mohta is a big believer in doing things instead of tossing around ideas without end.

“I’m so biased towards action,” says Mohta. As a serial entrepreneur, she says she has learnt more by taking the first step and reaching out to people than waiting around thinking through every last detail of a venture.

Mohta, a relationship coach, runs a dating accelerator to help people understand what they want from relationships and find their soulmates. She also hosts events and manages a neighbourhood community in a Bengaluru neighbourhood geared towards “social health”—and that’s just scratching the surface.

From Gifts To Poha

Mohta began her career in journalism and marketing but transitioned almost seamlessly into entrepreneurship in 2014 with WowSurprises, a customised gift-giving business that she founded and ran herself.

While she really enjoyed sourcing, customising and delivering the gifts, she says that the business model soon became untenable.

“I remember each and every order and how amazing it was for people,” she says. “But I also remember how it was just difficult at the end of it to even pay my intern.”

However, the experience did get the wheel turning for Mohta. After a stint at a cloud kitchen startup, Mohta decided to make a business out of her passionate love for poha, a popular snack in her hometown of Indore as well as many other parts of the country.

She established RadsPoha, a cloud kitchen that delivered the snack in Bengaluru’s Koramangala neighbourhood.

“I was not even a cook,” Mohta says. But she took the plunge because she had learnt enough about the operational challenges of running a cloud kitchen and saw an opportunity there.

“RadsPoha had amazing reviews on Zomato. There were people who would wait for a Saturday morning just so they could order it, and I loved it,” she adds.

Mohta soon came to terms with the fact that though the cost of making the poha was negligible, logistics costs were eating into her bottom line. So she shut down the cloud kitchen business and took the lessons she learnt to her next pursuit: the world of dating.

Matchmaker’s Magic

Mohta has been in the dating space for more than four years. In 2020, she worked on Eligible, a community of single people who discussed what was and wasn’t working for them in the world of dating.

With co-founder Arjun Singh, she then started Slow Dating, a Discord server that helped set people up on dates. After working on the project for a while, she gained insights into how the dating space worked and what the bottlenecks were.

With her experience in the space, she founded a cohort-based online dating accelerator called Elevate in January 2022 for “marriage-minded singles”. She asserts, however, that it isn’t a matchmaking programme—it’s more about understanding what a person wants out of the experience of dating and helping them achieve that goal.

“I don’t want to get into, ‘hey, come, I’ll set you up with somebody’. I want to get into, what’s the mindset you’re going in with,” she explains. “Do you have clarity about yourself—the kind of relationship that you want, the kind of partner you’re looking for? Are you taking enough actions to get there?”

Many of Mohta’s values as an entrepreneur are reflected in her work as a dating coach. The programme is clearly geared towards action. She says it deals with everything from making eye contact to going to the right places to maximise a person’s chances of finding someone they like. The programme also involves tests and exercises before a participant moves on to one-on-one live sessions with Mohta herself.

The accelerator also deals with setting up attractive social media profiles, learning to have meaningful conversations and dealing with rejection.

“The quality of your relationships defines the overall quality of your life,” Mohta underlines. “Especially for women: If you were to make the most important career decision you’ll ever make, it’s about who you choose as your partner. Because that is going to define your personal, professional life, trajectory and everything.”

Beyond Dating: Social Health

Despite her success in the dating space, Mohta doesn’t limit herself to romantic relationships.

“When people say loneliness is the next big epidemic, it’s basically friendship epidemic because people don’t have friends or those intimate deep friendships where they could go back to as a safe space,” she notes.

Mohta does her part by running HSRisHome, a neighbourhood community in Bengaluru, through Discord. The community organises book clubs, potlucks, food walks and meaningful conversations in an alcohol-free environment.

“For me, the definition of ‘social health’ is pretty simple. It’s ensuring that people have a good social life, that they feel connected to people in their neighbourhood, in their circles, and they can just engage in meaningful conversations where they are.” 

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