How Yes Madam’s first employee is now charting its Rs 2,000-crore path

In 2017, when India’s beauty and wellness industry was already touching nearly ₹80,000 crore, the on-demand beauty-at-home category was still a foggy idea, with no proven playbook. It was small, untested, and nowhere close to being recognised as a category.

But that’s exactly what made the opportunity audacious for Yes Madam. While the rest of the industry was doubling down on salons and offline expansion, Yes Madam was operating out of a 100- sq ft rented flat in Ghaziabad, with just three people running the show: Mayank Arya, Aditya Arya, and a young IITian named Dalai Roopdhar Nanda Goutham. 

He wasn’t just the company’s first employee. As the founders recall, Goutham became everything in those early days — the strategist, the hustler, the operations guy, the unofficial logistics manager. He literally put the team in a vehicle and shifted the startup to a 1,000 sq ft office in Noida when it was time to scale, a moment the founders still see as the first turning point in Yes Madam’s growth story. And while the outside world mostly associates Yes Madam’s rise with Mayank and Aditya, inside the walls of the company, everyone knew there was a third force holding the engine together: Goutham.

From hiring the earliest teams, to bringing in the entire Housejoy powerhouse talent when the brand needed operational muscle, to shaping acquisition and retention experiments, Goutham quietly became the company’s invisible foundation.

And now, seven years later, he’s back, not as an employee, but as the Chief Business Officer of Yes Madam. From doing BTL activations and society demos in the early hustle days to now competing at a national brand level, the journey has come full circle. The man who once helped take Yes Madam from zero to one crore has returned with a far bigger mandate, to take the company from ₹200 crore to ₹2,000 crore. “Some stories are not meant to end. My journey with Yes Madam never felt finished. We built the foundation once, and now I’m back to build the skyscraper,” he told e4m.

Building Before The Playbook Existed

While Goutham had just joined the brand a week back, his journey with Yes Madam goes way deeper, and technically starts much earlier. Back in 2015, when he was with Housejoy, he had already begun thinking about building something of his own in the men’s grooming space. That period exposed him to the early hyperlocal boom, the chaos of scaling operations, and a growing belief that beauty and grooming could become a massive consumer category.

However, destiny had different plans. In 2017, he met Yes Madam’s founders, Aditya and Mayank, and realised instantly that they shared the same belief system. “I joined Yes Madam because the founders were clear, transparent and genuinely obsessed with building the right solution. That’s what convinced me,” he told e4m.Back then, Yes Madam wasn’t operating with funnels, dashboards or SOPs. It was operating purely on instinct and conviction. The hypothesis was simple but execution was anything but: if pricing transparency, hygiene and convenience could be standardised, home-beauty could go mainstream. To prove it, everything had to be done manually. Goutham was in the trenches, convincing RWAs to allow beauticians in, scheduling and rescheduling bookings himself, building hygiene protocols from scratch, calming upset customers to learn where the frictions were, and training beauticians in trust and behaviour, not just services. The early days weren’t romantic, he said. 

“Trust didn’t exist, the home-service format was new for partners, and consumers didn’t believe “beauty at home” could be safe or professional. But every day of friction sharpened the understanding of what the category really needed. “To scale supply with quality, he eventually brought the entire Housejoy beauty team into Yes Madam — merging learnings, networks and on-ground know-how. From micro-location mapping to performance incentives and rating-based routing, the foundations of the company’s playbook were built in this phase.

By the time Goutham moved on, the playbook for 0 to 1 was written.

The Long Way Back To Yes Madam

After scripting the early playbook at Yes Madam, Goutham went on to spend the next twelve years building and scalling across Schlumberger, Housejoy, HungerBox, WhiteHat Jr, upGrad and Sharda University. Each stop added a new layer, he added. “From on-ground operations to enterprise sales, from category building to retention engines, from GTM strategy to owning P&L outcomes.”By the time he wrapped that chapter, he had evolved into a scale-ready operator who could build predictable growth systems inside large organisations. 

“Across industries, my role always gravitated toward the same thing, launch, fix and scale. Whether it’s a 10-member startup or a 10,000-member company, growth fundamentals don’t change. “But even as he worked across sectors, the emotional thread with Yes Madam never severed. He kept tracking every milestone — the app launch, the first million customers, the entry into new cities, the new leadership hires. And privately, he always knew there might be a time when paths would converge again. However, he couldn’t as he was in different cities only until last year.

According to Goutham, his return isn’t about rescuing the company, it is about unlocking its next leap. “Yes Madam had already proven the product–market fit, crossed the ₹200-crore ARR mark, and reached a point where the question was no longer “Can this work?” but “How do we scale this, sustainably, profitably and defensibly, in a category now dominated by giants like Urban Company?”

For Goutham, the return felt less like a job change and more like unfinished business. This time, he isn’t coming back to hustle through bookings or negotiate entry with RWAs — he’s returning to steer Yes Madam through its next phase of disciplined, tech-led scale. “I helped take Yes Madam from zero to one. Now I want to help take it from ₹200 crore to ₹2,000 crore, as the first big move,” he says.

According to him, the growth story of yes madam ahead will be powered by technology, predictability and customer love.

Taking Yes Madam From ₹200 Crore To ₹2,000 Crore

Goutham’s mandate as CBO is not just about driving revenue growth, it’s about establishing Yes Madam as the undisputed leader in the home-beauty and wellness category.

According to him, the roadmap ahead rests on three pillars: expanding responsibly across multiple cities while keeping profitability at the core, deepening the category beyond traditional beauty services into broader wellness offerings, and building a tech-led model where customer trust, beautician empowerment, and retention compound value rather than relying on discounts.To hit the ambitious ₹2,000-crore target, Goutham is focussing on optimising operational density, streamlining service delivery through AI-driven scheduling and recommendation engines, and ensuring that beauticians are trained, empowered, and fairly rewarded. 

He is also keen on leveraging technology for personalised customer experiences, predictive demand management, and minimal-touchpoint service execution, so that scale does not dilute quality. On the marketing and brand front, the plan, according to him, is to evolve from the early BTL-heavy model to a full-fledged brand presence that combines offline trust-building with online visibility and retention strategies.

Goutham’s leadership announcement comes at a time when the company has just delivered one of its strongest comebacks yet. FY25 was a milestone year for the company as its revenue surged 232% to ₹94 crore and EBITDA jumped a staggering 1,600%. For a brand that is still bootstrapped, serving 8.2 lakh+ consumers a year across 60+ cities, the numbers reflect something deeper. And now, with the company finally in its strongest financial shape, Goutham steps back in. “FY26 is on track to close at ₹200 crore, setting the foundation for the long-term ₹2,000-crore vision,” he concluded.