How AppsForBharat GrowsđŸȘŽ

Disrupting the $50B faith-tech industry and learning lessons on category creation and design

Author

Saurabh Kumar
October 04, 2024

Hello Hello! 👋

It's good to have you all back here.

In the past few deep dives (Blinkit, Caratlane, and NoBroker), we have learned about marketplaces, D2C brands, and peer-to-peer businesses - how they navigate through different layers of growth, building a formidable moat in the market.

Today, it’s going to be different. And different, is sometimes beautiful. 😁

We delve into the workings of Apps for Bharat today, a company that carved a new space of devotion with a very straightforward business model - solving user needs without judging them.

Beyond insights on their go-to-market, this deep dive covers two important aspects we haven’t covered so far:

  • Category Creation

  • Finding PMF

From a personal perspective, praying has been a part of my daily ritual since childhood. Lately, I’ve lost touch but when I reminisce about praying, it brings a different kind of peace. There’s something so powerful about devotion, isn’t it? 

I feel great writing about an app that gives courage to millions every day.

On that note, let’s get started.

But first, join your hands, close your eyes, and say
 🙏🙏

Okay. Let’s do it. đŸ•‰ïž

Here’s what to expect in today’s analysis:

  • Zooming in on the faith market

  • How Apps for Bharat Started?

    • Prashant’s Unusual transition from engineering to devotion and the start of Apps for Bharat

  • A Lesson in Category Creation

    • No ocean strategy & Cirque De Soleil

    • The magic triangle

  • Finding PMF

  • How Apps for Bharat’s SriMandir Grows: The GTM Breakdown

    • Divine Engagement Loops (Flowers, Aarti, Suvichaar and more)

    • Beyond basics: Going all-inclusive on devotion

    • Godliness personalized

  • How Apps for Bharat monetizes: Puja, Punya & more

Zooming in on the big big devotion market in India

Large crowd of devotees at Tirupati Temple

If you talk to today’s generation, there’s an implicit assumption that the importance of religion is slowly decreasing with passing generations. However, the data tells a different story - it shows that religion is still hugely important to the majority of the Indian population. For example, the Hindu devotional content channel, T-Series is the second highest subscribed channel on Youtube with 274M subscribers. That’s roughly 50% of the overall active YouTube subscribers from India.

There’s another element that justifies the growing importance of religion - Religious Intensity. Pew Research Center finds that six out of ten Indians pray daily, including 18% who pray multiple times daily. That’s an extreme level of religiosity!

Bottomline - religion matters a lot to people. According to a study, as of 2023, the Indian faith market stands at a whopping $58.56 Bn growing at a CAGR of 8.82%. (Gigantic Addressable Market).

This means there’s every reason for builders and investors to jump right in to build this market. And that’s exactly what has happened. Today, various VC-backed faith-tech startups such as Sri Mandir, VAMA, and AstroTalk exist, serving different niches of Indian devotional needs. 

To see the serious revenue potential of this market, let’s look at these two comments from a spiritual tech cofounder.

Comment 1:

Just recently, during the ongoing Cricket World Cup, a group of Indian cricket team fans organised e-puja through our application and donated INR 25 Lakh to seek God’s blessings

Comment 2:

“We have seen an NRI tech founder and his family spend INR 7 Cr on temple darshans and astrology services in the past few years,”

That said, it’s important to acknowledge that these changes are not driven single-handedly by new startups. Other good macro tailwinds have helped drive this growth. Factors like:

  • UPI revolution: Facilitating microtransactions (chadhawa and donations)

  • Cheap Internet: Penetration of 4G and 5G services enabling videos and live streaming

  • App for everything and everything on app cultural boost by Covid

  • More stress, burnout, and unwavering faith of individuals

  • Price: Online poojas come at half or one-third the price of conventional poojas.

While the entire industry benefited from these changes, Sri Mandir has been the trailblazer that kickstarted the devotion category into motion. So, let’s look at what this actually means. đŸ‘‡

How did Sri Mandir start?

To understand everything about the founding tale of Sri Mandir, we need to know about the founder, Prashant Sachan, and his background first. Prashant was born and brought up in Uttar Pradesh where his father was an HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) Technician. Due to an incident at the job, his father faced severe medical issues, leading to stress in the family. However, in times of distress, his family always looked up to god. Prashant’s parents were devout followers of Hanuman and leaning on faith gave them immense strength. This experience became the foundational source of power for Prashant which ultimately led to building Sri Mandir.

Image of Hanuman, a deeply revered Hindu deity known for love, compassion, strength, and intelligence and the source of strength for Prashant’s family.

After studying mechanical engineering at UPTU (Uttar Pradesh Technical University), Prashant went to IIT Bombay for a Master in Design. After two stints post-graduation at Microsoft and Samsung, he teamed up with his fellow IIT Bombay alumni to co-found a video-based social commerce app called Trell. Over the next few years, Prashant along with his co-founders went on to build Trell that raised $66M and reached a user base of 100 million today with 50 million monthly active users.

While Prashant was at Trell, he wanted to experiment with different apps that could be cross-promoted across the user base of Trell. So, he pooled in a team of developers and designers within Trell to focus on his new venture. He called this little company Apps for Bharat.  Prashant soon exited Trell due to a difference in opinion with the other founders.

While the team made four apps, one of them stood out in terms of popularity and retention - Sri Mandir. A product meeting the needs of the next billion internet users and more importantly, close to his personal experience of religion playing a pivotal role in keeping him going in his dark days.

Apps for Bharat raised $14M from several VC funds and angels including Tiger Global’s Scott Shleifer, Cred’s Kunal Shah, and Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal, among others in 2021. This was followed by another $18M recently from SIG Venture Capital and others.

They have absolutely terrific engagement on the app with monthly active users of 20M and have tie-ups with 50-plus temples across India.

A snapshot of AppsForBharat funding and DAU

Before we jump into Sri Mandir’s PMF, there is something unique about Sri Mandir that we should address. - New category creation. Unlike groceries, pharmacy, or electronics, there weren’t any other tech-first apps in India for devotion. So, let’s go deeper into category creation with 2 case studies and a magic triangle first. 

A Lesson in Category Creation

How many products can you name which are better, smarter, easier, or faster than others?

Lots of them. Right?

Unfortunately, it’s a comparison game. The moment you’ve anchored your product to someone else’s, you’ve fallen into what Christopher Lochhead, a renowned author and a master of category design, calls “The Better Trap”. There’s an entire generation of innovators who have fallen into this trap. Now, following the better path is not entirely wrong - a lot of companies have followed that path and disrupted the status quo by doing things better (Notion vs Google Docs).

However, it means you’re not creating net-new categories for yourself, and rather are making a conscious decision to compete over the same limited space. 

Even the world’s best companies have made this mistake:

You might have heard about the blue ocean vs the red ocean strategy

Red Ocean Strategy vs Blue Ocean Strategy

While pursuing a blue ocean strategy is clearly favorable, both strategies are for winning in an existing category. To design and create a new category, you need to focus on the No Ocean Strategy. 

What’s that?

No ocean strategy is when you take someone who says “I would never be interested in a thing like that” and convert them into a believer.”

Let’s understand this with two examples.

The Case of Candy Crush Saga: Finding a new category of gamers

Candy Crush Saga is a global sensation today. But, the people who are hooked to Candy Crush today, never found gaming interesting before. As Chistopher Lochhead finds: 

Before Candy Crush and many of the swipe & confetti games you now see flashing all over people’s iPads next to you on airplanes and subways, “gamers” were thought to be zit-faced, teenage boys and degenerate men who hadn’t completed intellectual puberty (and whose mothers still did their laundry). And it was assumed (“accepting the premise”) that gamers spent the majority of their waking hours in their parents’ basements, escaping into MMORPGs and other immersive games in 3 major categories: fantasy, war, and action games. As a result, many console and PC gaming companies long dismissed both female gamers and casual gamers as potential audiences. They believed “the ocean” was made of men, ages 18–25 years old, with a particular set of interests.

If you were a gaming company in the 90s and 2000s, and this was your perspective of “the ocean,” then your strategy was to create new and different games for this audience. And your Blue Ocean “Strategy” was to find new and different subcategories of games in uncontested waters, but still very much existed in the frame of “this ocean.”

However, if you rejected the premise (“There is no ocean”) and instead looked to invent net-new ocean for net-new consumers, No Ocean Algebra swung wildly in your favor.

Which is exactly what happened with Candy Crush.

“‘Candy Crush Saga’ was launched by King in November 2012, and by November 2017 it, plus ‘Candy Crush Soda Saga’ and ‘Candy Crush Jelly Saga’ had been downloaded 2.73 billion times. King had revenues of $2.1 billion in the fiscal year which ended September 2015, and in November that same year Activision Blizzard announced it would acquire King for $5.9 billion, in an effort to reach mobile gamers. Co-founder Zacconi owned 9.9% of King, meaning his stake was worth about $584 million. That $5.9 billion price tag is higher than the sums paid for Marvel and Lucasfilm, which Disney bought for around $4 billion each,” according to CNBC.

What happens when you create net-new ocean? (Or mountains, or waves, or rivers?)

The legacy ocean (Activision Blizzard, best-known for creating two games aimed at young adult males and hardcore gamers, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft) has to acquire what they had originally assumed “didn’t matter.” The average Candy Crush player — the core market being women ages 35 years and older — plays for 38 minutes per day. It’s not the ~2 hours an average Call of Duty user plays per day. But, as it turns out, both “oceans” are massively valuable.

Similar to Candy Crush, there’s another interesting 50 year old story of a circus, that gives us a lesson on category creation.

The Case of Cirque du Soleil: Story of the circus that did not find animals to be funny

Up until 1984, circus shows relied on domesticated wild animals kept in captivity to bring in spectators.

They brought bear trainers from the Middle Ages, performed balancing acts on horses, taming and caging multiple exotic beasts. The audience was enthralled looking at the wildest animals controlled by humans. 

However, the industry was shrinking slowly due to other forms of kid's entertainment formats getting popular such as video games and home entertainment, and the increasing people sentiments against animal usage in circuses by animal rights groups.

In 1984, Cirque de Soliel, a circus-producing company, decided to break the century-old tradition of using animals in the circus - starting a new era for the circus industry. Soon, they took the world by storm. 

Humans playing animals in a Cirque de Soleil show

Cirque’s productions have been seen by more than 150 million spectators in more than 300 cities around the world. In less than twenty years since its creation, Cirque du Soleil achieved a level of revenues that took Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey—the once global champion of the circus industry—more than one hundred years to attain. 

What’s made their success interesting is that they did not compete for customers from the existing circus market leaders. They made shows that appealed to adults and corporate clients - attracting a new set of customers with higher wallet sizes. (Having only humans also meant more agility to perform shows at famous venues within the city)

Cirque de Soliel succeeded because it created an uncontested market space, making the competition irrelevant.

To summarize, there are two approaches to category creation:

  • You combine 2 unrelated categories

  • You “find a niche” within a category that invites a new set of customers

Once you’ve found a category like that, how do you go about designing a new category?

The answer is simple. The Magic Triangle.

The  Magic Triangle

The Magic Triangle is the combination of product design, company design, and category design—each side with equal importance, ideally executed at the same time.

The triangle of category design

Product Design: The purposeful building of a product and experience that solves the problem the category needs solved. The goal here is what the business world traditionally calls “product-market fit”—which we see as strategically flawed thinking. What you really want is “product/category fit” (which we’ll clarify later in this letter).

Company Design: The purposeful creation of a business model and an organization with a culture and point of view that fits with the new category. The goal here is company/category fit, meaning you have engineered the right business model and missionary team for the problem you are looking to solve.

Category Design: The mindful creation and development of a new market category, designed so the category will pull in customers who will then make the company its Queen. In marketing terms, this is about winning over popular opinion, and teaching the world to abandon the old and embrace the new.

All three elements—company design, product design, and category design—work together and balance each other to exert great force on a company’s success and value. And the legendary, enduring companies get the three elements of company design, product design, and category design in such a state of synchronicity that they reinforce each other.

Coming back to Sri Mandir, let’s find the elements of the magic triangle in their app.

Firstly, Prashant created the category of praying online, offering on-demand, virtual deity visits for everyone. To give the new category the necessary fuel, he did the following:

Product Design: Sri Mandir is designed with a simple UI, enabling you to offer your prayers with a simple click. It has other spirituality-related segments which makes it a pious place for its users (more on this in the GTM section)

Company Design: Prashant exemplifies a founder-product fit and built a mission-driven team to bring devotion to their phone to people. They made praying digitally normal for 30 million people.

Category Design: Prashant’s biggest challenge was presenting devotion in its new packaging to people without rolling their eyes. This led to the idea of adding music, daily panchaang, Jyotish (astrologer), and more. (We’ll discuss this also in slightly more detail later in this article)

So that’s how Sri Mandir App made a net-new ocean for themselves. Soon, other competing apps launched in this market (Paavan and Sadhana) making the ocean bigger - which is good for all the players in the market.

But, simply creating a new category doesn't guarantee success. You still need to launch, find your product-market fit, and grow. Let’s look at how Apps for Bharat’s Sri Mandir did these. 

Finding PMF for Sri Mandir

Reaching product-market fit is when your startup transitions from an idea to something tangible. It's the point where you confirm that there is genuine demand for your product, that it provides value, and that customers are willing to pay for it. This is a key step before making a substantial investment in sales, so it's important not to rush the process.

During this stage, it's essential to stay focused on the right indicators—getting the right customers, ensuring regular use of the product, demonstrating its value, and securing fair agreements.

Let’s see how Prashant found early product-market fit for Sri Mandir: 

  1. First Client Acquisition: Prashant started by spending INR 500/day on Facebook ads with a simple temple app image. It got him ~100 users/day. This formed the cohort of early adopters - a crucial cohort because they provide the first real-world validation of the product.

  2. Proof of Adoption and Usage: Once you have the initial set of users, the next step is to ensure they are actually using the product and finding it useful. Prashat’s team monitored how these customers were engaging with the product, gathered data on their usage patterns, and looked for signs that they were integrating it into their daily operations. They saw spiky behaviors from a limited set of users out of all the users they had acquired. (power users).

    Prashant also conducted regular interactions with users to identify power users. When a customer went beyond saying “it’s a good app” to explain “how it is so beneficial for them” (in an excited tone), it showed that they cared.

    He also regularly reviewed Play Store reviews. Intense emotional feedback like “Why is my daily pooja streak not considered? đŸ˜­đŸ˜­đŸ˜­â€ and “Why has my chadhawa not shown on the app?” showed that the app was becoming a part of their lifestyle.

In short, Prashant’s team summarized these behaviors to identify if their app patterns mirrored users' offline devotional behavior.

  1. Proof of Value Exchange: The third stage is proving that your product delivers measurable value that justifies the cost. Prashant asked his early ideal customer profile (ICP), customers - You know, it’s very difficult to bear the kind of cost the app needs - server costs, people costs et cetera. To which, he got a resounding response from people saying - I’ll pay for this thing. Just let me know how much.

Once you find proof of value, relook at your ICP and see if there’s a large enough market to capture.

Alright, now that we have discussed how Prashant got the early feels of PMF, let’s dive into their go-to-market strategy.

Sri Mandir’s GTM Breakdown

We’ll start by looking at Sri Mandir’s engagement loops, dive into their business line expansions, and touch lightly on personalization and partnerships.

Divine Engagement Loops (Flowers, Aarti, Suvichaar and more)

Let’s understand this with an image and a video from Sri Mandir.

Homepage of Sri Mandir App

When you open the Sri Mandir app, you're immediately greeted by your own personal shrine. As the demo shows, you can also explore a wide array of Hindu deities, seamlessly switching between them. Each deity offers multiple avatars, allowing you to swipe through until you find the one that truly speaks to your spirit.

Once you've chosen your shrine setting, you can dive into an immersive virtual arti (prayer) experience with your selected God or Goddess. Light the arti lamp, ring the temple bells, blow the conch, and move the arti plate around the deity—all with a few simple taps, bringing ancient rituals to life in an engaging, interactive way.

But it doesn’t stop there. You can also make ritual offerings—digital flowers, leaves, Gangajal (holy water), garlands, and more—all while enjoying a sleek, built-in audio player filled with thousands of devotional songs, mantras, chalisas, and bhajans dedicated to the many deities of the Hindu dharma. It’s a soulful, immersive journey of worship right at your fingertips!

This is the primary engagement loop of Sri Mandir App - assisting you in offering virtual prayers to your god the same way you would do at your home. Except, you can do this anytime, anywhere.

Meeting Bhakti Chakra daily streaks on Sri Mandir

Beyond basics: Going all-inclusive on devotion

In our last newsletter on How NoBroker Grows, we covered how marketplaces can build their differentiations using one of the three strategies: Comprehensiveness, Curation, or Exclusivity.

Sri Mandir has built its ecosystem taking the comprehensive route. Listening to their users, Sri Mandir has carefully added all things devotion to their platform. Offering daily prayers to the god and reading mythological literature, consulting a jyotish(astrologer), booking a chadhawa to your favorite shrine and seeing what your stars say for the day (zodiac) makes Sri Mandir a go-to platform for all devotees. It also gives you a Suvichar that you can share in your WhatsApp group (potentially, this is how people get fresh devotional content for their family Whatsapp group).

Shareable good thoughts(Suvichar) on Sri Mandir’s

I love this App. I am from Toronto Canada. Not possible to go to Mandir every day. Thanks to Sri Mandir App, Now I visit Mandir at least twice a day. Perform Aarti, puja and listen to many Bhajans. Give me peace, comfort and bring positive energy. All other information like hora, choghadia, panchang etc. are very informative and useful. Offering service is very impressive. Everyone should have this App and offer prayers.. 🙏🙏🙏

Gopal Trivedi, a Sri Mandir app customer

à€œà€Ż à€¶à„à€°à„€ à€°à€Ÿà€ź Great app. I've using it for more than 3 years. My morning starts with this app only. There's so much about our Sanatan dharm, which is not available anywhere else on a single platform

Manish Sharma, a Sri Mandir app customer

Godliness personalized

While we can go very deep on personalization, we’ll limit our scope to two kinds of personalization that stand out. 

Tying language to cultural roots

In most cases, when apps offer language customization, they focus mainly on translating text from one language to another. However, since language is closely connected to culture, it’s more meaningful to adapt the content itself rather than just translating words.

Sri Mandir recognizes this by offering different deities based on the selected language. For example, the deities displayed in the app when using Hindi will differ from those shown when using Tamil. This thoughtful approach helps create a more personal and culturally relevant user experience.

To put it aptly, One god. Different appearances

Tunnnnnggg!

Digital apps primarily engage in visual experiences, but Sri Mandir takes it a step ahead with audio (like intel inside!). Each time you open the app, the sound of temple bells welcomes you, paired with a gentle animation of the bells swaying. This blend of sights and sounds creates a serene, sacred atmosphere.

Partnerships

Sri Mandir team has recently collaborated with Sarvam Ai to launch Sri Mandir Saarthi, an AI-driven WhatsApp companion that’s set to transform devotional experiences. Saarthi is in beta as we speak and aims to provide devotional information and services from wherever the devotees are and in any language they are comfortable with.

So far, so good. Sri Mandir is facilitating millions to pray to their gods every day. But, that doesn’t pay, right? So, how does Sri Mandir fund its growth and generate revenue? 👇

How does Apps for Bharat’s Sri Mandir monetize their business?

If you look at content-first apps (Instagram or Spotify), they rely on advertisements as one of the primary mediums to generate revenue. However, Prashant was crystal clear from day one on not running ads on Sri Mandir. Why? Because it breaks the sacred devotional flow of its users. So, they identified other ways to monetize their app.

As far as I can tell, there are two levers generating revenue for Sri Mandir: 

  1. Pooja and Chadhawa Seva: Sri Mandir has ties with both large and small temples in India to conduct poojas and offer chadhawas. You can customize your package experience with offers like Vastra Daan, Anna Daan, Gau Seva and share your name and Gotra, and book your pooja seva. Their pandit ji calls out your name during the pooja and you get the video of your pooja within 3 days. In the next 5-7 days, Gangajal/prasad from the pooja will be delivered to your home.

  2. Jyotish Seva: Teleconsults with Jyotish is another lever on the Sri Mandir app that helps them generate revenue. The service is charged at INR 10-15 Rs/minute and offers jyotish with varied specialities such as kundli reading, palm reading, tarot cards and so on.

Kali Pooja Packages ranging from INR 801 to 3001 on Sri Mandir

By thoroughly understanding the needs of the market and aligning the offerings, strategies, and operations to meet those needs, Prashant has created a successful and growing business. With a new round of $20 million funding in hand, I ‘m super excited to see how the next 5 years pan out for Sri Mandir. đŸ˜ƒ

And that’s a wrap on Sri Mandir.

Thank you so much for reading! I appreciate your time a great deal, and I hope you learned something new today in return.

If you did—and you enjoyed this post— I’d be super grateful if you gave it a like, and share, and if this was your first time reading, subscribe for more.

PS: Other random, interesting highlights of my last week:

  1. An ad I laughed a lot on: here

  2. A thought I thoroughly discussed with my wife and office colleagues: What are some things that you love performing but don’t like practicing?

  3. A post that made me think twice: here

See you soon!

Saurabh 👋

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