Investing in AppsForBharat

Spirituality and Devotion are deeply intertwined with all the aspects of life and culture for an average Indian. While there is a vast variation in how different people choose to engage with one’s faith, one fact was obvious to us—devotion is ubiquitous in India and cuts across any classical indicators of demographics, and even religious beliefs. A vast majority of Indians pray daily and visit a place of worship at least one a week. And almost everyone turns to faith and looks for blessings and guidance ahead of monumental moments in life such as marriage, starting a family, a new job perhaps, stepping into a new house, kicking off a new business, and so many others. Hardships and bereavements bring us even closer at times. The elders in our families are typically more devout in the traditional sense of the word i.e. visiting temples, reading scriptures and planning events around auspicious alignments, and so on. The rest of us have perhaps seen our faith flounder and flourish, our beliefs tested in times of hardship, and our extent of devotion waxing and waning as we navigate the phases of life. But, we have all at some point found comfort and sought refuge in the thought of a greater power.

As we think back to all the instances where we seeked comfort in the power of devotion, we realise how fundamentally the experience of faith continues to be offline. At Elevation, we have been acutely aware of the dichotomy that devotion forms a core aspect of our lives and still manifests mainly itself in physical ecosystems. You can get your customised morning grocery order delivered online, but not your personalised morning devotion routine. We intuitively felt that there must be a medium through which people are expressing or want to express their faith in the digital world, where they spend more than a fourth of their waking time. So we started to look deeper into people’s behaviors pertaining to faith and devotion in the online world.

We scanned many destinations of content consumption in India and here’s what we found: on Youtube, T-Series Bhakti Sagar, a channel dedicated to devotional content, with 43 Mn subscribers is the 33rd most subscribed channel globally and 11th in India. Its top video with 1.9 Bn views makes it the 5th highest ever viewed Indian video. To put this into context, the top video on the world’s most subscribed channel, T-series (191 Mn subscribers) has 1.2 Bn views. On Facebook, the Pope successfully delivered sermons through live sessions to a staggering size of audiences during the COVID-19 lockdown. On the Google Playstore, any keyword search around religion shows hundreds of content-first apps, many of which have 10 Mn+ downloads. On top social and content platforms like Facebook and Sharechat, devotional content accounts for 10-20% of all content and most family WhatsApp groups continue to buzz with devotionally inclined shares and forwards. On audio platforms like Spotify and Kuku FM, devotional podcasts constantly rank among the top charts. Such deep engagement across existing platforms, cutting across content formats, further cemented our view that there is a strong demand for a dedicated spiritual-tech platform where people can engage with devotion and spirituality in a fundamentally new approach.