Business of Religion & the Soaring Popularity of F1
Discover more from The Indian Dream
Business of Religion & the Soaring Popularity of F1
Did you know Incense sticks are a Rs. 10,000 Cr business in India?
Each week we share business ideas and opportunities that you can use to build your next big business. You’ll also find tweets, articles and a lot more to keep you updated on the latest business trends.
Also, thanks to everyone who followed us on Instagram last week. We didn’t hit our 1k followers goal but we’re getting close!
This week you will find:
Business of Religion
Formula 1 Business Opportunities
TID’s 3-2-1 (3 Tweets, 2 Podcasts, 1 Article)
Book Recommendation
Religion and Tech Become Business Partners
Trigger Warning: The following article is purely apolitical and is not intended to attack any sentiments.
India is no stranger to the monetisation of faith. Just the agarbatti & dhoop market in India was ₹10,000 crore in 2018 and is growing at 10+% per year. Now add pilgrimage services, sweets & other religious products and we have a huge market in India.
Modern Religious Businesses
The Not-so-obvious Opportunities
While tourism, retail, etc. are common and profitable religious ventures, we looked around for some new age tech business opportunities. We believe that with the pandemic and rise in tech-enabled businesses, it’s only a matter of time that the business of religion goes digital too.
Religious concierge service - It can be a digital service that performs any ceremony or provides any offering you wish. You want an offering made at Kashi, you can just hit a button and someone will do it for you. Maybe even record the whole ceremony.
VR-enabled Pilgrimages - Why trek up a mountain to go visit a temple when someone can do it for you while you experience it real-time through a VR headset. Hajj & Umrah already exist in VR! Saudi plans to double down on VR for Hajj.
Pay-per-view Aarti service - You can partner with religious authorities to livestream the most famous temple aartis. With all the travel restrictions, we’re sure this will be a huge hit! Take this video for instance:
Meditation + Religion = an unbeatable app! Creating an app that mixes the teachings of religion with the amazing benefits of meditation will be revolutionary. You can have a special baba section where the most influential gurus host meditative sessions. It can be in a cohort course model - learn and reap the benefits within x number of months. The Conscious Entrepreneur by Laura C. Cannon is a book that bridges the gap between business and spirituality. There are meditative practices for entrepreneurs to guide them through their journey. Something similar in an app format, targeted to the everyman can be a wildly successful idea!
The religious space is a huge market that still uses age-old processes making it ripe for disruption. We’re already seeing the disruption with businesses like Phool growing at lightning speed. Disrupting certain religious practices could put you in the bad books of some people but all PR is good PR right? Give it a shot!
Race of a Lifetime - The Soaring Popularity of F1
Fun Fact: Formula 1 is the fastest growing major sport on social media. Check out the graph below:
The reason? It’s a fun, nail-biting sport that was recently purchased by social media fanatic Liberty Media. F1’s previous owner, Bernie Ecclestone had this to say about social media:
“I don’t know why people want to get to the so-called ‘young generation.’ … Why do they want to do that? Is it to sell them something? Most of these kids haven’t got any money. I’d rather get to the 70-year-old guy who’s got plenty of cash.
Once Liberty Media got the keys to the business, they pumped up the sport’s Social Media game and even launched a Netflix series called Drive to Survive. This series led to a huge boom in the viewership of F1 races - the US saw the 2021 season viewership as 53% higher than the 2020 season average and 40% higher than the first 14 comparable races in 2019.
F1 is growing insanely fast and a rising tide raises all boats. Now is the time to join the F1 bandwagon with these ideas:
F1 special e-commerce stores in India. Europe and USA have multiple F1 merch stores, but there’s none in India.
Create Content around F1. YouTube channels around F1 have been blowing up over the past year with massive growth in subscribers & views. There’s still time to start your own content business in this niche - maybe in Hindi or other regional languages?
How about taking a brand license and start manufacturing F1 products? Listen to our episode on Brand Licensing to learn how you can start off with brand licensing.
F1 Esports also saw a huge surge in popularity because of the pandemic. Why not start an F1 esports team or league in India? You can also ask your players to livestream everything to simultaneously amass a huge following on Twitch.
How does an F1 themed data analytics cohort course sound? F1 is one of the most data heavy sports in existance. You could teach Data Analytics to business executives in a fun way with an F1 themed course! This would be a great way to stand out from the crowd and get eyeballs to your website & social media.
Since F1 is such an exclusive sport, create marketing strategies that give your product/service an exclusive feel. We all want posh and luxury items and the demand for your services will only increase. You can even charge a bit higher!
3 Tweets
We’ve used most of these tools ourselves - they’re not only for startups. Loom is our favourite and we love TidyCal as a cheaper Calendly alternative - we use TidyCal for setting up all our Podcast recordings & other meetings.
I started journaling in 2021 and used that to do a 2021 review on 31st Dec. I used this 2021 review & spent the entire day on 1st Jan, 2022 to set up my goals & daily journaling system on Notion. Overall, setting goals at the start of 2021 gave me a clear vision of where I wanted to go in 2021. I’ve already started seeing the benefits of my 2022 exercise.
It’s never too late to learn No-code. It can take your businesss to the next level.
Bonus Tweet from Sahil - I absolutely love Indie dogs and have 2 of my own. I spent 30 minutes just going through this entire thread and looking at all the indies and their unique personalities.
Indies aren’t aggressive. They’re not ugly. They’re not dirty. They are gorgeous and unique. They’re ridiculously sturdy dogs that adapt beautifully. They’re gentle & loving and literally perfect #lovemyindie Please feel free to share your gorgeous indie under this thread ♥️
2 Podcasts
Cloudnine Hospitals - Building India’s largest chain of Maternity Hospitals by The Indian Dream - This episode is a great example of an outsider coming into an industry and disrupting it. Rohit MA, co-founder of Cloudnine, spoke candidly to us about the economics of hospitals, the capital it takes to build a new hospital, and how they built a system of process improvement in their hospital chain. P.S. they have Baby Aquariums in their hospital!
The State of Indian Sport by The Seen & the Unseen - this was possibly the best podcast episode we heard in 2021. It goes deep into the current state of Indian sport and also highlights many areas where an entrepreneur could build infrastructure. Listen to the entire 3.5 hours episode - trust us, you’ll love it.
1 Article - Studying Studies Part 1
Critical thinking is in short supply these days. People believe anything they read on WhatsApp University and instantly share it on their family WhatsApp groups.
But how do you actually verify if a certain source is telling the truth?
Studying Studies is a 5 part series + a Podcast on how to examine seemingly scientific studies and figure out what’s true & what’s not.
Send this article to your aunt the next time she spams the WhatsApp group with this photo claiming she knows everything about Covid-19.
TID’s Book Recommendation
Atomic Habits by James Clear
3 simple but profound learnings from this book:
3 ideas to start your year: 1) You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. 2) Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. 3) Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.#1 is the reason why we focus so much on building processes & systems in The Indian Dream. You will be surprised by the backend systems we’ve built to get this newsletter out each week.
#2 helped us build our own habits & goals for 2022. People are unhappy when there’s a dissonance between who they believe they are vs. the actions they take. For example, I could talk to everybody about how much I exercise and how fit I am but I am very inconsistent with working out because of bad habits. This causes a dissonance in my mind thus leading to frustration & unhappiness. Read this article to learn more about this system.
#3 helped us move our targets from giant targets all the time to small wins. These small wins give us the courage to then go for the larger challenges.
That’s it from us this week! Share this with your friends, family and colleagues who want to stay on top of Market Trends and Business Ideas & Opportunities!
Until next week!
Sahil & Sid
