Goonjan Mall was in his early twenties when a visit to the famous Karni Mata temple in Rajasthan inspired a category-creating business idea. “I was there at the temple of rats during Navaratri, and it was extremely crowded – people from around the country had rushed to Bikaner during this auspicious time,” says Mall.
There he realized the potential to disrupt a traditional industry and make it more convenient for devotees to connect to their faith.
In 2012, Online Prasad began as a portal to deliver prasadam from temples to households across the country. Mall began in Gurgaon with two interns and has since grown the company to a twenty-member team in the start-up capital, Bangalore. From one to over fifty temples across India from where you can order offerings at the click of a button, Online Prasad has evolved over the years.
Now you can order everything from an astrology session to a pilgrimage package, event a pandit on the website. Mall continues, “We’re doing something nobody else in India is – we’re changing the face of spirituality. Our product range will continue to expand so we can serve all the devotional needs of our customers. We’re trying to figure out an important question – what scale can be hit with spirituality?”
And as the spirituality sector grew hotter and Online Prasad as a brand grew, Mall needed an easy, flexible payment platform.
“The pricing, ease of integration, ease of use and adaptability that Instamojo offered appealed to me. I’m seeing more and more ways to scale my products and services while directly connecting with and collecting payments from customers,” says Mall.
And with Online Prasad, Mall says this is just the beginning. In the next six months, he plans to service over a million devotees and grow that by 20x by 2017. Mall signs off, “We want to cater to 360 degrees of a devotee’s spiritual requirements – whether to want to read content, travel to a temple, purchase a Ganesh Chaturthi puja kit, select a metal or an eco-friendly Ganesh idol – even pick up prasadam.”
