At first glance, astrology and business seem to belong in completely different worlds. Yet both are fundamentally about understanding human behavior and responding to people’s needs. At heart, I still identify as an astrologer who is trained to observe patterns, listen to underlying emotions, and understand people. Today, my work also involves managing costs, pricing, and revenue. Building a digital Puja Calendar has shown me that faith and business don’t have to conflict. When done with respect for tradition, data simply helps us serve people better.
Bridging Traditional Intuition with Business Reality
When I started working on the Puja Calendar business, understanding users was not the difficult part for me. My background in astrology had already taught me to observe people, understand their needs, and recognise patterns in their behaviour. The bigger challenge was understanding the business side of those decisions. I had to learn how to look at past performance, projections, costs, and revenue, and use those numbers to decide whether a Puja could actually work as a business proposition. Initially, this was a significant learning curve because these were areas I had not worked with extensively before.
Learning Technology and AI to Speed Up Research
I also had to learn how to use technology and AI effectively to research faster, analyse information, build propositions, and turn scattered information into actionable insights. Instead of seeing this gap as a limitation, I started treating it as a skill I needed to build. I began studying the data, questioning my assumptions, and learning through every event and proposition. I started combining what I already knew about users with what I was learning about the business.
Before creating a Puja proposition, I looked at last year’s data on what worked, what didn’t, the revenue, and whether we achieved our projections for upcoming events. I approached this by researching user needs, studying market trends, and the traditions behind different temples. I spoke with Pandits and temple teams and used AI tools like Claude and NotebookLM to research faster and explore new ideas. Gradually, I started looking at every Puja from both sides, astrology and business: What does the user want, and does it make sense from a business perspective? I used past data to form a hypothesis, created the proposition, tested it through execution, and learned from the results.
Turning On-Ground Insights into Business Growth
This approach significantly changed the way I built Puja propositions. By combining user behaviour, historical performance, market research, and on-ground insights from Pandits and temples, I became more confident in identifying which Pujas had potential and how they could be structured. One example was a Puja we created around a Chandra Grahan. This puja proposition generated 4X revenue against the initial projection.
Beyond individual events, our approach to new Pujas also changed significantly. For several events, around 70–80% of the Pujas are now newly conceptualised, based on research, user needs, and event-specific opportunities.
What This Journey Taught Me
The biggest lesson I have taken from this journey of bringing astrology and business together is that our education or previous job title does not define the limits of what we can learn. What matters is the willingness to adapt and the drive to keep learning. I came from a traditional Brahmin and astrology background, where my strength was primarily understanding people, astrology, and spiritual practices. I then had to learn business performance, numbers, projections, and new technology.
AI became another skill I learned to use as part of my work. For me, it is adaptability and that means being comfortable saying, “I don’t know this yet,” and then actively learning it. With that mindset, a completely unfamiliar area can become a new strength.