Virtual afterlife: How Shradhanjali is letting your loved ones live forever

Namrata Mathur marked the passing away of her grandfather with an obituary column in a newspaper every year for four years. In March 2013, she stopped this practice after logging on to Shradhanjali.com, a website that does what the print medium is doingwith regard to obituaries. Mathur now commemorates her grandfather’s death anniversary by buying online space on Shradhanjali.

Operated out of Ahmedabad, Shradhanjali is an online portal that provides space to create a digital profile of a deceased person listing their details, achievements, family members, photos, et al. “We want it to be used as a place where family members can visit to remember their loved and lost ones, and share their feelings,” says Vivek Vyas, co-Founder, Shradhanjali. The website also provides a feature whereby remindersare sent to family members, be it for birth or death anniversaries.

New life
The website was born in 2010 when Vyas and Vimal Popat, both working in a life insurance company in Ahmedabad, placed their teatime snack of samosas on a newspaper only to realize it was the obituary column. “We did not like the way the column was presented and wanted to provide a better alternative. We did not find anyone doing anything similar on the online space. There was no stopping us then,” says 32 year-old Vyas.

Within a year, in 2011, during which their site crashed twice, they were up and about with a fully functional website ready to be uploaded with profiles. Consciously, the founders decided to have a no-advertisement policy on any page of the website. “We did not want to color the page with advertisements.The profile page has to be personal and free from any sort of distractions,” explains Vyas.

Revenues are earned through a subscription model. Users can opt for one of the two plans-an annual subscription for Rs 1,000 or a five-year subscription for Rs 2,700. As of December 2013, the portal has 140 profiles and has generated revenues of Rs 4 lakh.

Counting numbers
As there is little awareness of an online obituary service, Vyas works with a salesteam whose members work for newspaper obituary columns to get clients. “We ask them to compliment the newspaper service with ours,” he informs. The sales agents get 50 percent as commission for each client they bring to Shradhanjali.

Though Vyas and 41 year-old Popat have invested Rs 25 lakh into the startup, they are in need of institutional investment for marketing and advertisement. “Currently people get to know about us only through word-of-mouth and through our sales agents,” Vyas says.

Interestingly, Mathur also heard about them through a relative who had used the portal. Now she says many of her relatives abroad are also using Shradhanjali. Vyas believes that if people know about the service, they will use it at least once as the services offered are different from the other alternative of obituary columns in newspapers.

“Gujarat Samachar in UK charges Rs 56,000 for a full page tribute and newspapers in India charge anywhere from Rs 3,500 to Rs 7,000 for a small black and white tribute,” Vyas says.

The charm of print
Those working in the newspaper advertisement industry and investors in the internet businesses say that an online service like this cannot be counted as competition to obituaries in newspapers.

“The purpose of a newspaper obituary is to make an announcement so that people can attend the funeral and prayer meetings. On the internet, that immediacy may be hard to achieve, especially in India right now,” says Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder, Info Edge(India) Ltd., which owns Naukri.com and invests in online businesses.

Prateek Srivastava, Founder of MyAdCorner, a portal that helps companies buy advertisement space in the print media, feels that though the concept is good, print and online serve different purposes. “One is to inform people and the other is to have a long lasting profile. People will not log in everyday to find out who has passed away but newspapers are read every day and that’s how long-lost friends or relatives come toknow of such incidents,” says Srivastava.

He adds, “A website based on a full obituary profile might not be a good idea from a business point of view. However, it might compliment print advertisements by giving a link to the online profile.”

Initially people may make profiles, but with time that too can become a painful exercise, he feels. Vyas plans to rollout a mobile application for the website from where people can book and edit profiles. He is also working on a Short Messaging Service (SMS) reminder service for death anniversaries that currently works throughe-mails. “In the next six months, we will finish all of this as we are confident ofraising some angel money soon,” he says.

The purpose of such a website, informs Vyas, is to create a database where anyone can search for their ancestors online. “We want to give our generation the legacy of their ancestors so that they have a ready online reference of their forefathers.”

This article first appeared in Entrepreneur India magazine