It’s yoga time: log on & roll out the mat

Avid yoga enthusiasts Alex Klein and Alex Jaton found it extremely difficult to find the right yoga teacher, especially while travelling to other countries.

What did they do? They built YogaTrail, a global online yoga platform that connects yogis with yoga providers and updates users on what’s happening in the community.

“While there were internet-based platforms to find restaurants, hotels etc, there was a vacuum with respect to a network for yoga community. We wanted to create a tool for easier communication between instructors, students and yoga studios,” Jaton said.

Klein served as a physicist before this while Jaton worked in the publishing industry. The couple is in the country to understand the market and business prospects here.

The Thailand-based company, started over 2 years ago, has more than 1 lakh registered users across 100 countries. The website is free for students, users and yoga professionals as well. It currently makes money when yoga professionals upgrade to a ‘premium’ listing, which gets them a few extra features and a lot of extra visibility.

“At present, the US is our biggest market accounting for almost half of our total user base, followed by the UK, Canada and Australia. But India is the biggest emerging market. We think India is half the yoga market of the world in terms of numbers of people,” Klein told BusinessLine .

The website currently has over 1,500 users from India. “We hope to take this to 1,00,000 in 12 months from now,” he added.

The government of India, too, has been promoting the practice. While the Ministry of AYUSH, set up last year, aims to promote ancient Indian practices, including yoga, Prime Minister Narendra Modi too has been actively promoting this at the international stage.

The portal aims to make yoga teachers, who the company believes are getting the short end of the stick, the centre point of the industry.

As much as $600,000 has been invested in the website, including the personal savings of the founders, seed funding, and funds from an accelerator ‘500 Start-ups’.

The company currently has a team of seven. It is also set to launch a mobile app by the end of this month. “We are also hoping to become profitable by the end of this year,” Klein added.