An infinite TAM - What I learnt about humans through their belief in Astrology

In this post, I try to share what I’ve learnt about humans, who never fail to fascinate me, through my journey of building Vaya.

You don’t have to believe or disbelieve in Astrology for this post to be valuable. If you’re interested in consumer businesses, or curious about why humans do what they do, I hope you find this useful. [1] In my entire career thinking about humans and building consumer products, Vaya has been and continues to be, the most challenging from an intellectual lens.

At Anuvaya, we’re building Conversational AI agents for professional services. We picked Astrology as our first use case - but why?

It’s easy to assume a purely capitalist incentive: Astrotalk doing hundreds of millions of revenue, Indians having a large propensity to pay for astrology (we know how rare that is), and a largely untapped market (Astrotalk still has < 15% market share). But that’s an incomplete story of Vaya.

I found the belief in Astrology very intellectually intriguing. Why do hundreds of millions of people in India rely on Astrology and are willing to pay for it?

From everything I have learnt so far, Astrology prominence and success has everything to do with human’s discomfort with uncertainty.

Humans Vs. Uncertainty

Our distaste for uncertainty is not unique to our generation. Since prehistoric times, humans have had a massive discomfort with uncertainty. In Tribal eras, uncertainty often meant life or death: a failed hunt meant no food, a sound in the bushes meant a predator. For ancient civilisations, uncertainty was driven by war, disease outbreaks, crop outcomes. Today, it shows up differently — layoffs, failed relationships, rapid tech shifts, but the discomfort is the same. The brain perceives ambiguity or uncertainty like a threat, and evolution wired us to seek patterns, narratives, and explanations.

Humans have developed different coping mechanisms to deal with uncertainty over time. These included hyper-pattern recognition, oral storytelling, animism, to religion. Humans have made incredible progress in predicting, measuring and dealing with uncertainties. Agriculture helped us be certain about food, marriage as an institution helped us be “more certain” about relationships, and money and banking stabilised trade and future planning.

In fact, lots of businesses were built by removing uncertainties, or dealing with them. At Atlys, where I was driving consumer product, our winning value prop after several iterations solved the strongest pain point in the visa process: uncertainty. People were anxious about when their visas would arrive, and our on-time guarantee promised extreme certainty.

In fact, I’d argue that every consumer business in the world solves a deep human emotional need in some way, and uncertainty is one of them. (whoop - uncertainty, CRED - status seeking: and not just the membership, most of the personal loan consumption is aspirational).

Despite making incredible progress in bringing certainty to our lives, some parts of human life remain fundamentally unpredictable. These include, but are not limited to, decisions about love, purpose, and personal direction.

That’s where Astrology has and continues to make a place for Indians. Hundreds of millions of Indians, from all walks of life - from small merchants to billionaires, rely on Astrology as a tool to address this core human desire for certainty. That behavioural reality is what got me interested in Astrology.

So how does Astrology solve uncertainty?

Think about the last time you had a breakup, a layoff, or a random failure that doesn’t make any sense to you. Your brain automatically must have searched for a story: this happened to teach me something; this is a phase; this will lead somewhere better. Narrative-building is an automatic coping mechanism, searching for patterns that restore predictability.

Some parts of Vedic astrology do what your brain did automatically there. Astrology solves the deep human need to manage uncertainty by providing a structured narrative that links personal experiences to a “scientific” planetary framework. (this happened in your life because of Rahu dasha). This gives meaning to unpredictable events. By mapping life circumstances onto planetary positions, it transforms randomness into a sequence of interpretable phases, offering explanations for setbacks, guidance for decision-making, and predictions about future trends.

This process engages core human psychological patterns: it reduces anxiety by creating the illusion of control, satisfies the brain’s preference for patterns, and supports identity formation by framing personality and life path within a larger cosmic story. Even when its causal claims are scientifically unverified, Vedic astrology delivers emotional validation, a sense of agency, and a coherent framework for navigating life’s uncertainties, fulfilling fundamental cognitive and existential needs that have been formed because of deep evolutionary reasons. The need is so strong that a false prediction by an astrologer translates to “this astrologer probably didn’t know how to properly read my chart.” and not “is astrology true?”

So asking “is astrology true”? is the wrong question. The process is the outcome; the belief is the truth and it doesn’t really matter whether or not it’s true.

So now that we know why Astrology really works, how do you create a 10x better experience than the status quo? That’s what we spend most of our day on. If you like how we think, join us and email me at maahin at anuvaya dot com. We’re building the most cracked engineering, design and product teams.

Read more about us: www.anuvaya.com

Notes

[1] the need to write this article is not solely to add value. It stems from a selfish need to productize addressing of “why astrology?”, “is astrology true?”, “do you believe in astrology?”, which I am often asked.