What would you like to play today? Cricket, football, basketball or tennis? And perhaps makes some friends while at it? Then Rooter is for you – to root for your favourite team, team up with like-minded fans and predict your club’s victory over rivals. A social networking application launched by sports enthusiast Piyush Kumar, Rooter allows people with similar interest in sports to come together and cheer their favourite teams.
Launched around six months back, Rooter is betting on the IPL season to boost its user base to 500,000 from the current 75,000. In conversation with Hita Gupta, Kumar, founder and CEO of Rooter, points out that April-May is a critical season for sports fans as it includes tournaments such as the Premier League, Champions League, La Liga and Europa League in football; French Open and Wimbledon Championship in tennis, and IPL in cricket. Edited excerpts:
How do you create user engagement on Rooter?
We realised that we would not be able to connect people until we made them do something together. On our app we created a live match prediction game where we divide sport matches into different parts and the user can make predictions for different phases of a sports match and in the process make connections with other fans. There is also a live match forum where fans can talk to each other and connect.
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How is Rooter different from other sports content platforms?
An average user spends 15-20 minutes a day on the app because we have got four different sports, prediction game, quizzes, articles, and match forums. This is a huge opportunity for us as it differentiates us from content sites such as BBC Sports or Cricbuzz.
What are the different sources of revenue generation for the company?
In the later stages we will start charging a subscription fee for our services but it will happen only when we have got people hooked on to the platform. We will not be launching the paid version for another one year but it will form the biggest source of revenue for us.
We will also have pure play advertising and sponsorships with brands. Another source of revenue will be lead generation where we will create ample opportunity for brands to generate users from our app.
We offer virtual Rooter coins which the user can earn on match prediction. Users can redeem their coins on either Paytm or Amazon to make a purchase. We can use this model for lead generation when a user redeems his points and makes a purchase.
Who are the major investors in the company?
2016 was a tough year for funding. We raised a part of our seed round in August-September 2016 from Boman Irani and a couple of other angel investors and then we raised another tranche of seed round of investment with Intex. Besides investment, Intex also helped us through strategic partnership. We have their know-how in technology, marketing, and additionally we will also be managing their fan-engagement with the Gujarat Lions team in this year’s IPL. We will close the third and the final tranche of the seed funding by the end of April.
Where will you deploy the fund?
Our major deployment of resources is in the tech space. We have a 16-member team and half of them are in the tech team. But we will continue to maintain a lean team of 20 people and not cross that before the next round of funding. Right now we have four sports: Cricket, football, basketball and tennis and by the end of April we plan to launch F1 and MotoGP.