Sporting a platform beyond social media with Rooter

Last week, social media was abuzz with tweets and posts about leg-spinner Yuzvendra Chahal’s six-wicket haul against England; same with the 2017 Australian Open final, where Roger Federer beat his old foe Rafael Nadal; and the thrilling match of the Williams Sisters was not an exception.

No sports fan likes to watch a match alone, he/she likes to interact and connect with each other, sharing thoughts and progress of the match. Keeping all these in mind, Piyush Kumar launched a mobile sports app called Rooter in May 2016.

“Rooter’s main goal is to connect sports fans with each other. After creating the platform, we realised that we need to have certain activities or games on Rooter which would help users communicate with each other. We added the live match prediction game feature in June, which received an overwhelming response,” says Kumar, who is also the CEO of Rooter.

Subsequently, Rooter added a chat feature and then match forum, which rapidly increased the user engagement and interaction. “All of our offerings and feature add-ons have contributed immensely to expanding our user-base, as well as to the time spent by existing users on the app,” says Kumar.

At the moment, Rooter is at the seed-funding level, which it is about to close. Actor Boman Irani led the round of funding. A team of 15 people, who are obsessed with sports, is working out of a coworking space, and its user-base is growing by 75% every month. Currently, Rooter has over 25,000 downloads.

Offline integrated operations

“We are more focused on enhancing the product experience. We are looking at growing the user-base by three times in the next two months. The next three months are extremely crucial for us, as they are filled with big events such as IPL, the final rounds of EPL and Champions League. We would also be launching offline integrated operations for Rooter. The process is still in the testing stage,” the CEO adds.

Rooter’s most popular feature is the live match prediction scenario. “It is exciting for the users as they get to test their mettle at understanding game situations. There are live match forums where users discuss a match and express their views,” he says.

Rooter currently has four listed sports — cricket, football, tennis and basketball, and it aims to add two more — F1 and MotoGP — within the next two months.Though the sports app hasn’t planned for any direct-from-user revenue model at present, it aims to enhance its user-base as much as possible, and then target the regional sports teams of various tournaments such as IPL and ISL, among others, for merchandising and fan engagement opportunities.