Changing The Game: How to Immortalize Consumer Trust — Harsh Jain, CEO & Co-Founder Dream11
· How Dream11 Won The Trust of Over 80 Million Users?
· When and Why To Invest In Brand Ambassadors?
· What is DOPUT Culture?
As a start-up, you need to solve one problem, nail it, and scale it!
In your entrepreneurial journey if you ever feel things are going haywire, take a moment to think of why you started it? What problems did you intend to solve? Who are the people who backed you? More often than not, you will find the answers that will motivate you to keep going and refining your business model for it to truly scale.
Harsh reminisces about his college days when he first played fantasy football and how it helped him keep in touch with his group of friends across the globe while being in London and Philadelphia.
Harsh Jain, who is the CEO & Co-Founder of Dream11 — India’s biggest fantasy sports platform has a degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, started Dream11 when he came back to India and realized that fantasy sports were not available in the country. He soon realized it was a gap that several others felt.
Finding the Right Product-Market Fit:
Despite launching in 2008, the company made a few pivots before taking on its current form in 2012. Today, –as the number of fantasy sports users in India grows to a staggering 80 million in 2019 from 2 million in 2016, Dream11 is surely seen as the game-changer.
What worked for Dream11?
According to Harsh, it’s about building trust. Harsh and his team pivoted business models to test different product offerings and learn from consumer behavior. Customers would come onto the platform however, retention and engagement would remain a challenge. It was in 2012 that the team witnessed a complete product-market fit when users kept returning to the platform and paying without any promotions, discounts, or referral codes.
According to Harsh, product-market fit begins with having a sticky audience, then finalizing on a business model and then breaking it into a clear path of ROIs, which eventually leads to the best fit according to market conditions.
This hypothesis was tested when the startup started to witness an upsurge in organic traffic and friend’s referrals without any marketing budget.
Testament of Product Value:
It would be a significant achievement for any brand to have more than 80 million registered users on its platform and Dream11 has been able to achieve this without being listed on the world’s largest app platform- Google play store. Why so?
Well, this is because Google does not allow mobile applications to offer cash contests on its platform. The users thus need to download the application from the company’s website — which also comes with a disclaimer on unsafe download.
Despite these challenges, Dream11 continued to garner interest from a wide array of audiences to become the most loved mass-market gaming platform that provides high entertainment value at low disposable costs.
But what, apart from the product, makes the users stick?
Harsh in his candid way explains this phenomenon with a very simple example. He says “technology and user interface can always be replicated, but fantasy sports is nothing without one’s network of friends. This is similar to why Google+ could not overtake Facebook or Hike could not overtake WhatsApp because one’s network of friends & family is already built. Even if one wants to move, he/she would have to move their complete network with them which in turn is very difficult.”
Brand Ambassadors and their role in building Trust:
The path to becoming a unicorn wasn’t always a smooth sail for fantasy sports platform Dream11. While discussing his strategy in detail with Ankur Warikoo on the Building It Up with Bertelsmann podcast, Harsh talks about the critical role that marketing and communications play in building trust for a business, especially when it requires users to park their money with the company.
He further went on to explain how by adding the right brand ambassador to your brand, one can leverage the existing trust and credibility of the celebrity and establish a virtual bond its users. However, to identify the right ambassador, it is very important to shortlist personalities that resonate well with the brand and also share the values that your brand stands for.
By signing Harsha Bhogle and Mahendra Singh Dhoni as brand-ambassadors, Dream11 added a lot of credibility to the brand as users could now place their trust because of the credibility and faith brought-in by both MSD & Harsha.
If you are considering celebrity endorsements for your brand, we highly recommend that you listen to our podcast episode featuring Malini Agarwal, Founder & Blogger-in-Chief of MissMalini.com, and Preeta Sukhtankar, Founder of The Label Life. here: https://bit.ly/2YlpME2
Dream11 later went on to become the official fantasy game of the ICC (International Cricket Council), the IPL (Indian Premier League), the BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India), PKL (Pro Kabaddi League), ISL (Indian Super League), FIH (International Hockey Federation), the NBA (National Basketball Association) and its latest addition being the title sponsors of IPL 2020. Woah, isn’t it just amazing!
All these associations and brand building exercises have helped build trust with the end-user and the results have been phenomenal.
The DOPUT Culture:
Picking out a master-tip from his playbook, Harsh emphasizes on the importance of writing down the company’s culture. Many of us get it wrong by believing that a great company culture revolves around having a pool table at work, flexible work from policies or simply having a sleeping pod at work. All these are perks.
Culture is something which happens when no one is looking and Harsh goes on to say, “I think the one thing I have learned over the last 11–12 years is that the only thing that truly scales is culture. If you get the culture right, everything else kind of just walks around it.”
At Dream11 they came up with the acronym DOPUT (Data, Ownership, Performance, User First, and Transparency). To deeply embed the culture in everyone, Dream11 uses creative models of appraisal based on DOPUT. Harsh adds that tying culture to performance makes a hell lotta difference.
These were excerpts from our podcast Building it up with Bertelsmann. Tune in to the full episode here and hear Harsh Jain share insights that could transform your start-up.
