Play your way to fitness and fun — The story of Sporthood
Love for Sports is the seed for the origination of Sporthood. It is a startup that provides a platform for sports enthusiasts to discover and train themselves. It is a medium that allows you to come together with other sports enthusiasts who are interested in playing a particular game at the areas of their operation. Quite intriguing, right? But not only this, the venue, equipment, people to play with etc, will be taken care of by Sporthood, all we have to do is subscribe! It also provides specialized training and coaching for those who require assistance for various activities.
“Sometimes you are only one decision away from a totally different life” , that is what happened in the case of Rahul, the founder of Sporthood. The turning point that made Rahul realise the worth of sports in his life was when he went for work and explored Germany for two years without knowing the language or the people but the only source of happiness for him was to engage in sports. He was a sports fanatic and loved involving himself in sports and organizing games. All through his childhood he grew up alongside sports. He came up with the idea of Sporthood four years ago when he recognized that in the working life, the quality of life reduces immensely as most of the people don’t get their convenient times to play or indulge in sports activities because of their schedules. Therefore he identified the need through his own life of wanting to play with a community.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started”
How it all started?
As they entered this idea ahead of its time, the first one and a half year were spent on iterating different ideas. The entire first year was funded by themselves and was based only in Trivandrum. They experimented by organising events so as to get a feel of how the industry and customers would react to such an idea. By doing this they obtained a small customer base so that when they migrated to app and website subscription they could use those loyal customers to try it out and obtain more feedback.
In the second year they moved to Bangalore in order to scale up their venture. They employed 10 core members and they experimented their model. They were having a difficulty to raise funds initially as most of the investors were sceptical about the idea since they didn’t think this idea could scale up. Few angel investors who aligned to their vision agreed to invest in their idea. College alumni community helped them to get started financially which shows us how networking is a very important tool for any business venture. The initial amount of money they raised through Angel investors and alumni were used to showcase scalibility in the market.
Operational Challenges
Since it’s a very operation intensive venture, Rahul says that the key is to standardize and quantify the operation process so as to minimize variation and provide seamless sporting experience to all irrespective of age and in all areas. They incorporate various curriculums and regimens according to the needs of the sportsperson. They have training programs for trainers so as to increase their quality. They also included internal rating systems inorder to give their customers feedback and how to improve on them. They focuses on the customer experience and thrives on making sports as a vital part their day-to-day life.
The Business Model had been changed quite a few times during the course of the growth of Sporthood keeping a constant vision. Its a notion that changes in a business plan changes the perception of investors about the reliability of the original idea but in the contrary, for Sporthood, change in Business Models increased confidence of the Investors on the founders.
Sporthood in the coming days..
In India, the pain point in this arena is the lack of recreational activities and good quality aveneus for people to engage in sports. Although Sporthood is operating in two cities currently but it aims to expand and want people to pick up a more active and healthy lifestyle. They would get into the operational process in other cities after they get enough funds for their venture. Since Rahul was from Trivandrum and he worked in Bangalore, he already knew the venue and understood the customers of that area. But since they are having a vision to scale upto 15–20 Tier 1 cities all across India in the coming years, they would not have the same advantage as they had in Trivandrum and Bangalore. Therefore, they are fine tuning their business model so as to scale into these cities as soon as possible without facing much challenges. The main challenge would be to gather resources, capital and a dedicated team with core competencies. As of now they are partnering with local sport centres and clubs, where these sportcentres provide equipments, trainers and venues.
Incorporating a healthy living habit is the main motto of Sporthood and it is still undergoing the scaling & transformation process and various funding stages so as to get the necessary capital to scale their venture.
Key takeaways:
The interaction with Rahul gave us an insight upon the fact that there will be a lot more downs than ups in a startup and the basic premise of a startup is to test the idea and keep iterating it. The recipe to starting a startup according to him is:
· Resilience,
· Belief that your idea will work.
The only way to go through with your startup is to be patient and learn from the mistakes that you make.
Check this out to know Sporthood’s story from the founder’s words:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9GTO2aI1SwbeVBnT01JM0Q0S0k/view?ts=59dd33d1
