Sports is nothing less than a therapy. While playing a sport keeps you physically healthy and mentally alert, even watching a sports you love can help you beat stress and depression. As per studies, being a sports fan can be great for your emotional, psychological and social health. But this is not all, now being a sports fan can help you make money as well, and SportCo is the startup that helps you do so. SportCo is a unique online platform with over 500K sports fans where you can create sports related content, make predictions related to matches, participate in contests and in turn get money, merchandise and more. We interviewed SportCo founder Anuj Sharma to understand more about this interesting startup for sports lovers.
SportCo Highlights
| Startup Nmae | SportCo |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Nicosia, Cyprus |
| Founder | Anuj Sharma |
| Sector | Sports Tech |
| Founded | 2018 |
| Parent Organization | FutureTech Sports Corp Ltd. |
| Website | www.sportco.io |
About SportCo
SportCo - Industry Details
SportCo - Founder & Team
The Idea Behind Starting SportCo
SportCo - Name & Logo
SportCo - Revenue Model
SportCo - Funding
SportCo - Marketing Strategy
SportCo - Challenges
SportCo - Advisors & Mentors
SportCo - Awards & Recognitions
SportCo - Growth & Future Plans
About SportCo
SportCo is a platform that lets sports fans get more engaged to the sports of their interest rather than just being a passive viewer. Sports lovers can contribute sports related content in the form of articles, image or videos in the platform, and earn SportCo coin against it. SportCo coin is a Blockchain based currency, that users can use for buying merchandise, memorabilia, games' tickets, for purchasing apps and more. This coins can also be redeemed for participating in virtual contests like sports related quizzes, facemerge games and predictions on matches. On winning these contests,users are entitled to win more SportCo coins. Thus SportCo lets you encash your love for sports.
"At SportCo, we aim to redefine the engagement of Sports fans worldwide by rewarding their contributions. Rewarding the Sports fans is the cornerstone of our vision. We believe that blockchain will disrupt the Sport industry by introducing a transparent reward system and help in building coherent & decentralized Sport fan communities. With several years of experience and more than 500,000 fans on our existing platforms SportCo aims to be the catalyst of this change by focusing & expanding its product range and seamless integration of technology within Sport communities. This will be possible by Blockchain enabled Sportco coin. The decentralized peer to peer community will also store historic data bases and fan contribution records on the basis of which transparent reward mechanism will be rolled out." SportCo co-founder Anuj Sharma quotes about the startup's vision.
SportCo - Industry Details
One of six people on this planet have a common passion for sports. As such SportCo's target market includes a huge 1 billion sports fans. Among this sports population, several people have an affinity to multiple sports and events. Also Sports fans create several markets. These markets consist of Competitive Sports tournaments across the world, games, merchandising, media and of course lifestyle sports.The total value of sports and related commercial activities including online games is currently about $200 billion. And growing. Growing at a pace faster than the fastest GDP growth of any country!
"The consumption of sports has changed in the last twenty years and will continue to change in the next twenty. Leaps in technology enable us today to experience sports at a far more personalized & convenient manner. And this is just the beginning" Anuj quotes speaking about the sports industry.
SportCo - Founder & Team
Having a collective business experience of over 200+ years, the SportCo team has the drive, experience and what it takes to bring an idea to life and make a business successful. Core members of the team are -
Anuj Sharma is the founder and business leader of SportCo. Anuj is a business graduate from IIM Ahmedabad with over 25 years of experience across sports media, financial services and technology industries. As an entrepreneur, he has brought the 3 components together to envision the SportCo ecosystem using token economy based on blockchain technology.
SportCo Lead Advisor Prof George Giaglis is the Director of Institute for the Future at University of Nicosia. He is also Professor of e-business at University of Greece. He is a pioneer of the Blockchain industry, and his views are widely respected and quoted across the industry.
SportCo content head Devang Prasad graduated with a Bachelors of Arts from University of California, Berkeley in interdisciplinary field studies. Devang is a content and communications professional with skills particularly in content marketing, social media, journalism, and research methods.
The Idea Behind Starting SportCo
For many,watching their favorite teams play is not just for mere entertainment. Sports fans are very passionately and emotionally engaged while watching a match. Anuj felt that while people are so deeply connected to the sports they love, their engagement with the sport is limited to being just passive viewers.
Through SportCo Anuj wants to make the sports fans feel more engaged with the sports they love by creating and sharing content related to it, by playing quizzes and contests on their favorite posts and getting rewarded in the process.
The SportCo team identified the following problems-
- Vast majority of sports fan are not rewarded for their online contributions.
- No single platform to fulfill online sporting needs of Sports fans.
- Lack of a global peer to peer currency in Sports.
- Sport Fans today do not have technology enabled tools to enhance their engagement. They are fully dependent on external media in this regard.
SportCo intends to solve the above said problems by the following solutions-
- Providing multiple ways for all Sports fans who contribute in content creation, knowledge share and building of communities to be rewarded on our platform.
- A multi layered platform that will holistically capture the journey and fulfill the needs of the sports fan.
- SportCo coin aims to be the preferred currency of choice across global sports world.
- SportCo uses blockchain to decentralize and provide specific tools for analytic overlays, gaming and online media experience.
SportCo - Name & Logo
In the name SportCo "Co" stands for coin, community, communication and contest. The logo signifies a combination of a baseball and a gold coin, where gold represents value and the ball represents sports
SportCo - Revenue Model
SportCo's sources of revenue includes -
- Revenue generated when users buy SportCo Coins.
- Membership fee of SportCo Club
- Merchandise for the fans with leading brands; with handling fees for SportCo
- Customized content for sports institutions
- Ad network for brands that wish to engage with the SportCo community.
- Tie-up with leading sports leagues for their merchandising, ticketing for premium events
- Fee paid by the users for participating in SportCo’s own Tournaments and contests
- Revenue earned from registration and trade of memorabilia
SportCo - Funding
SportCo has raised an angel round of funding worth 400,000 USD.
| Date | Stage | Amout | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid 2018 | Angel Round | 400,000 USD | Undisclosed |
SportCo - Marketing Strategy
Being in the sports sector, utilizing online communities has been one of the go-to marketing strategies for SportCo team. The team worked hard to promote the SportCo brand in Facebook groups around different teams, sports, leagues etc. Furthermore, they also worked with the contributors, who provide content on the platform and their network to expand their personal reach and bring users on to our platform.
SportCo - Challenges
Acquisition of initial writers was the most challenging part, which the SportCo team overcame with the help of brilliant marketers who designed great strategies that attracted users.
SportCo - Advisors & Mentors
SportCo's advisors include -
- Football player and coach Bryan Roy. Bryan picked up 32 international caps for the Netherlands national football team and played in numerous championship games, also believes in the vision of SportCo and will help SportCo spread its vision.
- Tim De Leede of KNCB Cricket Halden .Tim de Leede is a former Dutch cricketer, who had a long One Day International career of 11 years for the Dutch national team. A right-handed all-rounder, he played for the Netherlands at 1996, 2003, and 2007 World Cups. After his retirement in 2007 he started a coaching career and in 2015 was appointed as the head coach of the France national cricket team. Tim de Leede is recorded in KNCB (Netherlands Cricket Association) Hall of Fame.
- Tennis Player and Coach Juan Carlos Báguena is a tennis coach and former professional tennis player from Spain. He has played to a high professional level, acquiring ATP rankings of 190 in singles and 100 in doubles. He has won several ATP tour events in doubles and a singles ATP tour event in Madrid.
SportCo - Awards & Recognitions
SportCo was listed among Top 10 sports startup that uses blockchain technology, by Disruptor Daily.
SportCo - Growth & Future Plans
SportCo is built around a unique concept and has received positive response from users. Initially SportCo was launched in Europe over all the digital platforms- and then gradually shifted to Asia and Africa. There are already more than 500,000 sports fans on the platform.
Sports market will continue to grow in double digits for the next few decades thereby adding millions of sport fans. With platforms like SportCo future sport fans will have more ways to engage with their favorite sport. SportCo is moving towards being a platform that will connect Sports institutions, Sport clubs, Sports professionals and Sports fans and thus create a huge community of sports lovers
"The last 4 years were crucial to understand fan centricity behaviors, needs, revenue inflection points and building a network with Sporting institutions. We will continue on our path to improve fan engagement with technology. The race is on and we are in this race to win!" Anuj Shrama quotes speaking about the startups journey and future plans.
Author: Chayanika Goswami
Source : https://startuptalky.com/sportco-sports-technology/
Date : 2020-09-08T03:20:24.000Z