We are publishing an interview of Mr. Aravind Ramachandran, Chief Products Officer, Fantain.
Please tell us about the founders:
Anand Ramachandran (CEO of Fantain) was a seasoned IT sales head in Wipro, where he has helped to sell various services to fortune 100 companies, Vivek (CTO of Fantain) comes with a deep technology background having been involved in many of global e-commerce rollouts of largest retailers on the planet. I am the Chief Product Officer at Fantain, a startup veteran of the three start-ups in the US and understand the product/market fit mentality from my previous ventures.
All the three of us have run independent P&Ls in their careers thus have skills beyond our core competencies. Another interesting fact is that none of us come from the sports and entertainment industries. We are outsiders looking in, and that has helped us come up with interesting solutions.
What is the problem you are trying to solve? Can you share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?
Fantain is a Fan Relationship Management start-up. Think of it as a CRM for sports teams, music labels, movie houses and events. We help our customers use fan information to improve revenue, increase profitability and engage deeper with fans.
Fan Engagement is a very nascent industry in India – meaning that there is a lot of latent demand. But this also means there is a need for doing a lot of discovery. In such industries, it is critical to building a company that is focused on listening intently to the customer and building an ability to make rapid changes to our product.
We tried multiple ideas around fan engagement and fan analytics. Everything we have tried has taught us valuable lessons that we are incorporating into our future products. We believe we have a good understanding of the market now but have to learn the lessons of scaling the business in the Indian context and the Fantain App (https://fantain.app.link/ad) is in that direction.
What is the uniqueness about your Startup?
We understand the Indian Fans, their preferences and sentiments that a global competitor has to relearn in the Indian context. We have evolved a whole new set of engagement assets that we use today, our platform is robust and has proven its mettle during IPL something that a new start-up has to take a lot of effort to replicate.
What is the revenue model?
We have two revenue models. For the B2B customer, it is subscription based and for B2C business it is Freemium, for now.
Who are the consumers that you are targeting? How is this going to affect them?
- B2B: Sports leagues, boards, associations, teams: We target the sports leagues, team and associations by providing a comprehensive set of tools that they can use to engage, analyse and measure their fan behaviour. A league/team that understands its fan has higher ability to garner better sponsorships.
- B2C: Young, educated, sports fan: We target the B2C market in terms of the young sports fan by giving them an ability to engage with their favourite teams/sports. We provide them unique engagement opportunities that are peppered with detailed information about their favourite team/sports person and other additional information about the sport.
What is the big picture of your startup? Will it lead to something bigger? If so, how?
We have been harnessing data and have aggregate views of fan behaviour. This gives us some unique insights about the fan in demographic and psychographic profiles that are immensely valuable to brands. With more and detailed understanding of the fan, it is a win-win situation for the fans as well as for the businesses as we help them get the best of both the world.
Any new entrant will require a similar period of time before they can be effective in this space. We have invested immense time, effort & money to build an infrastructure that captures and harvests fan data. We use this information in all the solutions we build for our customers.
What is the success story of your startup in your own words?
We are a unique service provider in the B2B sector, being the top Fan Relationship Management Firm. We count Kolkata Knight Riders, Sunrisers Hyderabad of IPL fame and Tamil Nadu Premier League as our customer. In other sports, Fantain is the official fan engagement partner of Premier Badminton League. We also count T- Series and Sony Music India, in music domain, as our customers.
In the B2C domain, we are the best Andriod based platform to play Fantasy sports like Cricket & Kabaddi with 3,00,000+ downloads, 1.2 million lineup submissions, 5 million monthly app opens and more than 20 Lakhs in prizes distributed to the sports fans.
Any other information about your startup that you would like to share with us.
Our vision is to transform the way Sports and Entertainment businesses are conducted in India. And thanks to our association with BookMyShow, we are working on some interesting ideas where we work directly with fans and their interests. Watch this space for some exciting announcements in the coming months.