BackFantasy sport app Ballr launches in India
Ballr CEO Sam Jones says what brands like most about what the fantasy sport app is doing is that it's totally in the opposite direction of gambling
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New Delhi: Fantasy sport, where you play the virtual selector of a live game, collect points according to the actual performance of the players and win a prize, is making its mark in India. Ballr, a mobile app, is the latest to tap the market.
Ballr, a Singapore-based micro fantasy and fan engagement platform, launched its operations in Asia starting with India. Unlike traditional fantasy sports games, Ballr has introduced a new way to play—rapid-fire micro gaming to predict the next wicket in a cricket match or the next over of the game—and has replaced monetary prizes with money-can’t-buy experiences like opportunities to hang out with sports celebrities, in this case Harbhajan Singh, the company’s first brand ambassador in India.
Ballr will launch soccer and basketball games in China, Thailand and Vietnam. The company has received $4 million in seed capital to date.
Sam Jones, founder and chief executive of Ballr was in India to announce the launch. In an interview, Jones spoke about online fan engagement for sport in India and why it’s a lucrative opportunity waiting to be unleashed. Edited Excerpts:
How did you set up Ballr?
Before setting up this company I had a head-hunting business connecting bankers to new jobs based out of Hong Kong.
In my time in executive search, one of the major trends (I discovered) was mobile phone penetration not just globally but specifically in India and China. I think there’s nearly a billion phone accounts in India of which 30% are smartphones.
The world has become consumed with the use of their mobile phones, they are addicted to it. And I realized that’s the business I should be in.
One of the other trends I saw was people not only use their mobile phone for news and communication they actually use their mobile phone to escape into a virtual world through games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush.
The third thing I noticed was the explosion of sport. Sport is the ultimate panacea in terms of connecting people. It breaks down languages and cultures.
I looked at these trends and digging up deeper into the world of sport I saw in the US fantasy sport had become a huge phenomenon. Taking in more revenue than the gambling money at stake at Las Vegas by a multiple of five.
We looked at this model and we thought it was really interesting but the Asian consumer behaves much more rapidly on the mobile phone and we felt that this model needed adapting for the Asian market place. So we started building Ballr.
The final trend which we threw into our business was how design thinking had totally disrupted certain industries. If you look at Tinder it has a billion swipes a day and its created a whole wave of similar apps. It’s about being able to connect with people just with single swipe. Same as Uber. So we looked at all these things and said how can we do something in sport all through for mobile that’s global that’s using the fantasy sport concept but simplifying it so it was available for the masses.
How do you plan to bring people to the app?
There’s a number of ways. The first way is through design so making something absurdly simple and addictive to play. If people can’t understand the app in the first eight seconds they delete it and never use it.
The second thing is we make it free to play. So we know how many people like sport, have a mobile phone but not everyone has a credit card. So that’s why we wanted to make this app totally free to play. So everyday you get 20 tokens to play 10 games.
The other thing we did is we studied Candy Crush and the way they grew their business was they reward people for sharing it within their social network. So you get 20 tokens a day and if you share it with your friends you receive another 50 tokens. Its called the viral loop.
We have launched on Facebook a few weeks ago. We have close to half-a-million members on our community. So we build the Facebook community, our target for this year is 5 million.
We do that by bringing in ambassadors to help us, so Harbhajan Singh is our first ambassador, we have another West Indies player, Chris Gayle... The Facebook following of our ambassadors who we have chosen in cricket is 19 million. So we’ll be using a lot of Facebook to reach out to our users.
Which markets are you focusing on?
Our business is launching from India, outwards. We launch in India covering cricket. In July, we launch in China covering soccer. There’s not many cricket fans in China. So we have got cricket and soccer, the two biggest games, the two biggest countries.
We are launching on Android but as soon as we launch in China we are also on the iOS. Come October we launch NBA on the app.
You were also an investor in PlayUp, a sports tech start up that failed to take off. What went wrong?
I think PlayUp caught onto a lot of early trends very quickly which was around mobile phone usage and certain sports and so on. I think the mistake that they made was they tried to become a content player.
They tried to focus their efforts on generating news and scores, there’s no revenue in that. ESPN and Cricinfo are pretty good at that.
PlayUp started out to be a gaming app, but I think they raised too much money and tried to build the Facebook of sport. The only problem with that strategy is that Facebook is already doing that. They didn’t articulate their mission and their path to revenue early enough and just got lost.
Take us through your business model.
We are speaking to over 150 companies at the moment. Companies like Tag Heuer, Microsoft, Oakley have already come on board. We are in talks with Uber, Samsung, Mahindra and Nike, among others.
What brands like most about what we are doing is that it’s totally in the opposite direction of gambling. It’s not cool for a brand to be close to a gambling brand. We are going down fan engagement; if we succeed in getting 50 million people to play our games, to connect with their friends through this special moment of time when they are watching live sport.
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