ince the 90s, fantasy football has been a rage in the UK. Tabloids like The Sun have run such competitions for years, asking readers to fill in their picks and send across clippings; the newspaper would then announce winners every week. With the advent of the internet in the early 2000s, the game moved online, and a 16-year-old sports buff from Mumbai, who was schooling in London in 2001, was hooked.
Harsh Jain later moved to the US for his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and then returned to India in 2007 to join his family business, Jai Corp. But even as he moved continents, his love for fantasy football remained his constaricketer Matthew Wheeler's is turning kingmaker in Indian sports, food metaverse
In 2008, when the Indian Premier League was launched, Jain set out to look for fantasy cricket platforms. He found nothing—the concept was alien to the country even though it loved the game as much as the UK loved football. It was also around the same time that Jain was getting the entrepreneurial itch. “I always wanted to do something on the lines of my three biggest passions—sports, gaming and technology,” he says.
During a casual chat with school friends, the engineering graduate pitched the idea of bringing it all together—creating a fantasy cricket platform. “Let’s launch it ourselves [I thought] if no one else is doing it... even if it’s only for us. If we make a good version, maybe a 100 million other Indians might like it,” he said.
A month later, he finally made up his mind—he was going to go on with it. “was the only one to join me. We just jumped in, eyes shut or wide open, however you want to say it,” says Jain. The 22 year olds met a bunch of gaming gurus and, Jain says, “all of them told us it was the worst idea in the world”. Sheth adds, “…they were absolutely right.” In 2009, when they launched the website, Dream11, it tanked. The model was free to play, advertisement-driven and entailed creating one fantasy team for the full season. “But the problems were manifold. Yes, people love free-to-play, yes, people love to win prizes, but you can only give prizes to the top 5-10 people who play. Second, the ads were coming, but the money wasn’t,” says Jain, the founder of Dream11.That was then. Today, the fantasy cricket platform claims to have over 150 million users, ahead of rival platforms like Games 24x7 and MPL (Mobile Premier League), which have 100 million and 90 million registered users, respectively. Its parent company, Dream Sports, is valued at a whopping $8 billion and, in 2019, it became the first sports technology unicorn in the country. Dream Sports closed FY21 with a revenue of ₹2,706 crore and a PAT (proft after tax) of ₹329 crore, up from ₹2,120 crore and ₹181 crore, respectively, from the previous year.But it was hardly smooth-sailing in the beginning. Jain’s family helped him with the seed money for theBut it was hardly smooth-sailing in the beginning. Jain’s family helped him with the seed money for the
You must be logged in to post a comment.