Dream Sports started off as a fantasy sports platform, and is now expanding across verticals like sports merchandising and experiential tourism. Will it help the company overcome regulatory hurdles the sector is battling?
Since 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 constant companion.
In 2008, when the Indian Premier League (IPL) 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. “Bhavit [Sheth] 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.
Keeping The Dream Alive
Once they started gaining some traction, Sheth and Jain set out to look for funding, but most venture capital (VC) funds in India would tell them, “This is a foreign concept, India mein fantasy koi nahi samajta hai [No one understands fantasy in India]. Why don’t you do ecommerce?”
From 2012 to 2014, the duo claims to have reached out to 150 VCs in India and the US—where Jain was pursuing his MBA from Columbia University. “When you hear a ‘no’ 150 times, you also learn more about your business each time—from gross margins and contribution margin to the retention curves and total addressable market [TAM],” says Jain. “In one of our early meetings, an investor asked us, ‘What’s your TAM?’ and we were like, ‘Who’s she?’” he laughs.
Soon after Jain’s graduation, he met Vani Kola, founder and managing director of Kalaari Capital, in New York in 2014, at a time the business had hit 300,000 registered users. Kola recalls, “What I saw in Harsh was a founder who was very mature for his age. He had a clear vision of the kind of leader he wanted to be.” Unlike most entrepreneurs who paint a rosy picture, Kola says, “He was very comfortable openly talking about the risks involved in his business. Most entrepreneurs don’t talk about the risks, let alone a game plan to deal with them.”
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