How shareplay CEO Shyam Rajamani grew to $120K revenue and 500 customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is sean rajamani he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called shareplay which brings communities to sport uh shareplay is the perfect melding of his loves sports and getting people to play with over 20 years of entrepreneur experience in diverse industries with a focus on sales his vision is to create a supercharged sporting ecosystem all right shawn i'm ready to take us to the top yep all right what's your what's your favorite sport uh well i play squash and i also do a lot of running so those are my two main go to sports but i've started playing a little bit of tennis in basketball here and there just to keep some interest going and learn some new sports as well and so did you build this for yourself to start well uh not really so we well kind of so uh about three years ago when we before we started this uh me and my co-founder used to play soccer football down in the neighborhood playgrounds but then it was always full so we thought about spaces to come up with where where people could anyone could pretty much go in and play right so the primary primary mode of chevrolet was to get people to come out of the enabled to come out of their houses and find places to play and uh we couldn't so we thought of a lot of places where we could go and sign up and maybe build some infrastructure and all of that and then we looked at the number of schools that are there in india so we primarily work with schools and universities and colleges that have a lot of sporting infrastructure because india has got about a hundred thousand private schools and maybe five to ten times that in terms of public schools and a lot of these schools have some kind of sports infrastructure uh whether it's a standard mud ground or a basketball court or a volleyball court or you know something better for some of the schools but they're in every neighborhood and they're all closed after 4 p.m and 5 p.m uh because school's out at three so we saw an opportunity there for to create neighborhood sporting centers so anybody could just come in from a two kilometer radius to and get a game of their favorite sport interesting yeah so it's almost like it's almost like meet up events but for sports specifically and sean who pays for this how do you make money uh so uh so we have we our chair played only lists all of our facilities all the schools and all the sports recipes that are there and we sell them by the hour uh so a large part of our population is the school students themselves who come back maybe senior school students uh 60 of our customers are between the age of about 16 to 21 where they come in and they book out the sports facilities with their friends with their neighbors and they come in and use it later on through the day some facilities are over until midnight and we have a lot of older people coming in and using it to finish work and they come in right uh so most of our customers live in that neighborhood in a two three kilometer area so we're kind of creating uh place centers for people who wouldn't normally go to a private space or pay a club membership to get a membership so if i open the application today how many different venues will i see available for me to book time uh you'll choose you'll be able to choose from about 22 different sports from about 15 different venues at the moment so where geographically are you based mainly we are in chennai and india okay oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this 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hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and so i guess the right question is in in july so last month the full month how many individual people played via a reservation through your app oh we get last year in july we were actually you know last july was this year this year this year which was two months ago yeah this year in july uh we would have had about 500 to 600 individual bookings uh each group would have been anywhere between eight to 15 people would come in and play and so what do you make on a you know let's just make the math easy a 10 person group playing on one of your courts uh so we charge so it costs different amounts of money for different types of sports like racket sports like paternity might be a little lower price uh sports like uh what's low though what's the price with the low price the lowest prices is uh 400 rupees that translates to about eight dollars per hour per person or for the whole i can take 10 people in uh you could play maybe about between two and four and six people could play on a record sport maybe a batman court uh basketball coach would probably be somewhere double uh close to double that between 10 and 15 cricket grants would go up to twenty dollars per hour uh we also got bookings that go on through the entire day uh so then we kind of uh maximize uh you know create some discounts for these people we've got memberships people who subscribe and play one hour every day for a particular time so they prepay prepay us in advance as well interesting and so in july when you had 500 600 bookings how many hours does that equate to in july is that about 500 600 hours no typically each booking is about two to two and a half hours uh because their team sports and they they end up making multiple bookings uh so they would go on for about two three hours so it would be close to about a thousand hours of gameplay that we've had last month yeah so if we take 500 hours booked times two hours of pops it's a thousand hours at 10 bucks on average per hour eight dollars per hour is cheap you know 16 per hour might be a basketball court but an average of 10 bucks an hour i mean you're doing like between 10 and 20 grand a month in revenue oh 10 20 grand yeah that's that's pretty much right that's very cool and you mentioned you've been doing this for three years so if you're doing between ten and twenty thousand dollars a month today in revenue what were you doing exactly one year ago uh one year ago we just so we we opened we certainly started about three months before the first lockdown so in december 2019 so we got china four months after that and we kept getting shut down for a long period of time [Music] back then till last july so since last year over the last few months we've signed up a lot more centers and we're expanding we should be at about 25 to 30 centers over the next uh four to six three weeks so we see our revenues growing uh only from this financial so this is the actually the only financial year that we're fully open without a lockdown and john are you doing this full time yes very cool and do you have co-founders or just you uh his name is dragon so we both of us started doing this together interesting were you guys nice at the beginning you just split it 50 50. yeah yeah we go 50 50. we've stayed at 50 50. and if you stayed bootstrapped or decided to raise some capital so we wear bootstrap uh till about [Music] that's happening we're making money from the schools that we work with [Laughter] [Music] because we're building up software to help our schools manage themselves and so i'm real quick sorry sorry before we get too far away so you did a seed you did a seed round four months ago how much did you raise uh in dollar turns about seven thousand dollars seven hundred fifty thousand and and what makes this no no no seventy thousand seven zero thousand yeah yeah seventy so we didn't want to pay too much money uh at this point of time because operationally we are profitable but we needed money more to build our tech so that we're moving out of a completely man operated uh service to a to a subscription-based model and we're selling staffing services as an add-on as well so that's that's the model that we're moving towards and so how many folks are on the team full-time today uh we have two full-time folks in operations we've got two in tech and we've got about 15 to 20 part-timers who who kind of uh work at the centers so 19 total something like that 19 totally yeah why do you have to staff the actual centers don't they have their own staffers that run the venues well uh that's that's why we're coming into the cessna so the so is when we started off we've been staffing all of our centers because these are schools and schools have a lot of apprehensions in terms of letting people in who's coming in to use the facilities so we provide staffing for the hours that we operate and so when we do that we do a revenue share with them but as we've gone along we've seen that certain centers or certain schools with the right mix of sports they make a lot of money but there are also certain schools maybe in smaller neighborhoods might be smaller centers with smaller playgrounds that don't make it a lot of money and they're not very happy to share on they're not very happy to share revenue base because it takes away a lot of the money that uh potentially they could make understand even though it's a smaller amount so what we've started doing with those over the last two months is we've pushed them out to a self-managed model where they kind of manage themselves and they're paying us that fee so we're kind of experimenting with that and so how many folks like how many customers did you do would you say you have per month right now 500 um customer database is about 1500 unique customers who have come and played with us over time uh about 500 to 600 would be customers who keep coming back every month at our centers yep interesting and so if they don't want to pay the per court fee what's the flat subscription fee they can pay uh so the subscription is paid by the school or by a sports center who would buy our subs and the service basically gets them their admin portal also gets them to list their facilities on that their sharepay.nbc could book and use their sports facilities now when you raise a seventy thousand dollars what did you raise it on was it a safe or a note or uh so we've actually raised we've we've taken money from a few friends from three friends and we've got one incubator deposit participate in that round as well and so how did you guys negotiate valuation with friends that can be hard well uh we did a we did a million dollar evaluation plus or minus you know a few percent and and uh we did the math we spoke to a few people uh we spoke a lot of people who are in the industry of helping people get funds and uh we the three people who actually put in money have been with us right from the start we want to put money right in our first year but we didn't take it till now because uh i think we need a little more proof of concept ourselves uh and make sure that we're on the right track and we knew and and this is kind of where we know that you know our sales cycle is kind of increasing our pipeline is good and we see we see us getting to about 80 to 100 schools by the end of december tell me about that how are you driving growth i mean going and recruiting people door by doors a lot i mean a lot of work how do you do that well at the moment it is uh it's we are knocking on those schools but we're also getting a lot of reference from our existing schools uh because a lot of schools have seen that this is money that they haven't made before even though it's smaller amounts and they've seen the money can do a lot right they can use it for sports infrastructure they can use it for for improving the school facilities uh pay off pay off a few salaries for some teachers if they have to and they see the value that we bring in that ecosystem as well yeah this is great if there's a local school that already spent the money to build a tennis court but the school only uses the tennis court right after school from four to five p.m well you can book it up and generate more revenue from 5 p.m onwards yeah and if it's lit up some of our venues are open to midnight so uh the longer they're open the more money they make i love that shawn what a great business model i love that is there anything is the tech heavy behind this or is this really sort of a physical play you just got to go you know knock on doors at the ground well at the moment the tech wasn't really important but as we're moving where schools and private centers or even clubs can start buying our software and use it at a uh probably as low as 2500 rupees which will be about 30 dollars per month per school uh it would give them access to a whole bunch of you know not admin control where they have their supervisors in the school knowing what is happening opening up and closing ours so that it doesn't disrupt the internal school use as well and also give it out to the security protocol so they have uh they know who's made a booking and who's coming in and pretty much make the entire process seamless right from right from the time they make a booking till billing happens and that book gets close right wherever people some some facilities do want our staffing services which we provide additionally over over this so we start wait for the times that uh they're open well sean we're rooting for you we're out of time no on that now let's wrap up here with famous five number one favorite book um most recent favorite book was shoe dog by phil knight it's a good one number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um not particularly but a few of them um there is um uh there is elon musk which i really like this greenish fresh desk uh there's mr raging carter of the tatas right so these are few few of the guys that i follow at the moment number three what's your favorite online tool for building share play uh so we use a lot of asana and we also use a lot of google sheets at the moment number four uh how many hours of sleep to get every night six to seven okay that's pretty good in situation married single kids married with one kid yeah one kid in however 43 43 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um travel mode i wish i traveled more guys what a fun story the guy plays a bunch of sports himself he says wait a second schools build a tennis court then the tennis court is empty most of the day i should rent it out for them and make money while he's doing that over 500 people rented his courts last month alone he did between 10 and 20 000 a month in revenue you know growing quickly now post cover they have over 22 sports covered across 15 venues mainly in chennai india as they look to scale just raised seventy thousand bucks in a million dollar evaluation so sold you know under seven percent of the business again as they look to bring on some additional talent sham thank you sean thanks for taking the top thank you thanks a lot one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas 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