How shareplay CEO Shyam Rajamani grew shareplay 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...