How Shareplay Hit $120K Revenue Helping Schools Rent Empty Sports Courts (Interview with CEO Shyam Sundar Rajamani)

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Sham Rajamani. He's the cofounder and CEO of a company called shareplay, which brings communities to sport. Shareplay is the perfect melding of his love of sports and getting people to play. With over twenty years of entrepreneurial experience in diverse industries with a focus on sales, his vision is to create a supercharged sporting ecosystem. Alright, Sean. You ready to take us to the top?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

00:23>> Yep.

Favorite Sports and Origin Story

Nathan Latka

00:24Alright. What's your what's your favorite sport?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

00:26>> 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 and basketball here and there just to keep some interest going and learn some new sports as well.

How Shareplay Was Founded

Nathan Latka

00:37And so did you build this for yourself to start?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

00:41>> Well, not really. So we well, kind of. So about three years ago, when we before we started this, 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 people could, anyone could pretty much go in and play, right? So the primary motive of shareplay was to get people to come out of their neighborhoods, come out of

01:03>> their houses and find places to play. And we couldn't, so we thought up 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 100,000 private schools and maybe five to 10 times

01:23>> that in terms of public schools. And a lot of these schools have some kind of sports infrastructure, whether it's a standard mud ground or a basketball court or a volleyball court or something even better for some of the schools. But they're in every neighborhood, and they're all closed after 4PM and 5PM, because schools are out at three. So we saw an opportunity there for to create neighborhood sporting centers, so anybody could just come in from a two

Targeting School Infrastructure in India

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

01:47>> kilometer radius to and get a game of their favorite sport.

Nathan Latka

01:56Interesting. Yeah. So it's almost like it's almost like meetup events, but for sports specifically. And who Shyam, who pays for this? How do you make money?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

02:05>> So cast so we have we our shareplay already lists all of our facilities, all the schools and all the sports facilities that are there and we sell them by the hour. So a large part of our population is the school students themselves who come back maybe senior school students. 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

02:27>> neighbors, and they come in and use it. Later on through the day, some facilities are open till midnight, and we have a lot of older people coming in and using it who finish work and they come in, Right? So most of our customers live in that neighborhood in a two, three kilometer radius, so we're kind of creating play centers for people who wouldn't normally go to a private space or pay a club membership to get a

Nathan Latka

02:46>> membership.

02:46So if I open the application today, how many different venues will I see available for me to book time?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

02:52>> You'll choose you'll be able to choose from about 22 different sports from about 15 different venues at the moment.

Nathan Latka

03:01So where geographically are you based mainly?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

03:04>> We are in Chennai in India.

Nathan Latka

03:05Okay. Interesting. South Of India.

Business Model: How Shareplay Makes Money

Nathan Latka

03:08Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

03:31your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get

03:56a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here.

Venues, Sports, and Geography

Nathan Latka

04:08Right? So

04:09the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter

04:33by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. Well, go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than

04:59what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here and go

July 2022 Bookings and Usage

Nathan Latka

05:23ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview.

05:32And 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?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

05:45>> We get last year in July, we were actually No.

Nathan Latka

05:48Last July. This this year.

05:49This year.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

05:51>> This year, which was two months ago.

Nathan Latka

05:52Yeah. This year in July.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

05:54>> Yeah. We would have had about 500 to 600 individual bookings. Each group would have been anywhere between eight to 15 people would come in and play.

Pricing: Court Fees by Sport

Nathan Latka

06:03And 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?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

06:14>> So we charge, so it costs different amounts of money for different types of sports like racket sports, like Patent, it might be a little lower priced sports like

Nathan Latka

06:22What's low though? What's the price? What's the low price?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

06:26>> The lowest price is 400 rupees. That translates to about $8 per hour.

Nathan Latka

06:31Per person or for the whole I can take 10 people in?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

06:35>> You could play maybe about between two and four and six people could play on a racket sport, maybe a badminton court. Basketball courts would probably be somewhere double close to double of that between 10 and $15. Cricket grounds would go up to $20 per hour. We also got bookings that go on through the entire day. So then we kind of maximize create create some discounts for these people. We've got memberships, people who subscribe and play one

06:58>> hour every day for a particular time slot. So they prepay prepay us in advance as well.

Nathan Latka

07:03Interesting. And so in July, when you had 500 to 600 bookings, how many hours does that equate to in July? Is that about five hundred or six hundred hours?

Monthly Hours and Revenue Estimate

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

07:11>> In no. Typically, each booking is about two to two and a half hours because their team sports, and they they end up making multiple bookings. 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.

Nathan Latka

07:25Yeah. So if we take five hundred hours booked times two hours a pop, it's a thousand hours at $10 on average per hour. $8 per hour is cheap. You know, 16 per hour might be a bad sell corp, but an average of $10 an hour. I mean, you're doing, like, between 10 and $20,000 a month in revenue.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

07:40>> 10 and $20. Yeah. That's that's pretty much right.

Nathan Latka

07:43That's very cool. And you mentioned you've been doing this for three years. So if you're doing between 10 and $20,000 a month today in revenue, what were you doing exactly one year ago?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

07:51>> One year ago, we just so we we opened we started about three months before the first lockdown. So in December 2019, so we got shut down four months after that, and we kept getting shut down for a long period of time. So didn't we just

08:08>> centers back then till last July. So since last July, 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 four to six weeks. So we see our revenues growing only from this financial year. So this is the actually only financial year that we're fully open without a lockdown.

Nathan Latka

08:26And, Cham, are you doing this full time?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

08:29>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

08:30Very cool. And do you have cofounders or just you?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

08:34>> Have a cofounder. His name is Raghu. So we both of us started in this together.

Nathan Latka

08:37Interesting. Were you guys nice at the beginning? You just split it fifty fifty?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

08:42>> Yeah. Yeah. We go fifty fifty. We have we have we have stayed at fifty fifty.

Nathan Latka

08:47And have you stayed bootstrapped or just had to raise some capital?

Funding: Pre-Seed Round of $70,000

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

08:50>> So we were bootstrapped till about four months. We we do the small pre seed round building that's happening. We're making money for the schools that we work with. We

09:07>> they

09:11>> don't use it. And so we've shown all that value because we're building out software to help our schools manage themselves and So, Sean, real quick.

Nathan Latka

09:18Sorry. Sorry. We're before we get too far away from the race. So you did a seed you did a seed round four months ago. How much did you raise?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

09:27>> In dollar terms, about $70,000.

Nathan Latka

09:30750,000.

09:31And and what makes this No.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

09:33>> No. No. $70,000. 70.. Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:3770,000.

Profitability and Tech Roadmap

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

09:38>> We we didn't wanna make too much money at this point of time because operationally, we are profitable, but we needed money more to build our tech so that we are moving out of a completely man operated 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.

Team Size and Structure

Nathan Latka

09:58And so how many folks are on the team full time today?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

10:02>> 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 work at the centers.

Nathan Latka

10:12So nine 19 total, something like that.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

10:15>> 19 total. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:16Why do you have to staff the actual centers? Don't they have their own staffers that run the venues?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

10:22>> Well, that's that's why we're coming into assessment. 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 and 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

10:44>> centers and certain schools with the right mix of sports, they make a lot of money. But there are also certain schools and 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 money that potentially they could make.

Growth Strategy: School Referrals and Expansion

Nathan Latka

11:03Understood.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

11:03>> Even though it's a smaller amount. So what we've started doing with those over the last two months is we push them out to a self managed model where they kind of manage themselves and they're paying us back fees. So we kind of experimented with that.

Nathan Latka

11:15And so how many folks, like how many customers would you say you have per month right now? 500?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

11:22>> Customer database is about 1,500, meaning customers who have come and paid with us over time. About 500 to 600 would be repeat customers who keep coming back every month who are regulars at our centers.

Nathan Latka

11:33Yep. Interesting. And so if they don't wanna pay the per court fee, what's the flat subscription fee they can pay?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

11:39>> So the subscription is paid by the school or by a school center who would buy our service. And the service basically gets them their admin portal, also gets them to list their facilities on shareplay.in, which is our website. So people in the neighborhood or their customers, their students, their alumni, their network could book and use their sports facilities.

Nathan Latka

11:58Now when you raise the $70,000 what did you raise that on? Was it a safe or a note or?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

12:04>> 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.

Nathan Latka

12:14And so how did you guys negotiate valuation with friends? That can be hard.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

12:19>> Well, we did a did a million dollar valuation, plus or minus, you know, a few percent, and and we did the math. We spoke to a few people. We spoke to a lot of people who are in the industry of helping people get funds. And the three people who actually put in money have been with us right from the start who wanted to put money right in our first year, but we didn't take it till now

Valuation and Investor Negotiations

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

12:41>> because I think we need a little more proof of concept ourselves and make sure that we're on the right track. We knew 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 a 100 schools by the end of December.

Nathan Latka

12:56Tell me about that. How are you driving growth? I mean, going and recruiting people door by door is a lot I mean, a lot of work. How do you do that?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

13:02>> Well, at the moment, it is it's we are knocking on doors of schools, but we're also getting a lot of referrals from our existing schools 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 that money can do a lot. Right? They can use it for sports infrastructure. They can use it for for improving the school facilities, pay off pay off a few

13:23>> salaries for some teachers if they have to. And they're seeing the value that we bring in that ecosystem as well.

Nathan Latka

13:28Yeah. This is great. If there's a local school that already spent money to build a tennis court, but the school only uses the tennis court right after school from four to 5PM, well, you can book it up and generate more revenue from 5PM onwards.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

13:40>> Yeah. And if it's lit up, some of our venues are open till midnight. So the longer they're open, the more money they make.

Nathan Latka

13:46I love that,

13:47Shyam. What a great business model. Love that.

13:49There any tech is the tech heavy behind this or is this really sort of a physical play? You just gotta go knock on doors at the ground?

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

13:57>> Well, at the moment, the tech wasn't really important. But as we're moving where the schools and private centers or even clubs can start buying our software and use it at a probably as low as 2,500 rupees, which will be about $30 per month per school, it would give them access to a whole bunch of

14:18>> admin control where they have their supervisors in the school knowing what is happening, opening up and closing hours so that it doesn't disrupt the internal school use as well. And also give it out to the security protocol so they know who's made a booking and who's coming in, and pretty much make the entire process seamless right from the time they make a booking till billing happens and that book gets closed. Some facilities do want our staffing

14:42>> services, which we provide additionally over this. So we staff it for the times that that that they're open.

Nathan Latka

14:49Well, Shyamur, we're rooting for you. We're out of time, though. On that note, let's wrap up here with Famous Five. Number one, favorite book.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

14:56>> Most recent favorite book was Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.

Nathan Latka

14:59A good one.

15:00Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

15:05>> Not particularly, but a few of them. There is Elon Musk, which who I really like. There's Girish Mathrubootham from Freshdesk. There's Mr. Ratan Tata of the Tatas. Right? So these are few of few of the guys that I follow at the moment.

Nathan Latka

15:18Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building shareplay?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

15:22>> So we use a lot of Asana, and we also use a lot of Google Sheets at the moment.

Nathan Latka

15:27Number four, how many hours of

15:28sleep do get every night?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

15:30>> Six to seven.

Nathan Latka

15:31Okay. That's pretty good.

15:32Relationship situation, married, single, kids?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

15:35>> Married with one kid. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:36One kid.

15:36And how old are you?

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

15:37>> 43.

Nathan Latka

15:3943. Last question.

15:40Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

15:45>> Travel more. I wish I'd travel more.

Nathan Latka

15:47Guys, what a fun story.

15:48The guy plays a bunch of sports himself. He says, wait a second. Schools build a tennis court, and 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 COVID. They have over 22 sports covered across 15 venues, mainly in

16:06Chennai, India, as they look to scale just raise $70,000 in a million dollar valuation. So sold, you know, under 7% of the business. Again, as they look to bring on some additional talent. Sham, thanks for taking us to the top.

Shyam Sundar Rajamani

16:16>> Thank you, Nathan. Thanks a lot.

Nathan Latka

16:20One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 one

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