The co-founder of the digital sports streaming platform speaks about striking deals with key stakeholders like F1 and PGA, the opportunity of going deeper into other sports, and building a scalable product
Yannick Colaco, CEO and co-founder, FanCode
In 2019, Yannick Colaco and Prasana Krishnan launched digital platform FanCode (under the Dream Sports umbrella that has Dream11 as its flagship company), to be a one-stop destination for sports fans like themselves. In five years, the sports streaming and merchandising platform has been able to break the clutter in the crowded and competitive market by recording over 100 million users. It has also inked streaming deals with key stakeholders like F1, the West Indies Cricket Board and the hockey and the rugby World Cups. In the latest episode of Sports UnLtd, Colaco charts FanCode’s journey over the past five years and shares its scaling-up strategy over the next five. Edited excerpts:
Q. Why did you set up FanCode in 2019? The market that you were going to operate in was already crowded and competitive. Why launch another platform?
When Prasana and I, along with Dream Sports, started FanCode, the idea came from this entire problem that we faced as sports fans. What we saw in the sports ecosystem was that, while sports fandom was growing in India, the coverage of sports events was getting extremely concentrated around these big premium properties, like the IPL, India cricket events, football World Cups etc. We started FanCode with the idea of solving this problem of access. There are tens of thousands of sports events across the world which sports fans in India want—not just in sports like football, badminton, basketball or rugby, but also in cricket. We thought the idea of setting up FanCode was essentially to address that problem, and use the power of digital to provide access of these events to this growing fanbase in India.
Q. Can you give me a sense of how the company has scaled up in these five years?
FanCode is a direct-to-consumer digital product. Right now, we operate only in India. We’ve been really thrilled with the kind of progress we’ve had in the last five years. We've already crossed 100 million users on our platform, we have more than 50 million downloads across iOS and Android mobile operating systems. In the last year or so, we're also expanding the reach of the FanCode product with distribution partners—we’ve partnered with Amazon Prime Video, Airtel Xtreme, Vodafone Idea, and a lot of others. When we started five years ago, the content that we showcased—let's call it the long tail of sports—had almost zero viewership because there was zero coverage. The fact that we've been able to aggregate more than 100 million users has been really fulfilling for me as a sports fan.