From starting off as a sports community engagement startup to pivoting to streaming during the pandemic, Rooter has gone on to become India's largest game streaming platform with an enviable army of loyal users. Here's a deep dive into how they did it
Dipesh Agarwal and Piyush Kumar (right) started Rooter in June 2016 as a sports fans’ community engagement startup
Image: Madhu Kapparath
Piyush Kumar had lost two back-to-back games. One more setback, and the former India head of marketing for Swiss watch brand Rado was sure to lose the match. “I knew it was all about one wrong move. And it was weighing heavily on my mind,” recalls Kumar, who started Rooter in June 2016 as a sports fans’ community engagement startup. The idea was to build a large group of fans through a tech platform that would keep sports lovers hooked through live prediction games, match chat forums, quizzes, trivia, and all kinds of updates.
Till August 2018, the first-time entrepreneur kept on tirelessly building an army of fans. The results were encouraging. In August, Rooter was selected for the 2018 leAD Sports Accelerator programme, a Berlin-based sports entrepreneurship platform backed by the Adidas family. Being chosen from among 400 startups globally, including 59 from India, was no mean achievement. In Kumar’s heart, however, something was missing.
Rooter had stagnated; it was not growing. “At our peak, we had around 2 lakh users per month. That’s it. It didn’t grow beyond that,” recalls Kumar, who decided to pivot. So the focus shifted to building user generated content (UGC) by using live audio, live video and other forms of sports content. “We wanted to provide sports content in a way that nobody else was providing,” says Kumar. An explosion in smartphone user base, thanks in large measure to Jio and its accessible broadband play, was exactly what the doctor prescribed for Kumar. In one-and-a-half years, Rooter grew at a fast clip. While MAU (monthly active users) jumped to 5 lakh, daily active users surpassed 50,000. “I thought we had found a product-market fit,” he says.
Also read: Why is esports becoming a significant part of sports marketing in India?
(This story appears in the 17 June, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)