SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
His software does $15k/mo helping you rent empty tennis courts (and 22 other sports)
03 Sep 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
500 hours booked times two hours of pop. So it's 1000 hours at 10 bucks on average per hour, $8 per hour is cheap, you know, 16 per hour might be a vassal 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 and 20 grand. Yeah, that's, that's pretty much right.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Shyam Rajamani.
He's the co-founder 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 20 years of entrepreneurial experience in diverse industries with a focus on sales, his vision is to create a supercharged sporting ecosystem. All right, Shyam, ready to take us to the top? Yep.
All right, what's your favorite sport?
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.
And so did you build this for yourself to start?
Well, not really. Well, kind of. About three years ago, 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 anyone could pretty much go in and play.
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Chapter 2: How did the idea for SharePlay originate?
The lowest price is 400 rupees that translates to about $8 per hour.
Per person or for the whole, I can take 10 people in?
Yeah.
You could play maybe between two and four and six people could play on a racquet sport, maybe a badminton court. Basketball courts would probably be somewhere close to double 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 some discounts for these people.
We've got memberships, people who subscribe and play one hour every day for a particular time slot. So they prepay us in advance as well.
Interesting. And so in July, when you had 500 to 600 bookings, how many hours does that equate to in July? Is that about 500 to 600 hours?
No, typically each booking is about two to two and a half hours because the team sports, 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.
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, $8 per hour is cheap. You know, 16 per hour might be a vast all corporate, an average of 10 bucks an hour. I mean, you're doing like between 10 and 20 grand a month in revenue.
Oh, 10 and 20 grand. Yeah. That's, that's pretty much right.
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Chapter 3: What unique challenges does SharePlay face in the sports rental market?
So people in the neighborhood or their customers, their students, their alumni, their network could book and use their sports facilities.
Now, when you raise the $70,000, what did you raise it on? Was it a safe or a note or...
Uh, so we've actually raised, uh, 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 million dollar valuation, plus or minus a few percent. 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 because I think we need a little more proof of concept ourselves and make sure that we're on the right track. And we knew, and this is kind of where we know that Our sales cycle is kind of increasing. Our pipeline is good. And 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 door is a lot of work. How do you do that?
Well, at the moment, we are knocking on doors for 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.
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Chapter 4: How does SharePlay generate revenue from sports facilities?
And they've seen that money can do a lot. They can use it for sports infrastructure. They can use it for improving the school facilities, pay off a few salaries for some teachers if they have to. And they're seeing the value that we bring in that ecosystem as well.
Yeah, 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 4 to 5 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 till midnight, so the longer they're open, the more money they make.
I love that, Sean. What a great business model. I love that. Is the tech heavy behind this, or is this really sort of a physical play? You just got to go knock on doors, hit 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 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, you know, not 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 services, which we provide additionally over this. So we staff it for the times that...
that they'd open well sean we're rooting for you we're out of time no on that no 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 There's Elon Musk, who I really like. There's Girish Mathur from Freshdesk.
There's Mr. Ratan Tata of the Tatas. So these are a few of the guys that I follow at the moment.
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Chapter 5: What sports can users book through SharePlay?
As they look to scale, just raised $70,000 in a million-dollar valuation, so sold under 7% of the business. Again, as they look to bring on some additional talent. Shyam, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan. Thanks a lot.