Smart sports aggregator: your true sports buddy

Abstract

Sports market in India is getting bigger and bigger since there has been growing interest in non-cricket sports primarily because of Olympics and various leagues that are being organized in the country. However, the lackluster support from Government in providing infrastructure to encourage sports participation and in providing quality training to enthusiast. The young population in India is in the largest proportion to other age groups and young generation are becoming cognizant of sports being a medium of fitness and fun. Increasing interest in mobile apps and internet has caused young generation to stay indoors and there is dearth of enough players to play sports that require large number of players. Smart Sports Aggregator taps in this opportunity and aims to be a holistic sports service provider for the sports enthusiast.Its vision is to help India win medals in the Olympic Games by helping budding players by not only enabling them to routinely practice the sports of their interest but also providing them expert guidance and suggested training. Smarts Sports Aggregator’s business model is a two sided network model in which it plans to cross subsidize one side of the network i.e. the sports players. The other side of the network are the facility providers who will benefit from our community of sports players and in lieu of this benefit they would pay a small transaction charge that will happen through website or app or telephonic services. However, there is a provision of introducing preferential account privileges to customers based on subscription fee once enough customers are on-board and there is sufficient customer involvement. It plans to leverage the best in technology to provide a personalized recommendation system suggesting customers to up their game through expert opinions and providing them access to quality sports gear suitable for them.Major services that will be provided includes a platform to find players, find places or facilities, chat and forum based communication system, bundled as well as individual facilities booking services, etc.The service will stand differentiated from competitors due to the strong network of partners in varied areas such facility providers, equipment providers, market research experts and mobile cab companies to enable providing seamless service to our customers. Major sources of monetization will be charging a transaction fee from facility providers, subscription charge from customers, ad revenue, charging on value added services and affiliate marketing for sports companies such as Decathlon. Feasibility of the business model shows that investment will be primarily in the human resource and technology infrastructure and sources of revenue are many based on the success of building a network. Operationally, building a strong technical infrastructure and training and on-boarding of facility providers would be handled by dedicated workforce.