A social way of covering sports

It is a typical middle-class residential neighbourhood. There is hardly a signboard directing you and as you find your way to the first floor of a non-descript house after asking around, you see a small group of 20-somethings, tapping on desktops and laptops.

A wall-mounted television is tuned into a sports channel. You ask a 20-something with unkempt hair, a scraggly beard, dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt for Porush Jain and he says in a soft voice that it is he.

You are a bit surprised – unnecessarily so since you are dealing with start-ups – as you had pictured in your mind somebody older, especially since you are looking for CEO of the company.

Sports worm

Porush Jain, 27, founded Absolute Sports Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore-based start-up that runs sports portal Sportskeeda, along with his friend Srinivas, in 2009 even while he was pursuing a Master’s in business administration from an institute in Bangalore. The idea for Sportskeeda – a variant of a book worm, it connotes a sports worm, or a sports lover – is to be a “social way of covering sport,” says Porush. “Sports by sports fans,” he adds.

It gets a variety of sports lovers and writers – engineering students, bloggers, sports lovers, a few established sports writers – write about a game, not necessarily about the results, but what happened before and after the game. And, it is not confined to just cricket, which is what most sports Web sites do, contends Porush, but covers a range, including F1, basketball, European football.

Porush, who worked in Infosys for two years after completing his engineering course, says he opted out of campus recruitment after his MBA and chose to go back home to Noida and ran Sportskeeda out of his father’s office for a while, before heading back to Bangalore. Back in Bangalore, he worked in TutorVista for a few months, before deciding to concentrate full-time on Sportskeeda.

“It is an online content company. I want it to be the largest Indian sports Web site,” says Porush.

Revenue from ads

Sportskeeda gets its revenues from advertising. It has tied up long-term advertising with a handful of companies such as Pepsi and Toyota. “We get around 50,000 visits a day. More than one lakh page views,” says Porush, but is confident that it is a matter of time before these numbers jump manifold.

He invested a few lakh rupees of his money in the venture and got a Rs 2.8 crore investment from Seedfund, which backs early-stage ventures, to scale up operations.

Porush says over time, Sportskeeda will have the largest community of sports writers, most of whom will have a good following. Like most of those in his age group, Porush exudes confidence that Sportskeeda will be profitable in a year and that he will soon enough start looking for another round of funding. Sportskeeda has about 15 employees right now, in both content and technology.

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