Start-Up Island. When personal passion drives a business to commercial success

You’re either an entrepreneur or you’re itching to be one. When formulas on attracting investors or turning profitable or scaling up are what the world is largely talking about, many entrepreneurs, like artists, can’t disconnect from the heart. And it may just be that your biggest opportunity lies in choosing a space you love and building in efficiency or creating opportunities for other people. There may well be a way to profit from your passion.

Prashant Pansare and Chetan Suttraway moved out of writing code for a living and started Playerify in 2012; they share a love for cricket. Ashish Gupta was an investment banker for 14 years but couldn’t shake off his passion for motor sports; Cougar Motorsport was born in 2009 out of that obsession.

Notably Playerify is seed-funded and Cougar Motorsport has managed to sustain itself over five years. Their own hard reasoning for starting their ventures has lured the support that fuels success. Because it’s about making it work.

It’s an important question to ask if a business that sits outside the ‘most popular’ segments has to thrive. The founders of Playerify began by solving problems they faced themselves as cricket team and league managers. “We began working on an online cricket portal. In the beta phase, we had paying customers for league management. We worked with league organisers closely to build a solution that could be sold and then moved to a generic portal soon after. We knew by then that the problems faced by cricket players and organisers are fundamentally the same for other sports,” shares Pansare.

As for Gupta’s Cougar Motorsport, captive customers were senior executives and businessmen who would appreciate luxury self-driving experiences across various terrains in India. He saw that head honchos who travelled the world on a regular basis would also appreciate exploring their own country for a change. His own extensive rally experiences helped. Between 2006 and 2009, Gupta had himself racked up a few podium finishes between events like Xtreme Raid De Himalaya and Desert Storm. In 2013, he also featured in Rainforest Challenge Malaysia, touted as one of the toughest motor races in the world. “I had friends who were interested in rallying but a lot of them shied away from extreme conditions. They were driving enthusiasts and seemed to want to enjoy something experiential. With the growth of SUV sales in India, what happened was that people had invested in good vehicles but weren’t doing much with them,” says Gupta. Arguably then, successful businesses may just be about matching what you love with your experiences, then letting those experiences shape the commercial strategy around your business.

Gupta thought about the ‘commercials’ very early on. Events organised by Cougar Motorsport always breakeven because the company’s own overheads aren’t loaded on to this stream of the business. Opportunity costs and company overheads are taken care of with events hosted for large automobile brands like Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Renault, Tata Motors and Audi.

Backed by seed investor and incubator The Morpheus Gang, Playerify too was clear about how the money was going to flow in. Monetisation is possible through the B2B segment with Playerify hosting events through the portal. From end-to-end league management including announcing the league and creating schedules to showcasing scores or league statistics, Playerify has 600 sports events across Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Pune, and Chennai.

Pansare and Suttraway expect that India will have a large base of amateur sportspersons in 4-8 years. Already there are 2,000 of them registered on Playerify. Gupta’s Cougar Motorsport will look at forging ahead with its established mechanism even as many brand managers across the country continue to make safe investments in sports like golf or polo.

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