India: Located in Bengaluru, location-based mobile app, Playo is planning to expand its presence in another four cities and two countries in 2017. The company is currently operating in two prime IT cities of India, i.e. Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
Founded in October 2014, Playo went live in May 2015, launching Android app on Google Play Store with two partner facilities in Bengaluru. The company’s objective is to bring together sports enthusiasts, facilities, trainers and organisers on a single platform, and through this expansion, the company is stepping in that direction further.
“Currently, we are operating in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. We are targeting Chennai, NCR and Pune in the near term, as the cities constitute a large working young immigrant population which is where most of our early adopters are from (25-34 year age bracket),” Playo Founder Gauravjeet Singh told DH.
“On the international front, we have received a lot of enquiries from various countries and our launch in the UAE has given us the belief and some expertise on replicating Playo at a global stage,” he added.
“We believe that we can make Playo a success in other countries, given similar user and supplier needs and the lack of an end-to-end player in the market. Our learnings in India and the UAE have helped us fine-tune the product and ready it for a larger international market. We’re looking at making inroads into one country in Europe and Asia each in the coming year,” Singh said.
On revenues, Singh said, “We are currently clocking monthly online transactions of Rs 1 crore and expect to grow by about 7x in the coming year. Our revenue model comprises commission on sales, software service fee and revenues from promotional/outreach/engagement campaigns.”
Singh said, “We have 1,20,000 app downloads till date across Android, iOS and Windows with a retention/MAU (monthly active users) of 55%. It took us 15 months to go from 0 to 50,000 users as we were careful about the quality and relevance of the initial user base.”
Talking about competition, he said, “Globally, we have seen some models exist that focus primarily on facility management solutions or aggregation. One prominent example is Active Network in the US.”
When asked about the meaning of Playo, Singh explained, “Put Play and a Ball (O) together and that’s Playo for you! The idea was to create a simple yet youthful brand that people immediately connected with Sports and Fun.”
