Delhi Based Playnlive Aims To Be The World’s Largest Platform For Sports Enthusiasts

In today’s fast paced environment where one doesn’t get time to breathe and relax, it’s important to devote time to sports and a healthy lifestyle. However, it’s not easy to find a place and company to play your favourite sport. In metropolitain cities with skycrapers all around, it’s even more difficult to find a place where one can play sports.

So if you want to break away from the monotonous un-healthy corporate life, Delhi based Playnlive.com is here to help you. “We are an online sports discovery and booking platform” says the founder of PlaynLive.com, Nakul Kapur.

Nakul had always been passionate about sports for many years and also represented his school and college in multiple sports at various levels. After completing his MBA from International Management Institute (IMI, Delhi), he started working in Gurgaon but didn’t find much time for sports. He used to struggle to find partners to play with because of the hectic work hours. Also there wasn’t any concrete information available anywhere about the sports facilities across the city. That’s when he started Playnlive.com, a platform to discover places to play sports in Delhi NCR.

Visitors can log on to Playnlive.com, select their city, select a sport and search for a facility near their place. The users will be able to find complete relevant information related to any sports facility.

Playnlive has more than 7000 sports facilities listed on the website in 17 cities. They also provide information on 30 sports events of which they handle payment and booking for runningandliving.com. It covers sports clubs, complexes, coaching academies and sports events. A visitor can view images of the sports establishment, find out the facilities available, timings, reviews, maps, contact number and email on Playnlive. It also cover topics related to sports, health and fitness through the Playnlive blog. They are working hard to get their mobile applications out soon as well.

The website was launched on 1’st February 2014, however it started its operations for Delhi NCR in September 2013. They started out with listings for Delhi initially and later on, as traffic grew, scaled to other metro cities as well. They initially targeted people in the 24-35 age bracket who are passionate about sports and are also working. It has also signed up with 5 merchants from Delhi NCR and has some of the big names like KravMaga and Delhi Rock to boast about.

“That’s when I took this plunge of leaving my comfortable job in the products team at PaytTM.com to work on Playnlive as a full time venture” says Nakul.

“Collecting and verifying the data was the most difficult task in the initial days” he says. With limited man power and capital it had become really difficult for them to cover clubs and complexes, academies for 30+ sports in every city.

Playnlive lists all sports facilities for free but charges for featured or promoted listings and ads. The website has also signed up merchants for online bookings, cash management and online ticketing for sports events.

Advertisement by sports goods seller, sports facility owners and sports event organisers is one their primary source of revenue. They work on a fixed and variable fee model with the sports establishments where they get the variable part on every referred sale from their platform.

Playnlive aims to be the world’s largest platform for sports enthusiasts. They have already developed a discovery and booking platform across major cities of India.

Soon they will be adding a section for social networking for sports enthusiasts on their platform which will help people connect with each other and start an activity. This will be open to people across the globe after a soft launch with a few users. Since the website already has a discovery and booking platform, this would complete the flow of starting up any activity or playing a sport. People will be able to create their profiles, connect with each other, discover a place through Playnlive and book the space as well, thus completing the loop. The company plans to break even by the end of the fiscal year of 2014.

A number of players like Qurly, FitHo and Fitternity have come up in the past few months who are going niche by aggregating service providers in verticals like gyms, yoga, spa’s. This is an unorganized space as of now which each of these players is targeting.

The Fitness & Slimming service sector is valued at $2 Bn which is growing at 25-30% CAGR. This market is just a subset of the estimated $17 Bn health and wellness market of India. The health and wellness space seems to be heating up a lot.