App, Live-blog, Facebook bots – What’s next for SportsCafe?

220 million, that’s the number of smartphone users in India and the numbers are constantly growing. Smart phones have forever changed the way we live our lives. We expect everything to be available on smartphones and sports news is no different.

Traditional media coverage of sports is still stuck in the 20^th century. News portals that do offer good coverage online cater to a small subset of the audience. There is a clear gap to be filled in online sports coverage and that’s where SportsCafe comes in. SportsCafe is an Indian startup, dedicated to covering sporting events for the Indian sports fan, that was founded in October by a bunch of friends passionate about sports. They recognized the gap in online coverage of sports in India, and they envisioned an online platform, which had extensive coverage for all Indian sports and is soon going to launch their content in regional languages.

When trying to follow Saina Nehwal at the Swiss Open last year, the team at SportsCafe discovered a complete lack of sites in India, which cover important matches and contain relevant content surrounding the matches. Upon further interaction they unearthed the real problem: there was a complete lack of dedicated coverage for Indian Sports, except for local news portals. They realized that Indians also needed a forum to express their opinion on sports, and were searching for an outlet. One thing led to another, and when these ideas got coupled with the recent rise in the Indian sports sphere the Idea for SportsCafe came about.

The team started developing SportsCafe in September 2015, and launched it by late-October of that year. With an initial user base of around ten thousand users by December, they graduated to around 1.5 lac users in March and are expecting a couple of million page views in August, which is a rise that speaks for itself. However, the novelty of the website is that they haven’t unleashed hordes of advertisements for revenue generation. The founders say that they are aiming for a user base of around 1 crore and from there they will look for avenues of revenue generation. Their primary aim is user satisfaction and maintenance of high standards.

Building a user base from scratch is a problem for any newly started company and it was no different for SportsCafe. But they had another problem as well, convincing people that their content was vastly different from what was already available. They did this by focusing on two fronts: Highly Engaging Content and Substantial Social Media Focus. They ensured that their content could compare to the best of journalism, but not lack the passionate spirit of sports blogs. They also focused a lot on engaging users through fan pages, especially on Facebook. They became so popular that their tribute to Vijender Singh was shared by the man himself! Way to go, SportsCafe.

After successfully releasing their app for android phones and extensively covering the Rio
Olympics using their live blog they have now released their bot on Facebook messenger. Sportscafe’s bot was developed by ChatMechanics (chatmechanics.com), an Artificial Intelligence startup specializing in chat bots.

“Currently there are only a handful of Facebook bots in the world including SportsCafe’s that provide live sports news and match scores” – says the CEO Yashashvi.

SportsCafe is one of the first news portals and the only sports news portal in India to develop a Facebook bot.

“Facebook bots are a revolutionary way for consumers to enjoy the content offered by SportsCafe while on Facebook” – says Sahil, the CTO at SportsCafe.

To keep receiving updates, you can go to their website or download their app.