Cricket E-Commerce Startup Seeking Finance to Expand Product Range

Opportunity Snapshot

  • Country: India India
  • Industry: Internet, eBusiness
  • Stage: Initial growth (first revenues)
  • Investment size: $30,000 / min. $20,000
  • Type of investment: Equity

Investment Opportunity

We aim to fill the gap by crowd sourcing items related to cricket at a one stop shop for the user. We have an in-house team which will complement the suppliers, drive innovation in this space and provide Cricket lovers with plethora of options to choose from sitting at the convenience of their homes.

Market

Cricket is more of a religion in India with at least half of the population of India passionate about Cricket in one way or another. You can see small children forming ad hoc teams and playing cricket even in smallest of cities and towns. During the world cup finals of 2011 more than 70 million people watched the same which is a viewership record. The idea is to facilitate the need of each and every Cricket lover in the country. Even today Cricket is more than INR 5000 Cr business each year. By introducing innovative solutions to the segment the space size of market will further increase. We will make it easy for every Cricket lover to get what they are looking for and so we will drive transactions up and help in raising the overall standard of the game/players

Offering to the customer

There are many factors which constitute our Unique Selling Proposition (USP): 1. We would be a one stop shop where buyers can find all the items for their Cricketing needs 2. Crowd sourcing will enable us to have a very wide range of options in all product categories 3. We will drive innovation in the space and promote Cricket Handicrafts which will give more options to the user and increase total market size too.

Sales/Distribution

We plan to reach to the user via online networks for Cricket fans. There are number of pages of various Cricket players on Facebook which already have huge numbers (some have 50 lacs followers), there are lot of cricket communities on yahoo and other very active communities like indiancricketfans. We intend to partner with them by providing special discounts to their users. We also plan to have an engaging community of cricket fans by providing a platform for Cricket bloggers to bring the best articles about Cricket at one place. We will ensure that quality of products delivered and our service is world class so that the offering becomes viral and spread via word of mouth. Last but not the least we will also leverage digital advertising (Google and Facebook ads).

Inspiration

The idea originated from the frustration we ourselves faced about lack of quality cricket merchandise in India. Whatever little options were available were very costly. We figured there is definitely gap in demand and supply which needs to be filled. Since starting we have evolved a lot on the future strategy by talking to various Cricket lovers. Starting with crowd sourced T Shirt designs we will be expanding into all Cricket gear, equipment and Cricket Handicrafts.

Competitive Advantage

Our USP, as described above, refers to being an innovative, crowd-sourcing based one stop shop for the Cricket lover.

Use of financing

We would expand the product offering from the existing set of T Shirts to a wider range of products including Cricket handicrafts, Cricket gear and Cricket equipment. We also intend to have an in-house design team which will complement the crowd sourced designs and refine the submitted ones. We will improve on logistics and provide COD in addition to existing prepay option. We also plan to reach to Cricket lovers via various formal and informal channels to diversify the product offering and also beef up digital marketing to make more people aware about us.

Opportunity for the investor

We are looking for investment in the form of Equity.

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