About GoPlayr Founder Shwetang R.D
Shwetang R.D, Founder & CEO of GoPlayr. Born and brought up in a small town in Bihar. I graduated in Computer Science almost this time 4 years ago from B.M.S Bangalore. Soon after graduation I took a job to work as Mobile apps developer in Brazil where I worked for 2 years and then returned to India. Starting something of my own was an old dream, my first start up or say idea of start up was back in college along with 4 of my friends where we wanted to organize 5 aside football tournaments in all major cities in India. We couldn’t carry the idea longer because of lack of finances but then the inner call of doing something or starting something of my own never died.
GoPlayr is the 3rd venture I’m working on, so far it’s going pretty good. The number of people participating in sports & fitness activities in India is on the rise, while we are planning to tap this market – we are offering some unique ways to engage in outdoor and fitness activities.
Q. When and how Goplayr came to your mind?
Well, After the failure of my second venture which was a Restaurant POS application, I was working as IT services provider along with a team of 15 people. Of course, the idea was never to get into IT services but since we were good at it and we needed some financial support, we started it part time and at the same time – I started researching into other ideas which could be the next big thing and that is when I came across sports infrastructure renting, social connectivity based on sporting interests and skills, outdoor activities, fitness sections which remains a highly untapped market in India even now.
Q. Introduce Goplayr Co-Founder/s and Team.
Vrunda Karmarkar, Co-Founder, COO – Vrunda is from M.P, She has 8 Years of experience working in MNC’s like IBM, Cognizant in the field of Business Intelligence & Project Management. She is a computer science graduate. We have worked together on more than 4 projects.
Shreyas Shenoy, Co-Founder & CMO – Born & brought up in Dubai. Shreyas is our striker, he handles Marketing, Sales and Business Development end to end. He is my college friend, and an electrical engineer by. Currently we are a team of 13 people working from our office based in Pune.
Q. Explain more about Goplayr, what makes it special ?
GoPlayr is a marketplace for sports, fitness & wellness activities. You can find players, matches, tournaments, coaching, venues to rent slot or day wise for your favorites sports and on the other side you can find fun filled outdoor activities, adventure sports activities, group packages in your city, fitness venues like Yoga, Gyms and Aerobics centers and rent them online hourly and monthly basis. GoPlayr is a unique platform in the country to provide all kinds of sporting, fitness and wellness services under one roof. Users can also host their own match and invite other players to join them by sending a simple push notification. Users can rate each others sporting skills after playing a match together, write reviews for Sporting facilities which will help other users to find what they are looking for and many other features.
For Sports Venue owners & Gym owners, we provide an easy to use platform to rent out their venue on hourly, slot, daily or monthly basis. They can manage payments, bookings, members, take Cash at their counter through our software etc.
Q. What challenges did you face while setting up Goplayr?
Challenges were different at different times. Having said, the biggest challenge is of course to manage the financial’s. There were times I had no answer to my own question, how am I going to manage and pay the bills. I kept fighting instead of taking a no and shutting down the operations. Eventually, things worked out in favour. For the readers of VID, i’d like to say – A lot of people become comfortable, go out of your comfort zone – you’ll find out talents & abilities that you didn’t know you had. Success is a lot of small things done well day after day.
Q. What’s the Current path, Goplayr funding and Future plan?
Current path is just keep taking users feedback and keep improving on our platform features. That’s the way we have thought to take this further, we do not want to build a product and ask users to adopt it. Instead we are trying to build features based on our users feedback and experiences. On the commercials side, we are unit economics positive. We are still in the very initial stage with 1500+ android app downloads and alexa ranking highest among our competitors.
GoPlayr App is available on Google play store here.
