Racing ahead

Young Dubai resident Amit Singh launched a new sports fan engagement app in the Middle East called Boomer11 last year. Here’s why he is confident the startup will achieve its goal

Why did you decide to set up Boomer11?

I returned home to Dubai at the start of the pandemic from the UK where I was studying business. With remote classes, I wanted to start something of my own in my free time to pursue my passion for technology, sports and gaming.

During my research, I realised that we have a great sports ecosystem in the Middle East where sports like football, cricket and basketball are followed by millions of people, but unlike the UK, US and India, there are no sports fan engagement apps with a focus on regional audiences. Hence we launched Boomer11 as a mobile-first, free-to-play app which offers features such as daily fantasy sports, quizzes, match updates and real-time scores so that users can be more involved in the sports they love and participate in sharing and discussing sporting moments that matter to them. The daily fantasy sports feature lets users create a fantasy team based on real-life matches like IPL and football leagues to score points and win prizes or Boomer coins. Boomer coins can be redeemed for prizes or branded merchandise on the app.

Overall, we want to provide a highly interactive gamified experience for multiple sports adapted for fans in the Middle East. Boomer11, which is also available in Arabic, has largely operated in stealth mode following the launch of our Android app in March 2021. So far, despite minimal marketing spend, the app has 15,000 users from the Middle East with an active user spending approximately 30 minutes on the platform daily.

Can you share any investment details?

We are currently bootstrapped with initial funds raised from friends and family and are concentrating on strengthening our operations, adding users and increasing our reach in the region. In the future, for scaling up the business, we may seek external funding.

What is your business and revenue model?

By offering ‘freemium’ formats for multiple sports like cricket, football and basketball on our platform, we aim to bring together all sports fans under one roof to fulfil their engagement needs.

While we continue to focus on user acquisition, we are working on some interesting revenue models where brands and sports franchises can collaborate with us to reach Middle East sports fans. We are also looking at sports tourism, which will further enhance the experience in the region. Additionally, we are working on an online sports store that will be targeted towards the platform’s users.

We are also looking at tie-ups and barter deals with large brands and sport franchises to enhance our reach within the region. We recently collaborated with Delhi Bulls – Abu Dhabi T10 team to promote the app in the Middle East.

Looking ahead, what are your projections for Boomer 11?

In the GCC countries, there are no apps for daily fantasy leagues for cricket and football. Based on PWC Middle East’s sports survey, enhanced sports fan engagement is a massive opportunity; we would like to make the right investments and collaborate with the right brands/partners to reach a strong audience of 90 million sports enthusiasts in the region.

With Boomer11 we have a first mover advantage. We plan to keep the core feature of the app free-to-play and concentrate on other models for revenue.

There is a lot of stickiness on the platform and so in the coming years we hope to make a big dent in the sports ecosystem in the Middle East. We would also love it if we can enable people’s esports career with Boomer11 in some way or the other.

In terms of expansion, while 80 per cent of our current users are from the UAE, we intend to take the app to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Oman and Kuwait. With many popular sporting events expected this year, our first milestone is to reach 500,000 users in 2022. Looking at our current growth, we believe the opportunity is just massive. With encouraging support from the UAE government for startups, we aspire to be one of the 20 unicorns that the UAE aims to have by 2031.