“The only bad workout is the one you didn’t do.”
According to a WHO(World Health Organization) report, approximately 2.5 million deaths per year are attributed to physical inactivity. Modern day sedentary lifestyle combined with increasing dependence on junk food have resulted in the prevalence of many lifestyle diseases.
It’s not that people are unaware of these facts and they don’t want to do anything about them. Everyone knows someone who started hitting the Gym and left it within a week or started attending yoga classes and found it too “boring” to continue with it. More often than not, people give up their fitness goals because they do not have enough motivation and a partner with whom they can enjoy their fitness activities.
Understanding these problems and with an aim to providing one-stop Sporting and Fitness Solution and ultimately bringing ‘active’ childhood days back, GoPlayr was founded by Shwetang R.D.
GoPlayr provides sporting & fitness solution right from finding play pals, trainers, coaches of your favourite sports to discovering nearby activities & matches. GoPlayr also gives you the option to host your own match and invite friends and acquaintances, rent venues and rate others sporting skills. If someone wants to rent a venue, GoPlayr provides a venue management software(SAAS or Software as a Service) to rent the venue and manage users, payments, schedules etc.
Born and brought up in a small town in Bihar, Shwetang graduated in Computer Science Engineering. Immediately after graduation, he moved to Brazil for work.
“Being in a 9 to 5 job for two years after college made me feel ‘I can do better than this’. I returned to India in January 2015 to start fresh, the long awaited StartUp dream. I started working on restaurant POS software which didn’t sell very well, started IT Services to support finances and eventually landed upon GoPlayr – Sporting services business. It took almost a year for me to come up with the idea of GoPlayr.” said Shwetang to Times of Startups.
“For a long time, I thought that I had to do something that had never been done before to be successful. While that is somewhat true, sometimes an innovation can be quite simple”, he added.
Shwetang said that going ahead with the idea of GoPlayr was not easy and he had to face many challenges. Right from setting up an office in a low budget to finding the right employees, getting people work and staying motivated in exchange for small returns to managing finances, he had to overcome many challenges.
According to Shwetang, Entrepreneurship is difficult and one must be ready to put in long working hours than people in other jobs do. Struggling for something you believe in genuinely is always exciting but it is hard to carry on and be motivated each day with not so many returns. Financial problems take up the most time.
Shwetang claims that GoPlayr’s web and android app have more features than any of its domain competitors but he considers just having more features is not a real differentiating factor.
“What I see as a differentiator is our team, our vision and the value we are giving back to our customer. We are leaving no stone unturned to convert this idea into reality. We have been pretty successful in our endeavour since we wrote the first line of code for GoPlayr. Within 3 months of starting operation, we have 60+ Venues & 15+ Trainers listed with us in Pune. Within 60 days of beta app launch, we have more than 500+ users and 150+ app reviews on app store. We‘re getting a tremendous response from corporates to participate in sporting activities.” said Shwetang.
The concept behind GoPlayr has been demonstrated at multiple summits and has received good feedback from investors and other fellow entrepreneurs along with plenty of suggestions for improvement.Within 2 months of its inception, GoPlayr was selected as Top 15 start-ups in Motorola Pitch Off – S3. GoPlayr was also selected as top 20 startups from 1200+ participants in Ideathon contest by Paytm & Mind batteries.
Explaining in detail how this app works, Shwetang said that GoPlayr is useful for anyone who wishes to stay fit by playing a sport or by doing any other outdoor activity that gives health benefits. A user can login to the app using facebook or google and see other users, matches nearby. The user can request others to join matches and send invites to others. One can also rent Venues and rate sports skills of other users. The app also gives an option to Corporates to include sports in their work culture. Also, Sports Clubs and Venues can list their venue with GoPlayr to get more leads and it can also help trainers/coaches get more visibility.
Tried the app and wish to submit a review ? Share your review of GoPlayr at hello@timesofstartups.com
