In a period where brands spend exorbitant sums of money on marketing to maximise profits, MyTeam11, one of India’s leading fantasy sports platforms, has been able to get positive results with a minimal marketing budget.

Vinit Godara, co-founder and CEO of MyTeam11, said that being a bootstrapped venture -- meaning it has minimal outside investment -- the company has to allocate funds judiciously.

“From the very inception of MyTeam11, we have been very strategic and cognizant of our investments and partnerships which has worked well for us. We are a bootstrapped firm and hence, we need to be cautious rather than being improvident about it,” Godara told Business World.

“Our budgets on our marketing campaign were as much as 28 to 30 crore across all mediums of promotion with a special emphasis on TV and digital as mediums for direct outreach.”

The Jaipur-based startup spends only a fraction of what other daily fantasy sports (dfs) platforms splurge on marketing.

For comparison, Dream11 reportedly spent INR 222 crore only on the title sponsorship of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020 and Paytm First Games has set aside INR 300 crore to invest in fantasy sports.

“This year our main focus was on increasing our marketing spends to utilize all possible mediums of promoting the brand and reach out directly to our customers offering the best possible immersive experience,” Godara revealed.

However, minimal marketing expenditure has not affected the performance of the dfs platform. In fact, MyTeam11 registered a massive increase in its user base and engagement during IPL 2020.

“As far as our performance is concerned, MyTeam11 saw a 40 per cent to 50 per cent rise in the number of participants this year compared to last year,” Godara said. “Our monthly average user engagement rate also saw a steep growth and it was almost 3-3.5X as compared to the previous season of IPL.”

Godara also revealed that the company doubled its profit from last year and wants to focus on customer retention in 2021.