As a lifelong cricket fan, if there is one thing I like doing aside from following my favourite sport, it is sharing my views with others in a social setting, especially when my team isn’t performing well – which seems to be a constant reality these days (see? There I go again!).

Considering that this sport has been around since the 16th century to the internet age, where it boasts legions of rabid followers, it is surprising that aside from a select few programs, cricket doesn’t sport an abundance of smartphone and computer applications, which allow its fans to keep up and socialise with other likeminded individuals.

Cricout (www.cricout.com) is a recently launched platform that allows fans to follow matches, interact with others, share opinions and socialise in an entertaining manner. In a nutshell, it is a social network (like Facebook/Twitter) for cricket.

Based out of Islamabad, Cricout has been developed by eMumba, a tech start-up made up of seven people, led by Owais Anjum. For Owais, sport has been a fire that’s always been burning, “I grew up in Abbotabad; my father used to teach at Abbottabad Public School. In the confines of the campus, there were just two things to do: study and play sports. We played all the games that were telecasted on PTV in those days, and cricket was obviously one of them. I played everything from cricket to basketball to tennis to swimming in my childhood. It’s just that I have a great passion for sports.”

But the decision to develop a cricket platform ran deeper than his passion for the game, “There were a number of ideas I had shortlisted, but I converged on this one. I wanted to work on an idea that had global appeal, and it was very relevant locally as well because you can’t build a star performing product team if your team doesn’t understand what it is building, and cricket obviously, runs in our blood.”

The irony is that when growing up, Owais’ father never wanted him to get overly involved with the sport on television, “I could play cricket, but my father would not let us watch cricket because he thought it was a waste of time. And my father is still having a hard time digesting that I am about to make a living out of cricket!”

After working at Silicon Valley in the USA till 2006, Owais moved back to Pakistan to be with his parents. After a while he decided to follow his dream, in a move that would have been nerve wracking for anyone, and quit his job to begin his start-up. His next step was to develop his product, so he looked for funding through his contacts in the USA. His geographical location, of course, posed a problem, “If you’re a product-based start-up in Pakistan and you need money to sustain your business, then you’re in a lot of trouble. Even for someone like me who has contacts in the USA, it was very difficult. They advised me to pack my company and move to the USA. I moved back for my parents and that reason still holds, [but] being in Pakistan and working out of Pakistan is not something I was willing to compromise on.”

Eventually, he raised enough capital to hit a milestone, but it wasn’t easy, “If you’re raising money for the first time and you don’t have a history of raising money, it requires a lot of skills; the way you pitch; the way you build those slides; your networking. Once we had the money, we executed really well.”

Seeking capital was a process that certainly tested Owais’ resolve, “Initially you are very optimistic, and although we were able to raise money, the process was painfully slow. What we didn’t realise is that when you are raising money, that’s all that you do. It is a full time job. It is extremely time consuming.”

Ultimately, Owais found investment from angel investors who believed in him, “We had already accomplished quite a lot before we sought investors. We’d already invested one year and had collected nearly 40,000 US dollars before we started seeking investors. If the investors could see that I had quit my lucrative job, that I had invested nearly a year on the project, and that I had invested money into it, it was very clear to them that I was really committed to the project. The second thing was of course my personal network, as I knew a lot of people who were looking to invest and I had a lot of credibility in the region. And although cricket is not played in the USA, it still has the largest concentration of desi investors who understand and appreciate cricket a lot more.”

The conditions are conducive in his mind for the project to thrive, “From the stats I have seen, it is expected that a 100 million new [Indian] internet users will be online in 2015. These are the people who will be using internet for the first time, and we estimate that these people will be very interested in cricket.”

Owais also explains why his product will hit fans for a six, “To me sports is always a social experience, but that experience has become difficult because friends are either too busy or geographically sparse and the idea was to create a hangout, to create a meeting point, where that experience could be recreated and those moments could be shared together. The key thing that people have become accustomed to is personalisation. Your Facebook feed is different from my Facebook feed because we have different interests. And that’s true for cricket as well. My interest in cricket is going to be different from yours and it is going to be different from anyone else’s. The platform we’ve built is designed for that level of personalisation, so that over a period of time, it is going to become more and more tailored to what you are more interested in. The second thing is if you think about the largest content producer in the world, Facebook, it doesn’t produce any content by itself. It empowers people to create that content, share it with other people, and make it meaningful."

"The idea behind Cricout is not to become a content producer like Cricinfo and Yahoo cricket, it is to empower people. Anybody and literally anybody can become an expert on Cricout, and start broadcasting his/her opinions. As a user, I have a choice to follow you or not in a Twitter-like way. If I like what you are saying, I have the option to see what you are saying on my news feed. And if I don’t, I can just unfollow you. To us, this is just a platform that empowers cricket fans (around the world) who love to write and socialise about cricket. How many people can write on Cricinfo? How many of us have the chance to be the next Osman Samiuddin?”

But with Owais’ team seeking further investment, Cricout is still on a sticky wicket, “Right now, our biggest challenge is to acquire users. To be honest, we don’t have that expertise. At this time our next goal is to raise half a million dollars, and the majority of that will go to marketing!”

At the moment Cricout has a solid app on the iPhone boasting 70 per cent retention with users, which speaks of the application’s quality and stability. Meanwhile, the Android Cricout app is in the pipeline, and set to debut before the upcoming ICC T20 Cup. Owais explains the differences between developing for the two dominating smartphone platforms, “We had a brilliant iOS developer who was recruited at an early stage, and that’s why we developed the app for iOS first. If it was a market-driven decision, we would have chosen Android, because the majority of the cricket following nations mostly use Android devices. That being said, our iOS app is very high quality and it gave us the validation that we were looking for. It is easier to develop an app for the iOS, even though you need the same level of resources for both. The form factor variation is almost nonexistent, so you only have to optimise your app for a few versions of the operating system. On the other hand, with Android, more than development, it is the development for different devices that becomes a nightmare. I mean, how many devices and how many form factors are you going to test the damn thing on? So it’s not really the development, but it is the testing that becomes really tricky with Android.”

As someone who has launched a tech start-up in Pakistan, Owais has considerable experience with the challenges of working in the local market. If the Pakistani government aims to foster business, they should pay close attention to what Owais has to say.,

“Most of the start-ups struggle because of the lack of an exciting work environment and the lack of tech incubators. Dealing with the operational stuff, power issues and other stuff requires an investment. We were lucky that a close friend of mine, Dr. Ali Qayam, whose own start-up was acquired by a team out of the USA, had a large space which was conducive and had some extra space for us. If he hadn’t been there for me, I would have struggled because it is a headache to worry about a space that is small enough for tech startups with power backups. There have been tech incubators for students, but nothing for professionals. I don’t think the government is doing enough to provide operational infrastructure and funding. It makes perfect sense for the government of Pakistan to dedicate funds towards start-up for the future of this country.”

Regarding Cricout’s future, Owais is optimistic, but he is prepared for anything, “I’ve been going without a salary for almost two years now and it is a very significant risk. That source of conviction has to come from some place. It took me two years to take this decision that I was going to leave my job and pursue this start-up. Thankfully, I had that conviction. When you are struggling to get your start-up to gain some traction, the last thing you want is your family to tell you to go back and get a job. I was fortunate that my family was supportive and continues to be, despite my insanity. When you do something like this, be very clear to yourself that you can be bankrupted for 12 to 20 months, and you have to deal with that. If you can’t say that to yourself with complete honesty, then you are not ready.”