Unlikely Cricket Success Story, Creative mind, Failed attempts, Scored Digitally at scale

Abhishek Desai (@abhishekdesai) of Cricheroes talks about his passion for cricket that helped him to think creatively. He ventured into making “Gully” cricket more digitized and now Cricheroes has over 4 million cricketers from over 50 countries. Listen to Abhishek of Cricheroes talk about his unlikely cricket success story, creative mind, failed attempts and how he scored digitally at scale.

In this episode, Abhishek, based out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, talks about the accidental sixes and the planned ones as well. About some close run-outs but like cricket, Cricheroes is a pump house of talent, ready to win every tournament.

Here is some interesting commentary from the episode.

8:55

Obviously like millions of cricketers like in India and world, we like to play cricket regularly over the weekend. And if you play cricket yourself you must know that at the end of every cricket session, there is always a discussion. Players come together and they talk about the game. They talk about the performances and sometimes these discussions become very hot. The problem with this is that these discussions are never based on data. Because most of the times you have not scored your matches. And even if you have scored the matches, it is more on paper based sheets. And getting data from those four sheets aggregating them and getting all the meaningful insight is very difficult, if not, impossible. So that was a pain point, which I realized with our own cricketing fraternity.

11:50

CricHeroes because we really believe that people like you and me who play cricket for fun and not for money, or for passion. They are the real heroes of the game. And cricket has this level of admiration – cricketers have this level of adulation in India. They have a godlike status because of people like you and me, who give everything to this game, even when there is no monetary return.

CricHeroes Working Model

35:57

I mean, after using CricHeroes for let’s say, to the five matches, you will stop scoring your matches on paper based score sheets. You will only rely on the CricHeroes, which in a way makes our responsibility far higher, much higher. As we have to make sure that the application does not go down at any point. Especially when people are scoring and a lot of matches get played on Saturdays and Sundays during the morning time. So for some time in 2018 Dec-Jan, consistently on Sundays, you know, we will go down for like half an hour, one hour. It was really really frustrating for us and it was obviously more upsetting for our users.

44:46

I have done that mistake in the past, where, I start something, I usually get bored. Then I lose my focus and start something else which basically results into failure of the previous attempts. It sounds very romantic on paper, like getting ideas and working on them and you are to be known as a creative person. But at the end, I realized that until unless you do not execute your ideas and take them to a certain level, actually, it doesn’t matter how many ideas you can come up with, creativity has no value. If it is not adding any value to the society, or at least to the user. So when I started Cricheroes, I was consciously aware about this weakness of myself and I, I try very, very hard not to lose my focus.

Having the right processes has surely helped the team, the chemistry between the players (co-founders) truely shows a remarkable team spirit.

Show Notes

Learn more about Cricheroes

Follow Abhishek (@abhishekdesai)

Books discussed in the episode:

Follow Maharajas of Scale On Twitter (@maharajaofscale)

Watch out for some prominent words used throughout the episode