It’s been a tough four months, with the uncertainty of the future bearing down upon us. Every day a stifling dread filled our workspace. We have been freelancing to pay the bills under the name of Lemotech Studios. For Cricingif, investment could not have come at a more critical time. If it were a month delayed, we would have shut down the company altogether.
For the first three months it looked like all was lost. I had used up all of my contacts from my Savaree days and while people would hear us out, nobody in the tech industry has had exposure to the media and content industry. The biggest challenge is content licensing and acquisition, and potential investors are skeptical about our ability to solve that.
However, we read a press release by the ICC indicating that a certain Khaleef Technologies had acquired exclusive Digital Clip Rights licenses for Pakistan for the next 3 years. We reached out to the CEO, and initially he did not respond. However, as it turns out, he has had limited success building his own cricket coverage platform to leverage the rights he has already acquired.
Therefore, it was a natural synergy between Cricingif’s proven track record and Khaleef Technologies’ content rights. In addition, Khaleef has committed to investing a few million dollars in Cricingif – including developing the product and marketing it. The investment will also cater to acquiring future copyrights and licensing.
Product revamp and strategy shift
One of the challenges that I’ve realized will always remain is licensing. You can do everything right, but if you are out-bid in the auction you can’t broadcast that series. Also, you are paying to put content on your platform. We will in the coming weeks finalize a strategy to create original quality content so that we can wean ourselves off of this dependency on copyrighted content.
This pushes our current valuation to $4 million, but I’m confident we will compound this massively within a year. We’re moving into a new office at the start of next week, as our current one is too small for us to grow.
The immediate next steps are to revamp the platform and do a public launch before the end of this year. The newly-minted Pakistan Super League is coming up, and should be a huge boost to our user acquisition.
For now, it’s back to the drawing board.
For more on what I’ve done, do check out my resume
Get in touch with me at: qasimzafar AT outlook DOT com
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