SportsChimp: Sports Picking With Facebook Friends
If you’re an ardent fan of the IPL possessing skills to match Paul, the octopus, and also enjoy taking a dig at a few friends from time to time, SportsChimp is the app for you. Having launched only on the 3rd of May this year, their growth thus far has been viral.
The idea of picking IPL teams was inspired by the rating site "Hot or Not" and the simplicity involved in binary decision making models. The app is currently platform agnostic and works in any desktop or mobile browser. Also to be noted is that SportsChimp is not a native iPhone or Android app.
“Sports Picking apps today are too complicated, make the user think and are not social. We want to change that with SportsChimp, which lets you pick teams in the ongoing IPL” says Nav Chatterji one of the founders. And change it they did, with SportsChimp being probably one of the easiest apps to use.
All you need to do is login to facebook and you are presented with two teams that will be playing from which you simply choose who you think will win (eg. Mumbai Indians vs. Kolkata Knight Riders).
“Once the actual match has been decided we will calculate how many ‘banana bucks’ you have won or lost from/off of your Facebook friends based on an internal algorithm. We present you with a leader board where you can compare your picking performance with other Facebook friends. We also allow you to ‘poke fun’ at your friends through our ‘In your Face’ button.” Also, the origin of the name is by combining the words, Sports Champ and bananas (their currency) which makes it SportsChimp.
The four member founding team comprises of Nav, Adi, Tarun and Rahul from the U.S, Canada and New Delhi.
Nav attributes their success so far primarily to the magic of word of mouth and facebook’s natural virality. Some of their stats since release bear testimony to their explosive growth. In a couple of weeks there have already been 6000 challenges, a 9,244% increase in content shared on Facebook and another 1,021% increase in feedback per shared content.
With time, besides the IPL, the app is looking towards moving into tennis, European soccer and mixed martial arts and the founders are also thinking about a twitter integration.
Here’s hoping they carry on with the good form, and users are fed with plenty more bananas.
More at Chimp Business at their site.
