Q&A: Ruwan Silva, co-founder of StockJocks
Silva tells EGR North America about his DFS stock market app, where users add and drop players to their teams as the game is being played
EGR North America (EGR NA): How did this idea come about?
Ruwan Silva (RS): About 18 months ago, my co-founder Ammar Dayani and I were watching an NBA playoff game and we both had DFS entries in the game but early on my top player was injured and out for the game. That moment was very frustrating and I just felt helpless – you’ve pretty much lost all your money. So we thought, why restrict people from engaging and changing their lineup as the game goes through its most interesting points? The industry evolved for season-long to daily, and we thought: ‘Why stop there, why not make it real-time, live fantasy?’
That’s the basic concept and then we started to think about how to manifest it. That’s when we hit on the idea of changing pricing to reflect a player’s performance, and we thought the best way to present that was a stock market format. From there we had to build algorithms that were intuitive and the whole thing took off from there.
EGR NA: So presumably you have a financial background?
RS: Ammar has a marketing background and I worked at RBC, one of the biggest banks in Canada where I was involved in derivative securities, so that was where I got the experience and the foundation for applying those techniques to DFS.
EGR NA: You built the pricing models yourself?
RS: We did. That’s our biggest IP. That’s what differentiates us. It’s a major barrier to entry for our competitors because those proprietary algorithms are unique.
EGR NA: How are you funded?
RS: We have angel investment right now and we’re funded through the operations of the business to an extent. But we’re also looking to raise another round in the next six to eight months to push our marketing initiatives and scale up.
EGR NA: Can you share any KPIs or user numbers?
RS: Our KPI that stands out is our session time, which is just over 32 minutes right now across the entire user base. Our power users are playing every day and their session time is over two hours 15 minutes which speaks to how engaging the platform is. We also see 483 screen views on average per user per month.
EGR NA: Does that engagement mean you have the shark/fish dynamic that plagues the bigger sites?
RS: We escape a lot of that because of the engagement that’s required. Sharks are doing their work and then monitoring scores rather than watching a single game. Our platform strips out those pros because we cater to the fans watching the game. Our data shows we have a wide spread of winners, but we still see an impact of skill. You need a knowledge of the game to do better than just guessing.
EGR NA: What are your growth plans?
RS: Our main growth avenue now is referral. We have a referral program built into the platform which incentivizes new and existing users. People love playing and they love telling their friends. We want to dominate in Canada where we are based first, and once we raise more capital we’ll start doing those acquisitions in the US where it’s more expensive. Then we’re looking at B2B as well, and licensing our application for fan engagement to teams and sports media companies.