CricketCompanion – a viral mobile application
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Cricket Companion is a WAP-based mobile application with which you can follow live cricket scores or check scores on demand. Its is a Java based application that can be downloaded from wap.crick.cc and requires a GPRS connection to run, and is a free app (except for data charges ofcourse).
The very interesting part is that the founder of this venture, Adnan, chose a community-centric marketing approach to launching his app. Just as some background, a community-centric approach is the approach that traditional business advisors here are likely to shun you for. “It will never work” they’ll tell you. They’ll make you feel bad about yourself even if you had several years of successful history that proves otherwise. They’ll force you to think about selling the product through one way or another.
Adnan, on the other hand, gave away the product for free. Did it work for him? Well as of right now the application has more than 51,000 active users across 108 countries… and all of these app distributions were made via community evangelists influencing their friends into getting the application. Because of this traction, he also recently entered into distribution partnerships with local telecos (who now also offer the product via their web portals).
His revenue model for this is even more interesting. Rather than hoping to get a good deal from telecos sharing their air-charges with him, he has built his own ad-server that displays non-intrusive ads within the application itself… now with all of this traction from the community, he has the negotiating power to do this on his own terms.
This is a pretty good success-story-in-the-works of how a good product can take off virally if it hits the market with the right solution.
12:36 am
Thank you Osama for writing about the Cricket Companion story. A few statistical updates are due on my side.
Total Downloads: 1,40,777
Total Retained Users: 86,638
India: 59,231
Pakistan: 18,152
Total distribution in 125 countries, albeit mostly in the Cricket playing nations.
I would also like to add that I am not the only person behind the app and we have a great team at Tricastmedia working on other apps in many domains.
The community centric model is not new. The power of free is formidable but it has to be backed with the right product/service, demand and business model. Once we found evangelists who worked on referrals, we found traction with the telecoms because their subscribers were getting the app any ways.
Look out for some new products coming out in the market pretty soon including a Football Companion (Premier League, UEFA), Contacts Backup and Transfer, IM and Chat.
9:39 pm
Amazing about cricket.and no word for prasie