CREX

Purushotam Rawat, Founder

Gurgaon, India

2023

How CREX built a thriving online community for millions of cricket fans

CREX is a cricket score and news platform that helps fans get quick and easy insights into how their favorite teams and players are performing.

From stands to screens: Making cricket a better experience for fans

Computer science student Purushotam was fascinated by softwares' ability to help solve problems. When friends suggested to him that cricket, one of the world's most popular sports, could be a worthy industry to improve, he sprang into action. Cricket is India's most beloved sport, and Purushotam recognized a major gap in availability of cricket information especially for people on mobile devices with limited access to the internet.

So, in 2017 during college, Purushotam created CREX, a cricket score and news platform providing livescore and updates. The app features in depth statistics from every cricket match and historical data on every cricketer to have played the game. "I wanted to build an innovative and creative way to present information about cricket," he says. "I wanted to raise the standard of cricket products for the community."

After developing the first version and publishing it on Google Play, he shared the link with friends and incorporated social sharing features to prompt users to share it with their network and drive organic growth. This proved effective in the early stages of CREX's development – organic growth became a huge driver of user engagement and propelled its reach to the 2-3M daily active users the app sees today.

Putting users at the heart of CREX

To continue scaling the app, Purushotam has kept the user experience at his core. "Our goal is to bring all cricket enthusiasts under one common roof where they can find cricket information in the most innovative, engaging, and efficient manner," he says.

Making the app more user friendly and creating personalized experiences are a big focus. Improvements include iterations based on user feedback, better displaying information when multiple tournaments occur simultaneously, and testing new ways to structure the app to make it accessible and engaging for users. "There are so many small ways that we've adjusted the experience for the better over the years," Purushotam says. A core component of the experience is ensuring anyone can access this content by offering a free ad-supported tier. "One of our main focuses has always been making the app more accessible to people with low bandwidth and limited internet access," says Purushotam. "We're happy to provide free information to people who wouldn't necessarily be able to pay to follow their favorite sport or wait for the newspaper the day after a match to see how it went. With an ad-supported model we can keep our app free while building a sustainable business."

“With an ad-supported model we can keep our app free while building a sustainable business.”

Partnering with Google to provide free content to India's cricket community

The CREX team uses multiple Google solutions including Cloud and Analytics to keep their business growing. "Google's partnership has been very important since the beginning, it's helped us build and grow our ad-supported business model," says Purushotam. "Ad revenue through Google accounts for almost 80% of our total revenue."

Using Google ad tech tools has been particularly helpful to their team. "The most important tools to our business are the monetization solutions that Google offers," says Purushotam. "We started with Google AdMob and now we're using Google Ad Manager. With Ad Manager, we can drive direct sales of ad slots and earn money programmatically." The earnings they get from Ad Manager has helped bolster their bottom line and enabled the CREX team to re-invest in growing their million+ daily active users. "With Google Ads, we've seen 30-40% growth in installs," says Purushotam.

As for the future and growth of the business, building CREX has allowed Purushotam to collaborate with people and grow his team from a few members to 70 employees. "I'm most proud of the people working with me - how they take ownership of their work and how they come up with innovative solutions," Purushotam highlights.

About the Publisher

Purushotam is a Computer Science Engineer and Entrepreneur. He is the founder of PARTH - A team of young, passionate Technology & Design enthusiasts who love to build innovative technology products.