Fantain, a startup that manages celebs' fans

CHENNAI: Celebrities know that they can't take their fans for granted. Whether they are actors, sports stars or even cricket teams, understanding fan behaviour has become increasingly important.
Faintain -a fan relationship management portal in India set up by sports buffs and brothers Anand and Aravind Ra and Aravind Ramachandran with their friend Vivek Venugopalan -offers to do just that.
After working as software professionals in the US for 15 years, the brothers quit their careers to set up the company. They launched Faintain in 2013 and got Indian Premier League teams as their first clients. Now, they are managing two IPL teams and Shah Rukh Khan's production house Red Chillies.
The trio decided to use their IT experience to build Fantain. Their primary focus is increasing a franchise's fan base through social media campaigns, presenting data and analytics by gathering activity from all platforms -social media, email, ecommerce (where fans purchase merchandise) and fan activation through suggestions based on the data.
“IPL fans have varied interests -some watch matches, others post updates on social media and a few buy merchandise. We analyse behaviour and provide data to help teams and companies tweak their strategy,” Fantain CEO Anand Ramachandran said.
Since it was an unmapped area, they initially found it difficult to sell their concept. The company was incubated by PayPal in 2013 and it continued for over 15 months before they began independent operations. Confederation of Indian Industries selected the bootstrapped startup as `Promising Startup Of 2014'.
In April 2014, the company partnered with Sunrisers Hyderabad. To understand fan behaviour, they designed an app `Playcall' that allowed fans to post their views about how players could have performed and giving reward points if the strategy suggested worked.
“We also partnered with Kolkata Knight Riders, our first with an established franchise. Among the 12 million fans in Kolkata, our analytics increased the response rate from fans to 3% from 0.5% earlier,“ Anand said. In addition, the startup also handled a targeted engagement of fans for Red Chillies' recent film Dilwale.