oCricket (2006-2023)

oCricket was a simple idea back in 2006. It was never meant to be a Startup, let alone a company. I’m not good with Cricket, nor do I know the game’s intricacies, even though I enjoy it casually.

I have lots of memories with oCricket — the mistakes, the learnings, and the team that worked together.

Back then, and perhaps now too, media content such as photos, videos, or anything related to Cricket was in the strongholds of a few big media houses. You had to either pirate them or for the more established players, pay a costly fee. So, if you wanted to write a simple blog post and use cricket-related photos, there was no easy and legal way to do it.

My unconfirmed and untested idea was to create a niche social media site about Cricket and form a collective that would make easy access to cricket-related assets. The hope was that the site would become good, significant, and influential with original reviews and opinions and finally make it super-easy to share the media within that community. The revenue model was advertisements.

“Welcome to a place where you can talk just about Cricket - discussion, photos, videos, article!”

As a side-project, I registered the domain, oCricket.com on Oct 31, 2006, but I did nothing with it until 2007. In mid-2007, I started posting on it as a blog;

In one of the casual meetings in Mumbai with Keyur Patel, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, he asked/suggested two ideas;

  1. Your website is popular and growing. Do you want to be like India’s Techcrunch?
  2. Cricket is big in India, and there is much room to do something with it on the web.

I wasn’t made out to be a journalist, nor did I have the conviction that I could grow my personal website to be of much use. So, the first option was out pretty easily. I chewed on the second idea and decided to go ahead with it.

I went to my erstwhile boss, Alok Singh, from Peerless Software, for whom I built and designed programs for the healthcare industry, mostly for Pocket PC devices to be used in clinics in the USA. I pitched him, and he was on board — not with the idea but just because I seemed to be doing something. He agreed to bankroll me for over a year.

That is how oCricket went on to become a company — Cricket Network Private Limited was registered in Mumbai on Mar 12, 2009. My erstwhile boss and I became directors. (archive)

Some remnants of the remains of oCricket from 2009 from the Web Archives.

Despite the growing traffic on oCricket, I struggled to make a business from it and fell into the trap of perfectionism, polish designs, and technical advancements.

In 2009, the oCricket team was acqui-hired by Abinash Tripathy, which went to form Infinitely Beta, later branded as Helpshift. A common friend, Freeman Murray, introduced us at a Headstart event in Mumbai. Abinash was coming out of their exit from Zimbra to Yahoo! and was itching to do something. The idea was to try a few ideas and Cricket was one of them, it never came to fruition.

In 2011, I declared that oCricket failed to establish a sustainable and meaningful company. In its finest days, Alexa once ranked it amongst the world’s top 100,000 websites.

oCricket Alexa Ranked 89,636 on Apr 11, 2009

I’m thankful and grateful to everyone I worked with. I’ll remember them forever;

I finally sold the domain on February 14, 2023. The final IP (intellectual property) was sold on October 11, 2023, marking the ultimate end of oCricket. It was a Cricket Score WordPress plugin that has been lying around untouched since 2009. Someone wants access to the plugin and its popularity in the WordPress ecosystem.

Now, nothing is left of oCricket except for the memories and the nostalgia.