Rooter’s Piyush Kumar on why product-market fix is crucial for success

COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns did slow down the pace of the market, but they also acted as booster for a lot of organisations that had already embraced digital. Gaming and streaming sectors were the most positively affected during the lockdown period. However, in that, too, finding the right pitch to play the ball was difficult. Many players have turned the lockdown negativity into their success story.

The inaugural edition of Adgully’s Leader 2.0 2022, held on Monday, January 24, 2022, featured some of the most prominent leaders across industries who have blazed their own trail and are driving their companies to newer and higher heights.

Speaking on ‘Finding the product market for your company’, Piyush Kumar, Founder & CEO, Rooter, a game streaming platform, said, “One of the biggest categories that has come out of the entire Covid situation and the lockdown is gaming, where almost everybody is either playing games or is watching some of the other content, which is where Rooter comes in.”

Speaking about Rooter’s beginnings, Kumar informed that the platform was founded in 2016. “We started the company as a sports engagement platform, where we wanted to connect fans with each other. However, we failed almost regularly between 2016 and 2019 even though we were building new features. We were not able to find our product-market fit and we were not able to scale much faster. In 2019, we started to put our learnings into gaming and as soon as the lockdown happened, it gave us an opportunity to get into gaming and since then it has been a great story. We have added close to 25 million users and I think in all possible ways the product has done well, but the key thing here is what is the product-market fit, which I believe is the most important part of any category or product or brand that we are looking for. It is where we start to look at our product from the perspective of whether it is a clear need in the market or not,” he added.

These are edited excerpts, for the complete keynote address, watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDvU8pcZqxw