In Conversation With: Charlo Babosa, COO Native Ads

Updated November 2026. This was first published on 23 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count. This is a record of a conversation from that day. No new quotes were added.

Key takeaways

• GoodGamer is a Fantasy Sports and Esports gaming platform with Cricket, Football (soccer), and CS:GO.
• A daily sports and Esports fantasy and real-money gaming app, GoodGamer offers a wide variety of skill-based games.
• The app is built for a wide cross-section of Indian gaming lovers, from cricket fans to hardcore Esports gamers to casual mobile gamers.

GoodGamer is a Fantasy Sports and Esports gaming platform with Cricket, Football (soccer), and CS:GO. A daily sports and Esports fantasy and real-money gaming app, GoodGamer offers a wide variety of skill-based games. The app is built for a wide cross-section of Indian gaming lovers, from cricket fans to hardcore Esports gamers to casual mobile gamers. Gamers can build their own cricket, football, and esports teams, play head-to-head mobile games against friends, enter tournaments, and experience gaming in ways never before seen in India. From Esports DFS to skills-based props contests, our app is introducing a host of new features and styles of entertainment to the market.

Charlo Babosa Bio #

As the Founder of several internet startups and COO of Native Ads, he successfully raised $4 million and has grown the business to an annual run rate of $30 million. Charlo is a pioneer in the industry with over 24 years of Internet marketing experience, including founding one of the first publicly traded gaming companies, Poker.com. Charlo is also an advisor to Fintech and Digital payments company uBUCK Technologies.

The first question that I wanted to ask was based on data that I had, so specific to India and the fantasy gaming market. In 2019, it was projected to be 920 crores, and in 2020 it’s about 2400 crores. The fantasy sports market has seen phenomenal growth, up almost three times year-on-year. What do you think accounts for this tremendous growth?

I don’t think the pandemic increased users for fantasy sports; it has expanded more like mobile gaming in general because people are locked down, bored, and have nothing to do at home. So that’s what the pandemic has been for eSports players like in the States, for example. But in India, I think the pandemic and the delay of IPL caused people to be anxious. During this IPL season, a lot more people were logging on to fantasy sports. The increase of player base is actually because of the roll-out of 4G and LTE networks in India. There’s better connectivity, more mobile users that have high-speed connectivity. So, the more phones out there, the more people that can play.

So, the infrastructure is in place #

There are around 700 million people in India, but only 57% of the total population has mobile phones. So, there’s still a lot of room to grow as networks’ expansion gets better and bigger.

Can you tell us about GoodGamer Corp and how you conceived it and where it is right now, and how are you marketing it?

We originally built a live streaming app, and it was going to be for eSports. My partner flew out to India a year and a half ago to meet with Shiva Nandy, Founder/CEO of Skyesports***.***The live streaming was a lot harder to pitch for investors.

When the pandemic hit, I started reading about fantasy a lot more. I learned how companies like DraftKings began to blow up because of the pandemic on the e-sports side and betting and playing on their fantasy form. Companies like Dream11, how in 2016 there were only two million players, and then there’s over one hundred million. I said, wow, there is a vast market in India for fantasy. We started going into it as I started looking at the players and how some of the apps we see on the Indian market are different and how they are being used in the North American market. While setting up GoodGamer, we noticed that user acquisition costs were considerably more economical in India than in North America. So, we wanted to move into that market, tackle that market with the partnerships that we had and the people we knew already. That was a big thing for us because not having anybody in India would have been tough. The trip that John Malik took over to India changed a lot for us. Also, our VP of operations took over, and he moved out to Bangalore. So at least we have someone that’s kind of like from Canada, but he lives there now.

I was looking at your profile, and from native advertisements’ to GoodGamer, that was quite a shift. But when you talk about user acquisition, that should be your area of expertise.

So, you know, one of our strengths is native ads. is one of the bigger agencies in Canada. When you’re talking about user acquisition, lead generation, or just branding and buying traffic and analyzing that traffic, since we owned our own RTB exchange native ad platform and I’ve been buying traffic for over 20 years. So, I understand how to acquire users at the lowest cost and make sure that the users we’re acquiring stick around.

There’s also a small issue of fraud in the Indian market where the app installs; there is a certain percentage of Athens that are fake.

So the first thing we did was choose the right attribution platform, and that’s what we use for checking in for the program. they log a lot of stuff and help us say which is the installs fraud, which one isn’t. Another thing that keeps us safe from such scams is building reports and checking out referrers. So, say we’re paying out like 30-40 rupees for a registered user. What they’ll do is set up a campaign to say, ‘Hey, we’ll give you 20 rupees, a 100% cashback. Just enter your Paytm number here, and when you sign up and deposit, we’ll give you 20 rupees back’. But those users that deposit the 20 rupees, they will never ever come back because all they are trying to do is win something. So, to me, that’s still a fraud because that’s incentivized traffic and we’ll never see that guy because he probably isn’t even into fantasy sports~~.~~.

Meanwhile, the guy that’s posting the free 20 rupees for joining his team, is spread. There’s a lot of DSPs out there with the fraud, where they build bots to automatically check suspicion. And what a lot of people in the industry do is they’ll just kind of make it. If you tell them like, ‘hey, you need to get a 4% guarantee’, what they do is they have bots registering accounts with fake telephone numbers, even on OTP. And then what they do is do the incentivized traffic. So, then they have the minimum four percent deposit and a whole bunch of registration. But then, if you look at the retention rates, after two or three days, the people are gone. They never come back; that’s another thing that we’ve noticed. Those types of people who continue to do that, we won’t work with them.

I do think that a lot of the installs that most of these other companies get, you know, for example, I hear stories that Dream11 is paying all this money. even with one hundred million users, I bet you they don’t have more than 10 million real players on the platform. But I guess what I’m saying is. I talked to the other affiliates running it, they’re trying to tell me that Dream11 is, you know, they’re paying for one percent or two percent deposit, minimum deposit. But if you only get a one or two percent minimum deposit rate, it’s almost impossible to make money. Suppose you’re paying like thirty or fifty rupees because you’re going to need to make something like twenty dollars from that player for their whole life. And if you’re giving away twenty dollars, you’re not going to make twenty dollars from most of these guys. Twenty rupees maybe, but not twenty dollars.

When I was researching, I looked at a prediction by KPMG that said the current revenue for this market fantasy gaming is one hundred and eighteen billion dollars. And in the next four years, it’s going to grow by 22.1%.

It’s very, very stiff, especially in the fantasy. There’s a whole bunch of new fantasy players popping up all the time. So even for us, we’re like a new player in the industry. To make an impact in India, what you have to do is hire some brand influencers or brand ambassadors that people know, to help build your brand. You have to associate yourself with people that are well recognized out there. That’s one of the first things you have to do. And you have to spend a lot of money to get that branding and have people talk about you.

It’s very competitive because you’ve got companies like Dream11, who just raised two hundred and twenty-five million dollars and sponsored the IPL for, I think forty million dollars. And then, you have MPL, MyTeam11, Paytm; they all have fantasy games. There are few players at the top and the guys are aggressively marketing their position. Smaller players like us, and new entrants in the space, we have to like to use our impact to get the new users at the lowest cost. One good thing, though, on a platform like ours, compared to something like Dream 11, it will probably be easier for a beginner to win. We have a different way to entice users to come because on Dream 11, the entry fees are a lot more expensive, and there are many more users who enter those contests, reducing the chances to win for new players.

One last question that I wanted to ask is specifically concerning Indian demography. Seventy-five percent of Indians are under 45; sixty percent of the gamers are between 18 to 24. Are you also targeting people between twenty-five to forty years of age to play games on your platform?

So, most of the users are of the age group 18 to 24. There is another group of twenty-five to thirty-five years old. But we do not target any users that are over thirty-five years old. And, even when you get users from the age group between twenty-five to thirty-five, you can see that the install rate, the conversion rate is dropping. Most of them like, I think about 90 percent of them are male, maybe even higher.

Ninety percent? #

Yeah, at least the ones that are playing on our platform.

You want to talk about how you are raising money? #

So, we just raised two and a half million Canadian about a month and a half ago. We’re already in talks with our investors. We’re looking at another five million US dollars for the next round. We’re hoping to close that by the end of the year because we want to use those funds for user acquisition. We are building an eSports type of platform, kind of like NPLs, where we’ll have a bunch of different games on the platform where users can like play games all day, casual games, car bombs, poker, rummy, various type of games, so that you don’t have to wait all day for an IPL. Those seasons are sure we want to use for us to make money in this industry. In my opinion, you have to diversify into other games. We want to find games that are different from the traditional games that people see on platforms like Paytm first games or MPL. it gives us a bit of an edge for why someone will go to our platform. If we bring a game publisher on board that has different games that people haven’t seen in India. they catch on, that’s how a platform can grow quickly and organically with like, you know, people just talking about, ‘hey, this is a cool game on this platform. You’ve got to check it out.’ So that’s the difference. And I think that’s what will drive us to get that set up in January.

That’s amazing, because you are basically saying, you know what, I want to consistently engage.

Poker is relatively new, yet we have around three million poker players in India. I believe it is closer to one million, like hardcore poker players. In the United States, when the poker craze went crazy back in 2000, the whole industry just blew up within a few years. I still think poker is still at its early stages in India. And what I love about poker is that the hands are very quick. So, if you have a whole bunch of tables in poker playing, you’re consistently making a lot of money on that rake, every single hand that gets played. It’s very fast; I think that’s ten times more valuable than somebody who’s playing on fantasy, to be honest with you.

Thanks a lot for the interview, Charlo. I hope to speak with you again #

Questions and answers #

What is the main point? #

GoodGamer is a Fantasy Sports and Esports gaming platform with Cricket, Football (soccer), and CS:GO.

What else did the original piece say? #

A daily sports and Esports fantasy and real-money gaming app, GoodGamer offers a wide variety of skill-based games.

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