Years of cricket. Nothing in writing.

Fees every month. Camp in the summer, kit every season, tournament entries, years of it. And at the gate, one sentence: "doing well." School sends a report card home. Cricket never has. The coach knows every child's game; nobody writes it down.

So that is where we start: a proper report card for a young cricketer, the kind every child gets in school. What the player does well, what to work on next, and where the player really stands. Written down, in simple words, so a family finally has something to hold on to.

Designed where the game is played.

The report card was designed from many visits across Shivaji Park in Mumbai, selection trials and cricket academies, listening to players, coaches, parents and academy owners. The same things came up everywhere: families pay for years without a clear answer, coaches know every child's game but have no time to write it down, and a child who is not seen in the right week by the right person has nothing that survives the moment.

A decade-plus of building, applied to the ground.

Sports Mantra was started by Vikram Bakhtiani. He spent a decade-plus building products at Deloitte, Future Group, Amazon and Tesco. At Amazon that included the systems that removed counterfeits from the marketplace, where being honest about what a machine can and cannot say was the whole job. That is the same discipline an honest report card demands: be specific, be right, and when you don't know, say so. He evaluated five versions of this business with parents, coaches and academy owners before building the first product.

Founder-led, built together.

A close circle of mentors, consultants and specialist vendors works with Sports Mantra, each of them highly accomplished in their own field. And behind all of it stands a close set of family and friends. Together they review the work, challenge it, and keep it honest.

Sports Mantra is the trading name of NextGen SportsMantra LLP.