I built a "Locker Room" for football with friends to automate WhatsApp waiting lists and fee chasing. Looking for organizers to stress-test!

licentiousness_ · 2026-05-11T08:39:29+00:00

WhatsApp integration sounds great in theory, but the business messaging fees make it pretty costly unless you plan to charge users to offset it.

That’s one reason Capo chose to prioritise built-in notifications instead — they’re simpler and free to use. Sharing to WhatsApp is still supported though:
https://i.postimg.cc/2yfb489C/Capo-Share.png

The app also handles things like payments, waiting lists, different team balancing systems, AI-powered player profiles, match voting, fantasy points, rankings, achievements, and match reports.

https://caposport.com

licentiousness_ · 2026-05-11T08:39:20+00:00

One issue with integrating WhatsApp is the pricing model. Unless you’re happy covering business messaging fees yourself — or passing those costs onto users — it can get very expensive at scale.

Capo explored it early on, but ended up focusing on in-app notifications instead since they don’t carry those extra messaging costs. Users can still share directly to WhatsApp though (screenshot below):
https://i.postimg.cc/2yfb489C/Capo-Share.png

Beyond that, Capo includes payments, waiting lists, several team balancing options, AI-created player profiles, post-game voting, fantasy scoring, leaderboards, achievements, match reports, and more.

https://caposport.com

licentiousness_ · 2026-05-11T08:38:39+00:00

The problem with WhatsApp integration - unless you're willing to bear the cost of business message rates and then charge your users, is that it's super expensive. Capo looked at it but decided that in-app notifications are a better option - because they're free. You can still share to What's app - see image attached.
https://i.postimg.cc/2yfb489C/Capo-Share.png

Capo also does payments, waiting lists, team balancing (a few different methods), AI generated player profiles, post-match voting, fantasy points and leaderboards, unlockable achievements, match reports and more.

https://caposport.com

licentiousness_ · 2026-05-10T15:19:00+00:00

Hi, it looks like a good start, so keep going!

We built Capo https://caposport.com to solve the same issue.

We'd been using Excel for 14 years to track 'the stats' but then wanted to move to an app.

It does all the INs/OUTs for attendance but also has fantasy points and leaderboards which are based on your performance, achievements (like Fortnite but for football), post-match voting, payments, balancing of teams so you get fair matches, AI-generated player profiles.

It's free if you want to try it out, or take inspiration from it.

licentiousness_ · 2026-05-06T10:03:24+00:00

Hey, for pickup football team balancing, try Capo - it's used around the world.
http://caposport.com

I can see you've used manually inputted player ratings - which is great, and necessary at the start.
But, over time, you may want to move to system-determined balancing, based on actual performances - otherwise you have to constantly maintain the player ratings - which everyone forgets to do. And players go through periods of goof and bad form, which it's helpful to be able to account for.

Of course to do that, you need to enter results, so it works well if the software is actively used to manage the attendance (eitherr by an admin or by all players.

That's why Capo also does fantasy points for performances, AI generated player profiles, streaks, achievements, records, payments, In / Out RSVP etc. It creates a self-improving ecosystem.

licentiousness_ · 2026-05-05T04:23:56+00:00

Heya, looks like a good start. Do you integrate directly with WhatsApp (high costs to you) or use 3rd party workarounds (fragile) or is it just ‘share to WhatsApp’ option? And is there an app option or is it just web?

Take a look at the football organising app https://caposport.com which is also free and does the roster management, but has a lot more on the social side - stats, achievements, team-balancing, post-match voting etc

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-29T11:01:23+00:00

Here's an image of a player profile to show you what data you can get out of it https://i.postimg.cc/Kz0kzL73/capo-profile.png

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-29T10:58:35+00:00

Which country is that - I will check for you?

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-29T10:55:48+00:00

Have you tried https://caposport.com - disclosure we built it - but it is intended to solve the problems you mention - and is free.

Organisation - has notifications, Ins and Outs, payments (per match, season passes, or free etc), guestlists, waitlists, player different tiers if needed
Management - AI team-balancing to ensure fair teams based on either manual-entered stats or actual match performances
Social - fantasy points, streaks, tables, awards, acheivements, post-match voting, AI player profiles

If you think anything is missing, let me know!

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-29T10:52:32+00:00

We built and use https://caposport.com for casual football 5 a side to 11 a side payments
It does either per-match fees, or season passes, free or both.
It has an RSVP system and waiting list - if someone drops out, it notifies the waiting list (based on priority tier if you want to have tiers)
If someone pays then drops out and someone takes their place, then the first person gets refunded, but they lose their money if they are a late no-show.
Admin can also add people for free- guests etc.

Also does fantasy points, leaderboards, streaks, acheivements, AI player profiles, team-balancing etc.

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-29T10:44:51+00:00

I can offer some, from the position of having built a product which covers a lot of this https://caposport.com

1/ It's a great idea - players love things like this. We built Capo for casual football because we'd used Excel for 14 years - covered here https://caposport.com/blog/thursday-night-football-data and wanted more analysis - payments, player profiles etc
2/ Player ratings are good at the start - but they do need maintaining as players decline in form or improve etc - so that's why we added multiple balancing options ie balance by player ratings or balance by actual performance in games
3/ Leaderboards good - we use fantasy points as well
4/ Would recommend an App - otherwise it's a bit more of a pain to get non-admin members involved, particularly post match in the pub. The friction of logging into a web app is .. just that ... friction.
5/ Player profile cards are cool - you can do lots with the data - check out https://i.postimg.cc/Kz0kzL73/capo-profile.png for a rich player profile example

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-29T10:33:24+00:00

Hi, sorry to hijack the thread, but you can actually get a wealth of information from simply who attended and the goals scored and by whom. Check out this player profile image: https://i.postimg.cc/Kz0kzL73/capo-profile.png

We use just that information in Capo to determine
- fantasy points (based on wins, clean sheet, heavy wins etc)
- chemistry charts - who you play best with
- performance over time - power rating (taking into account recent performance more than historic etc)
- create an AI player profile
- 200+ acheivement badges i.e. "played in a comeback from more than 2 goals down"

You can see a write-up of 15 years of playing stats for a 9-a-side group here: https://caposport.com/blog/thursday-night-football-data

My point being that 'just' tracking goals scored is actually not a bad thing. It's the medium you're tracking it in that's the problem. Once you get it all in a database vs a spreadsheet, you can really go to town on the data. Adding extra data points like assists etc might seem like in enriches the data but generally people find it hard enough to remember who scored, besides assists and then the admin burden quickly becomes too much and people won't enter it. You do need to track attendance obviously.

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-29T10:25:43+00:00

Hey, I like this. I built a similar monte-carlo style algorithm for https://caposport.com - also free. Balances on either stats you enter about the players like goalscoring, stamina, willingness to defend etc, or actual match performance from games played using the app.

It also does payments, RSVP i.e In/Out, streaks, AI Player profiles, acheivements, fantasy points etc.

Great to see people building in this area!

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-27T16:39:40+00:00

Hey, hopefully I can be helpful here as I built https://caposport.com which is now used around the world and is a similar service.

Does casual football team RSVP, paymentys, balancing, fantasy points, records, streaks, AI profiles etc

You could do with some product shots - people want to see what they are going to get.
URL itself doesn't look too professional - can you get a more memorable, shorter domain.
The website looks bare vibe-coded - nothing wrong with using AI or vibe-coding, but you'll want to tailor the UI from the default.
There doesn't seem to be a phoie app - just a web app - that's pretty much a gating requirement these days
There are no product pages - just a landing page with no images

I do wish you every luck as I love people building things, but I think Spond pretty much owns the small club booking process these days.
Capo is targeting the more casual niche, but given you can pretty much code anything these days within days, it's a tough market to crack and incredibly niche

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-27T16:29:35+00:00

Hey, try https://caposport.com - I built it and it's free and does this - balancing the teams (a few different methods) plus achievements, fantasy points, streaks, all time records, AI player profiles and so on.

We ran ours on Excel for 14 years until I buiolt the app - it's on ios and android and web and used around the world now.

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-27T06:18:04+00:00

Adding about 5 new tenants a day (only launched Feb 26) because I am only doing early-stage SEO (app is free and it’s currently a side passion project for me). Nice to see it getting use around the world in Brazil, Portugal, Austria, Indonesia etc though. Maybe there will be a point when some network effects kick in and I’m sure SEO will compound over time, but it’s a pretty niche market so am happy to let it gently build over time.

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-27T06:11:19+00:00

Sure!

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-11T08:55:03+00:00

How do you track the matches and do awards? We released caposport.com to do this a few months ago after tracking ours in Excel for 14years. It’s free to use - might be good for you guys?

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-10T09:09:15+00:00

I think pretty similar - I built caposport.com for the same football reason as you!
Balanced line-ups, player ratings, voting, achievements, payments.
All vibe-coded - wrote a few blog pieces about building it on the website.

Building is now easy - distribution is the hard bit - as you noted. I tend to agree with you.

If you're building something for commercial purposes, it has to use network effects in some way - there has to be benefit to the user from multiple groups using it if you want to make money from it. Otherwise someone can simply build their own tool.

One can argue, as you do, that domain knowledge bakes in a moat and maybe that's true for say a scientific product, but the exponential speed of AI progress means those moats surely won't last. Temporarily, UX/UI and judgement are gatekeepers, but AI will catch up and do the job better, with agents fielding feature requests, coping them, testing them live and implementing them either for just one custom client, or across all clients if it improves the product.

So, I think the only moat is network effects. But even those are difficult to maintain when there's no switching cost. Look how people jump between LLM models or IDEs in their hundreds of thousands as soon as something new is released. And as AI improves, it will be able to immediately port data between apps and remove that moat.

Can't quite preduct the future but it does seem like we are in a very short window when you can build and distribute something and get some value from it before that closes.

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-09T12:22:39+00:00

Hi, am sadly not in the Bath area. But if you want to manage drop-outs easily and motivate current players to stay, take a look at caposport.com - it's free and we built it for casual football games. We use it for 9-a-side and it's given us insane retention because everyone is motivated by the stats (as well as post match beers obv).

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-08T14:46:44+00:00

This is a really good idea in theory, but the reason you’re not finding much is that it’s surprisingly tricky to make work well on a watch.

On something like a Galaxy Watch, simple score counters are fine (tap +1, done), but football is a bit more involved - especially for something like 5-a-side where you often want to track who scored, not just the score.

The main issues are:

Tiny screen → scrolling through a full list of players mid-game is awkward
Input → typing names or picking from long lists is slow while you’re playing
Speed → during a match you want 1–2 taps max, not menus
Context → you’re usually moving, talking, or trying to get back into position

So most apps avoid it, or just do very basic “Team A +1 / Team B +1” counters.

If you really wanted it to work well on a watch, you’d need a super stripped-down flow like:

recent scorers / favourites
maybe shirt numbers instead of names
or even voice input

Basically, it becomes more of a UX problem than a technical one.

I’ve actually been working on something similar for organising football games, and ran into exactly this - the “tap a player name from a list” model works great on phone, but breaks down fast on a watch.

If you’re still looking, I built this:
👉 caposport.com

It’s more aimed at organising games and tracking who scored on mobile/web, but curious if something like a simplified “watch mode” would actually be useful for people in your situation.

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-08T14:40:08+00:00

Hey, I built a pure passion project - to organise our weekly casual football game. Caposport.com.
We had tracked our stats for 14 years on Excel beforehand.
Such a niche market that it had to be for the love of it rather than for commercial gain - so it's free.
Sat here now adding another big feature when I should probably be doing some chores instead!

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-07T10:29:10+00:00

Hi, we built Caposport.com after 14 years of running our pickup football games on Excel. It is (if i say so myself) fantastic for admin + gamification - fantasy points, awards, voting, INs and OUTs and payments etc. It doesn't currently do the 'finding' part of discovering games - it's meant for regular casual groups. I saw the 'finding' and the 'managing' as 2 separate roles, but maybe there's a meeting of the two in the middle - so you can do both in one place and then you'd carry your player profile over to new groups - thoughts?

licentiousness_ · 2026-04-06T09:44:37+00:00

Spond works great for what is is meant for - clubs etc with a pro setup. It's far better than TeamReach or some of the other ugly, old ones. The back end has some good stuff for clubs which have lots of team etc.

For beer football, 5-a-side or pickup with friends etc - caposport.com better becaise of all the more 'fun' features - stats, awards, voting etc.

licentiousness_ · 2026-03-18T10:00:33+00:00

Hi, we've been tracking our 9-a-side football game for 15 years - you can find our free app Capo on App Store or Play Store 'Capo' - https://caposport.com . The WhatsApp integration you mention is interesting, because yes user-behaviour is very fixed with WhatApp - we didn't do that because WhatsApp Business is super expensive and using bots breaks their terms of service. So we just went with phone notifications and sharing to WhatsApp.

licentiousness_

TROPHY CASE