PLAYGRND

Live · active development

PLAYGRND brings playing, organising and following local football into one product. I build the software and the business around it, from organiser relationships and user support to social content and financial planning.

Open PLAYGRND Discuss a project

The live public app brings competitions, player activity and statistics together.

My part.

Founder of PLAYGRND and HILLS Lab. I combine hands-on engineering with product direction, local community work, user support, growth and financial planning, using AI throughout the workflow.

Role: Founder · product, engineering and operations
Period: 2025 - Present
Stage: Live product, active development

Go · Postgres · Redis · SvelteKit · WhatsApp · Hetzner

One founder, AI-enabled.

I use AI across research, design, development, content and operations. It lets me take on a broad range of startup work while staying hands-on with the people who use the product. I also run HILLS Lab, a four-person engineering studio.

On the ground

Talking with players and organisers, attending local events and building relationships are part of the job. Those conversations shape the product and help grow a local football community.

Organisers and user support

I help organisers get started, bring in competition archives, set up their workflows and resolve day-to-day questions and issues. Support feeds directly into what I build next.

Social content and distribution

I automate the creation of branded schedule, result, table and player-stat graphics in Social Studio. Publishing workflows take that content through review and out to the community on social channels.

Business and investor preparation

I build budgets, cash-flow and runway scenarios, explore revenue models and plan funding needs. I also prepare the product and investor pitches, financial plans and supporting material.

The problem.

Local organisers, players and supporters often rely on separate league sites, messages and spreadsheets. PLAYGRND connects running competitions, arranging games and following the people involved, while keeping official records traceable and changes under the right permissions.

Playing, organising and following football.

Organisers run leagues and tournaments, manage teams, schedules, match sheets and results.
Players build a football identity across teams and seasons, claim their profiles and keep their statistics.
Regular groups organise pick-up games, collect availability and find players for open spots.
The community follows people and competitions, discusses matches and shares activity. Social Studio turns the same football data into shareable content.

Under the hood.

Public web: SvelteKit SSR with Croatian-first content and an English toggle
Application API: Private Go service reached over local sockets, with public writes kept behind the web layer
Source of truth: PostgreSQL for imported records, claims, identity, audit state, and deterministic aggregates
Hot reads: Redis snapshots for stable and short-lived public data, with PostgreSQL fallback
Identity and claims: WhatsApp magic links, short claim codes, pending profiles, and guarded approval flows
Operations: Hetzner releases, health checks, recompute tooling, backups, and documented rollback paths

Engineering choices.

One football graph, several useful journeys

Competitions bring players in; profiles, community activity and pick-up games give them reasons to return. Shared identities and match data connect those journeys instead of creating separate products.

SSR-first public reads

Player and league pages should be fast, indexable, and useful when shared. The private API remains an implementation boundary rather than a public contract.

Recomputable derived data

Finished-season standings, scorers, and player statistics can be rebuilt transactionally from source records instead of becoming cache-shaped truth.

Automation with human ownership

AI and automation help with development, data intake, content and operations. Identity decisions, official changes and publication still need clear permissions, review and someone responsible for the result.

What I’ve worked on.

Competition tools, player profiles, community features and recurring pick-up game workflows
Social Studio graphics and social publishing workflows built on canonical competition data
WhatsApp sign-in, profile claims and reviewed changes to official records
A Go/PostgreSQL backend, Redis read snapshots and production tooling for releases, health checks and backups

Next: video and matchday coverage.

I have a BALLR camera and have started testing match recording and live-streaming workflows. The next step is connecting that coverage to PLAYGRND: match recordings, personal highlights and, further ahead, live score-and-scorer overlays. Video is at the camera-testing stage; these product features are planned.