Mobile app for soccer fans living in the US that want to know when to watch European football. See the app’s landing page here. See the source code here.

Note: You can read the full article, with images included, on my medium for free here.

Initial braindump:

Name: It’s football?

football game fixtures for soccer fans.

target audience: soccer fans living in the united states that want to watch european soccer

effort to find when soccer games are on in US timezones

problem: takes at least a google search to get score updates (and another search for international play, another search for womens soccer, and another search for la liga) to get score updates

an app on app store.

MVP specs:

-lists soccer games in order of nearest away in time (top of screen) to farthest away in time

-incorporate the main leagues in europe (premier league, la liga, bundesliga, serie A), international play (men’s and women’s: i.e., world cup qualifier)

-add user sign-in and authentication later

-on boarding that has a tutorial that shows the features

tech specs:

-cross-platform (so React Native) [ended up using Expo built on React Native]

Background: I learned web development through TOP. I had this idea for an app that, as someone who watches European football, addressed some of the day-to-day problems I face trying to watch games and finding when games are on. So, I tried my hand at mobile development. With some help from Chatgpt, I created the MVP in about a day. You can view gif’s of the app in motion on the repositories README.

Guiding themes for the project:

1. Simplicity: Most soccer score apps on the app store include news, every single league in the world, ads, signup (i.e., a bunch of extra bs that is not necessary to finding who is playing and when).
2. Address Time-zone Pain Point: It is the most annoying thing trying to find when games are live through a google search. It usually takes 2–3 searches to confirm the right time zone and right start time(I found that google switches whether it shows local time [user time] or stadium time). Another issue with this is, if the game is live, the score will be spoiled for you, if you time your google search wrong (yes, this happened to me and yes, it was sad).

Testing Breakdown

Step 1: Build a landing page

Built a landing page through Carrd.

• Used the Pro Standard plan at $19/year (this gives you the option to connect a custom domain; form submissions connected to mailchimp, and more).
• Used a Carrd template and just added my own copywriting relating to the product, the product demonstration GIF, and a form to “Try Now” (the customer won’t really be able to try now, but it is a better conversion indicator [i.e., gives you a hint that people have some interest in using — or in this case at least trying — the product] than “Sign-up to my mailing list”).

Connect Google Analytics and Mailchimp

• Google Analytics: You want to know how many people are on your site. You can do that by setting up google analytics and linking it to your Carrd landing page. I’ll leave this up to you, but feel free to contact me if you end up stuck for some reason. Both platforms make it simple.
• Mailchimp: If a user submits their information on your form, mailchimp let’s you collect and store that information (in the case of Simple Football, it was an email address). Sign-up for a mailchimp account (the free version will do), find your mailchimp api key, then connect it to the form on your landing page.

Step 2: Ads

Spending money on ads to start is great for a few reasons (I’ll be talking Google Search Ads specifically here):

1. You can gauge interest in your product from real potential customers (as great as your family and friends are, they are not your — hopefully very specific — market). If after 2 weeks or 30 days, zero people have clicked on your ad, despite at least a hundred or so impressions, you either have something people don’t want or you’re not great at making a Google Ad (plenty of resources on the latter + AI helps these days, so shouldn’t be a hurdle). If you find out you have something people don’t want, that is absolutely great news. How much money have you spent? $20, $50 maybe. Don’t hold on to your ideas too tight — 100% are awesome, 10–20% are worthy business ventures. Anyways, this is a learning exercise (isn’t everything).

TIP: Set your campaign budget lowwwwww. I believe I started with $2/day. This is enough money to get impressions on your ad. If your keyword is particurly competitive (not recommended to start), you could bump this up, but again, $2/day should be enough.

2. You get a ton of information about where your market is (mobile vs web), who they are (demographic info), and how many of them there are (monthly searches for keyword).

3. You can do some rough estimations about your CAC. Based on the type of product you sell, profit margins may vary.

TIP: You can set up Google ads to measure conversions (those folks who submit the form), by redirecting to a URL after the forms submission (this “redirect-to-URL” is an option in the Form settings in Carrd). You can also manually count the legitimate emails that start showing up in your mailchimp account, then use that to do any calculations.

Keywords

Before we go into Simple Football’s number’s we have to talk keywords. Google “google ad keyword planner” and it’ll show up. Connect your google account and set up some placeholder business — if you don’t already have one setup — to explore the tool. No one ever explained it to me simply so I’ll do it here (I’ll leave out some of the nuance):

Keywords are words or phrases that are included in a Google search. Take the keyword “football”. The google search “football live now” would trigger an ad associated with the keyword “football”. Similarly the ad associated with the keyword, “champions league” would be triggered by a search like this, “when is the champions league”. Keywords are words and phrases you can associate with your ad to find your target audience.

TIP: Tailor your keywords to your product. If you had a musician marketplace where instruments could be traded, you would associate your ad with keywords like, “instruments”, “trumpet”, “keyboard swap”, instruments free”, etc., etc.

CTR = (number of people who clicked on ad/number of people who saw the ad) * 100

Avg. CPC (cost per click) = cost/clicks ->Example: $38.26/76 = $0.50 CPC

Impressions (not shown) = number of people who saw the ad

Clicks (self-explanatory)

I’ll give you the info here. This is what is possible with $40 on Google ads in the span of about 2 weeks.

CAC is your customer acquisition cost. It’s the dollar amount to get one customer all the way through the sales process (i.e., they buy your app, service, product). In the Simple Football campaign, we’ll use the Avg. CPC (the figure shown in red in the campaign overview) to get to CAC. In the case of a testing landing page, you’re really calculating your form-submitter acquisition cost (i.e., the cost per conversion). $0.50 per click. A total of 76 clicks — 76 landing page visitors. The number of form-submitters (I counted the number of legit emails I got in mailchimp) was 7. So, a total of 7 users visited the landing page. It cost me $38.26 in total to get those 76 visitors. For this campaign, the cost per customer acquisition is $38.26/7 = $5.47.

CAC = $5.47

The common benchmark for a good CAC is to keep it significantly lower than the LTV. — https://userpilot.com/blog/average-customer-acquisition-cost/

LTV? LTV (Lifetime-value). In the course of a customer’s engagement with your business, how much revenue does the customer generate?

More on CAC & LTV here and here.

A similar number is your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend; how much revenue you make per dollar spent advertising).

Why It’s a No-Go

Difficult Market (i.e., massive market): To compete in the soccer score app space, it would require an up-front investment to create a great user experience with all the features I want (a “no-spoilers” mode [live scores only when you want them], no ads, no auth, and others). Is the pain point of ads and spoilers worth 3.99 a month to users? If not, a significant upfront investment in the app itself is for very little if not my own use. Differentiating Simple Football as a competitor in the market through Simplicity and Time-zone adjusted Game schedules would be difficult in it’s own right. Assuming that was done, the app’s profitability would be in question.

Profitability as a Mobile App: Youtube is free. One of the most popular, well-known apps ever. Considering the rough CAC calculated, my app would require a monthly payment of 3.99–4.99 per customer to be profitable. Would I pay 3.99 monthly to view soccer scores in a simpler way? Not sure, I’d have to see the product. The product would have to be fantastic. It would have to be more than scores, it would have to give the user an experience. Soccer scores apps are utilitarian, making it simpler to navigate saves time and improves the user experience. Does that alone, considering the market and the information gathered from ads, encourage a path to profitability? In this space, I’m not so sure. My hesitancy, means “no-go”. As Derek Sivers writes in Anything You Want: 40 lessons for a new kind of entrepreneur, “If you’re not saying, ‘HELL YEAH!’ about something, say ‘no’.”

Additional Sources:

Another example of testing done by Tim Ferriss