MatchGuru: local friendly football game organizer web app

This is the very first digital product I actually built. Zero experience in coding, zero experience building anything online. But I had wild ideas I wanted to make real, and I felt a strong pull toward this world.

I'd tried things before (collaborating with agencies, building my own freelancer teams) but with no project management experience and no capital, I kept hitting walls I couldn't get around.

So I started looking for another way. Coding wasn't my thing at the time. I was a tech nerd from childhood, but when coding introduced itself to me, I was terrified. Thanks, but no thanks.

Around 2021, I hit this wall at exactly the right moment: no/low-code tools like Bubble.io were in their prime, connecting APIs had become almost plug-and-play, and AI tools were starting to go mainstream fast.

Around that time I was moving constantly. Five times around Budapest, then Austria, Letenye, Szeged. No friends in the new cities, and I wanted to play football. That personal frustration became the foundation for MatchGuru.

MatchGuru's goal: help local football players find and organize friendly games anywhere in the country, for free. It worked pretty well.

I got accepted into Buildspace's Season 6 incubator with it. If you don't know Buildspace, it was a startup founded by Farzaa that ran a yearly program where you'd apply with your project, and if they liked it, they'd support you through six weeks of building. I couldn't believe I got in. (It later turned out Buildspace was winding down and they were basically accepting everyone with a solid idea 😄 but at the time, it meant the world to me.)

Farzaa and his team are exactly the kind of people I want to be around. That hasn't changed, Ophelia is heavily inspired by Farzaa's current project, Clicky. So I went in with full effort and shipped MatchGuru in six weeks.

But then something just stopped. Honestly, I think I just had better ideas. I could blame the lack of capital (which was real) but the truth is I could have found users, maybe even funding. I just didn't.

Instead I moved on to other ideas and made money freelancing, helping people build their own SaaS projects. That's how I eventually met a guy, let's call him David.

David had founded a Hungarian company doing around $2M in revenue. He was looking for someone to build an idea of his, and I reached out.

On our discovery call, he seemed almost nervous to share it. That's a common thing, people act like their idea is worth stealing, when really no idea is worth a penny without execution. When he finally described it, it was basically a layman's version of MatchGuru. I was happy to find someone else who thought it was a great concept, so I told him about it, walked him through what I'd built, and shared the Buildspace story.

We met a few times, I showcased MatchGuru, and eventually I put together a full offer for him to buy the already-developed MVP. Looking back, I can't believe how low I priced it.

He never responded, not even once, despite multiple follow-ups. Okay then. I had other things going on.

About a year ago, I stumbled across his own "developed" version of MatchGuru. Not because of any clever marketing on his part, we were just still friends on social media, haha.

I wanted to try it, so I gave it a shot. Spoiler: it was really bad. The kind of bad you get from a non-developer's first attempt at something they probably shouldn't have built alone. I couldn't even sign i, the signup form had SEVENTEEN required fields. Yeah. He picked the "free" way, and it cost him a good idea.

MatchGuru is on hold. Sitting on my digital shelf, not at the bottom. I have a feeling there'll be a moment when I dust it off and actually solve this everyday problem for guys like me. We'll see.