BeTeam
Sports predictions with friends. Without the gambling part.
16 followers
Sports predictions with friends. Without the gambling part.
16 followers
Open a private league with your friends, predict match results before kickoff, and climb the leaderboard. The app does the boring stuff — scoring, locking predictions, organizing the table — so you can spend Saturday arguing about who actually called the match. 🚫 Not a betting product. No deposits, no real money, no cash prizes. Ever. ✅ iOS live · Android in review · 6 languages on day one · Football + basketball + Hockey
@ran_kopchovski Read your migration story on Indie Hackers a few days ago — the Bubble-to-React-Native part was wild, 4 days is insane. Curious how the launch is going. Also, the landing page in 6 languages is impressive for a solo founder — did you write the translations or use AI? And did the multi-language thing actually move the needle on installs yet?
@thomas_bentov Thanks for reading that 🙏 The 4-day rebuild was less about being fast and more about being desperate — Bubble's mobile wrapper was making the app feel sluggish enough that I was losing testers, and I had to choose between fixing it or shipping it dead. Rewriting from scratch was actually the simpler path once I admitted Bubble wasn't going to get me where I needed to go.
On the 6 languages: a mix. I wrote the English copy myself, then used Claude for first-draft translations into HE/ES/PT/FR/AR, then had native-speaker friends review them. The native review caught about 20% of phrasing that was technically correct but felt robotic. Pure AI translation would have been good enough for SEO but not for the actual landing page hero copy.
On whether it moved installs: too early to know — domain is 3 weeks old and most pages aren't indexed yet. The bet is on 6 months out, not 6 weeks. Hebrew is the only one with actual traffic right now (where I am + word of mouth). If you're a solo founder thinking about multi-language: I'd say only do it if you're willing to wait 3-6 months for SEO to kick in and have at least one native-speaker friend per language to review.
Are you working on something similar?
Football fan here. A few practical questions:
Does it support Champions League + Premier League + La Liga at the same time, or do I have to pick one?
What about international tournaments — Euros, World Cup, Copa América?
Can I do "predict the final score" or just winner?
Sports prediction apps usually nail one league and then everything else feels half-baked. Curious where you actually focused.
@barak_lafer All great questions and honestly the answer to all of them shows our current limitation: today you can run multiple competitions in parallel in the same league (so yes — Champions League + Premier League + La Liga simultaneously, each tracked separately on the leaderboard). International tournaments work the same way — Euros and World Cup are supported as standalone competitions.
On prediction depth: right now it's exact score + winner. Exact score gives you the bonus, winner gives you base points. We chose this because it's the format that survived 2 years of testing with my own friend group — anything more complex (over/under, both-teams-to-score, prop bets) started feeling like a betting app, anything simpler (just winner) made the leaderboard too flat by matchday 4.
Where we're admittedly weak: lower-tier leagues. We have data for the top European leagues + major tournaments + NBA + NFL, but if your friend group wants to predict, say, Israeli Liga Leumit, we don't have that yet. Data licensing for lower leagues is genuinely expensive for a free product.
What league does your group actually play in?
@ran_kopchovski Thanks for the fast and professional feedback!
I'm looking forward to crushing my friends in the upcoming tournament
@barak_lafer I can't wait to see how you smash Rafi
Looks great but I'm always suspicious of "free" sports apps. Be straight with me — how does this make money long-term? If the plan is to add ads or sell my friend group's prediction data to a sportsbook, that's a hard no for me.
Also a sincere question — if there's no monetization plan, what stops this from disappearing in 12 months when you run out of runway? I've been burned by free apps shutting down before.
@goldman_eliraz Fair concern and one I get a lot, so let me be direct:
What I won't do: sell prediction data to a sportsbook, run ads that feel like a casino (the worst thing for the product's vibe), require an account just to harvest contacts, or pivot the app into a gambling product after building the user base on "no gambling." That last one is the cynical playbook several similar apps have run and it would betray the entire premise.
What the actual plan is: in 6-12 months, introduce an optional premium tier for league commissioners (~$3-5/month) that unlocks deeper customization — custom scoring rules, historical season archives, multi-league dashboards, branded league pages. The free tier stays fully functional for everyone playing in someone else's league. So basically: the person setting up the league might pay for power features; the 6-12 friends they invite never need to.
On disappearing: legitimate concern. I'll be honest — I'm a solo founder, bootstrapped, and I don't have venture money. The flip side of that is I also don't have a board demanding 10x growth, so I'm not under pressure to do something stupid to keep the app alive. The cost to run BeTeam at current scale is ~$50/month in infrastructure. As long as that stays true, the app exists.
Does that level of transparency address the concern, or is there a specific monetization model you'd actually trust?
Long-time Superbru user here. Ran with the same group on it for 4 World Cups. Two honest questions:
1 Why would my group migrate when our 8-year history is already on Superbru?
2 Superbru struggles with anything outside Rugby/Cricket/Football. Does BeTeam handle American sports (NFL, NBA) properly, or is it Europe-focused?
Not trying to be hostile — genuinely curious about the value prop for a group already settled elsewhere.
@iriskop Not hostile at all, this is the right question to ask. Honest answers:
On migration: I won't try to convince you to leave Superbru. If your group has 8 years of history there and it works, the switching cost outweighs anything we offer right now. Where BeTeam wins is for groups that haven't picked a platform yet, or groups where Superbru's UX (mobile experience, invite friction, scoring rules customization) is causing dropout. If your group is happy, stay.
On American sports: BeTeam handles NFL and NBA the same as European football — same flow, same scoring, same league structure. It's actually one of the places we beat Superbru, since their NFL support has historically been thin. NBA in particular works well because the 82-game season generates enough matchdays to keep a leaderboard interesting all year.
The honest positioning is: Superbru is best for big, public, branded tournaments (World Cup, Six Nations, IPL). BeTeam is best for small, private, friend-defined leagues that mix multiple sports/competitions year-round. Different use cases.
Out of curiosity — what made you ask about American sports? Has your group been wanting to add them on Superbru?
@new_user___14520266ca8cd5b2b765760 Thanks 🙏 The "people forget to submit" problem was actually what got me to build this in the first place — the spreadsheet pool I ran for 2 years had a 40% drop-off by matchday 5 every season. Turned out it wasn't that people lost interest, it was that submitting through a chat message was just enough friction to skip.
On bonus rounds — yes, that's exactly where we're heading. The next release has "tournament mode" with bracket-style rounds you can layer on top of matchday predictions (e.g. "who wins the Conference Finals" as a season-long bet alongside individual game picks). Targeting end of June. Would you want to be a beta tester for that?
@noam_cohen91 Honest answer: if your group is actually placing real bets and enjoys that, BeTeam isn't for you and I won't try to convert you. Those apps are better at what they do.
The pitch is for the (much larger) group of people who don't want money involved but still want the competitive layer. From building this, I noticed two things kill friend-group prediction pools when money is on the table:
People play scared. Everyone converges on the favorite to avoid losing $20. The bold picks — which are the fun part — disappear.
Friendships strain. A friend owing $40 from a 6-month-old pool nobody wants to chase ruins group dynamics.
BeTeam keeps the social game (leaderboard, bragging rights, group chat dynamic) and removes the money entirely. Different product, different audience. Yahoo Pickem is closer to what we do, but it's tied to public NFL pools — BeTeam is built for private 6-12 person friend leagues with your own scoring rules.
Does that distinction make sense for how your group works?