Hey Product Hunt, and major thanks to @foolywk & @nivo0o0 for hunting us out.
We started ClutchPoints with one vision in mind: To disrupt the conventional way of watching and following sports right from your mobile device. We’re big-time sports fanatics and just didn’t feel there was a perfect product to follow live games when you’re not on a TV.
With ClutchPoints, we want to bring together fans in a go-to sports app that puts everything happening in the game in the palm of your hand. We’re not just talking text play-by-play: we’re talking about a visual timeline with a snippet-based, viewing experience.
Here’s what makes ClutchPoints so unique:
- An elegant, easy-to-use design with features convenient for all fans of all ages. No sports app brings together so much, so beautifully.
-We’ve developed an algorithm to parse social channels and find the top team-specific content, real-time. This content is then populated real-time along with play-by-play, bringing the game to you.
- The most essential videos, images, reactions and highlight plays in the game appear instantly within the ClutchPoints STREAM. Swipe right, and you've got all the stats and play-by-play you need. Swipe left, and you can follow the reactions of fans, writers, players right at your fingertips. The result is an innovative, visual alternative to the streaming services provided by most apps today.
- In the world of sports, all news breaks from the same place: social media. ClutchPoints revolutionizes how users discover, track and share stories with a media feed that brings fans right to the source.
Currently we’re LIVE on the iOS & Android, so we’d love for you guys to check out the product during a game and give us your feedback. We have a lot of great new features in store, including expanding across all sports.
@nishil92 so excited for this! I've been using ClutchPoints for the past few days now and the design is stunning!! There's no easier way to stay updated on your favorite NBA teams 🏀Can't wait for the expansion to NCAA, too!
@nishil92 This looks rather interesting Nish....how are you guys grabing live content from NBA games??!! Do you guys have a direct connection with someone inside the NBA, or is it just aggregation from social networking sites like Vine & Instagram.
@foolywk Thanks Brandon! Major props to the design team on that, we went through numerous versions before we found one that we felt users would really like to interact with. Looking forward to adding NCAA in 2016! Along with other sports as well⚽️🏀🏈⚾️
@nicholassheriff Thanks Nicholas! We're not grabbing it from the live streams, we are aggregating the content from social outlets and applying our developed algorithm to it to pull the top content at each specific moment in the game. You will notice there is specific credit to users within the STREAM section of the app, where the videos, images, and commentary populates.
Just downloaded and I'm loving the design. Not sure when the app first launched, but it looks like a lot of work went into the Android version. Why did you all decide it was important to place equal emphasis on Android/iOS?
@jonathankau Thanks Jonathan, appreciate it. We’re been beta testing it since the start of the NBA season at the end of October and just wanted to perfect it as there are a lot of real-time component as I’m sure you can imagine. Speed and accuracy is so key in this sports app industry. We wanted to create an elegant product people talked about with friends. Now if one had iOS and the other had Android we didn’t want that to be a limiting factor for growth and virality for us. Therefore we have put the same resources on both Android and iOS. Android runs about 1-week slow in development for us, but we learn our mistakes on iOS development first making Android that much easier and faster. Currently our users are split fairly evenly between the two platforms so we’re glad we emphasized having both apps, natively made instead of going with an alternative such as PhoneGap.
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Hey @niishh congrats on the public launch! My initial impression upon installing the app is that it looks and feels great. It's exactly what I've been looking for to help me keep up with basketball. I'm curious about where the live in-game statistics are being pulled from and how accurate are they compared to the real life game as it happens? You also expressed your interest in expanding to other sports. I'm a huge fan of "Forza" which does a great job at keeping me up to date with my favourite soccer teams. I feel like ClutchPoints is almost exactly like Forza but for the NBA. Are you looking to keep a consistent experience/feature set throughout the app when covering other sports or will you be trying unique things for each sport? It seems to me that ClutchPoints and other similar sport apps really emphasize their ability to pull content live from social media as it happens by using algorithms and/or human curation. What is your take on building an internal media team that can possibly create exclusive/original content? The Players Tribune comes to mind. ClutchPoints is awesome as is so much love to you and your team for building it but I'm also curious if you can provide any insight into the future of such an app/service apart from expansion into other sports?
@madebyildi Thanks for the support! Appreciate the kind words.
1. Live in-games stats are pulled from a sports data API (contract-based) that is able to aggregate the data real-time. The data appears in the app about 5-7 seconds from when you see it on TV. The data is then pushed to you as soon as it is available on our end for public viewing from the API.
Yes, we definitely want to expand to other sports as mentioned above. “Forza” does a great job with soccer and keeping fans updated. Every sport is a bit different, and we want to cater it to specific sports based on what those fans like to see and interact with most. While the framework will be similar, we want to spend most of our time on perfecting and catering the content that users see so it is meaningful, informative, and provides overall value to the stream component. But the main model in providing a hybrid experience of current options in the market is a key focus moving forward across all sports.
You’ve got that exactly, building content in-house as things happen is the ultimate goal. While we provide some of the exclusive/original content within the app already, the eventual goal is to build an internal team that can create a lot more original real-time content day to day and provide users with an even better, more catered stream. Another focus for us is not only on the in-game streams, but in general on the news streams so users can get to know their favorite teams and players that much better on and off the court. These days there seems to be so much interest in what the players are doing off the court. The Players Tribute is one of these outlets that is thriving on this.
The future is what excites us the most. While ClutchPoints currently has the framework of what our long-term goal is, there’s so much to still be improved on to get to our vision. We’re not trying to replace watching sports on TV, that’s not our goal at all. We want to be used as a supplement to watching TV or a way to get all your sports needs when you don’t have access to the TV. A way of you getting additional information and insight on the game, that you don’t get from a broadcast along with the top moments as they happen. With sports everyone wants to know when the moment happens and we want to do that by giving fans a way to get, show, and share that content with friends and family.
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@niishh thank you for the great insight. Sidenote: I really like Forza's feature where they allow users to vote/predict who will be the winning team before a game starts. Adding a dedicated chatroom for each game would be awesome. I can see super loyal fans jumping in there to discuss stats and predictions before, during, and after the game or they can even expand on the conversations that develop from the curated articles and social content you are already providing. I know it's hard to convince users to have the conversation away from Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/snapchat - but if you could pull it off it's another layer of "being with everyone" as the game happens. Actually the live chatroom would be more live than Twitter itself. Think twitch!
@madebyildi Of course, thanks for your insightful questions as well. That’s a great idea, we’re working on our pre-game page currently and will add that to the pipeline of upcoming features in 2016 Q1. We really want to avoid the sports social media realm, but having discussions with fans and rivals can make for some really interesting insight on the game. In the future we also plan to offer the ability for you on the network to send out notifications of specific events in the game (poster dunks, etc.) to you friends as a sort of “in-your-face” or “wow, check this out” moment if it’s a rival fan or if it's a fan of the same team.
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@niishh that's really dope, user to user push notifications. If permission and access is handled correctly this could be a really unique feature that we haven't seen much of. I do believe there's a lot of cool stuff coming in 2016 which revolve around notifications. Looking forward to what you have planned for Q1. For now I hope the Raptors keep up that good record 🙏 what's ur fav team?
@madebyildi Thanks, this is just one of the features down the pipeline for us. Yes notifications are about to get a major revamp in 2016 it seems. Raptors are currently #4 in the East, doing quite well. Big game against the Bulls today in Chicago however, let's see how they perform. The Raptors were 0-4 against the Bulls last season. Born and raised in LA, been a Lakers/Kobe fan for life.
This is great. I think this can be a better alternative to following hashtags on Twitter if the curation is done correctly and more local to the team. Possibly adding the ability for the user to tweet from here should be a feature.
@hlopez_ Appreciate the support Hector. We've been working on the curation, but going to continue to work and cater our algorithm to perfect the curation further. Lots of unique, interesting new features to come in Q1 2016.
This is pretty sweet, just installed and I'm the type of person to install very few apps on my Android.
The only gripe I have so far is that it forces me to follow a team, and there's no way to turn off all notifications. Either allow me to not follow any specific team, or allow me to turn off notifications please!
@kokev Thanks for the kind words Kevin. There's a way to lessen the notifications via the settings tab in the app or else you can turn them off via the Android settings section as well. Let me know if you have any other thoughts/questions!
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Looks cool. Going to test it out today GS vs. CLE.
Good luck to us all :)
@moravtchik Thanks Leo, excited to hear your thoughts on it. Going to be an excellent game to follow on the app today.
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@niishh@moravtchik Sorry forgot to update, long weekend. Brilliant, loved using it during the game! Also feels... easy (meaning not heavy, slow, complicated). NICE JOB!
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