I kept losing the same argument every week with my football mates, so I built an app to end it — feedback welcome
Every week, same two fights with my five-a-side football group: teams end up unbalanced (the same 2-3 strong players always land together), and nobody remembers who actually paid for the pitch.
So I built FairXI. You create a match, share one link, people join with their name, position and a 1-5 self-rating, and it auto-generates balanced teams using a snake-draft algorithm (sorts by rating, distributes 1-2-...-N then N-...-2-1 across teams). It also splits the pitch cost per player automatically, and after the match everyone votes MVP and gets a running stats history.
I built the whole thing with Emergent (an AI app builder) as part of the Fabrizio Romano x Emergent Builder's Contest — the brief was basically "solve a real problem, build it fast." What surprised me most wasn't the AI writing code, it was how much clearer the product got once I forced myself to write out the exact balancing algorithm and every screen before generating anything, instead of just describing the idea loosely.
Link: https://fairxi.vorneaux.com
Curious about two things from this community:
- If you run any kind of recurring group activity (sports, board games, anything with "who's in + who pays"), does this problem sound familiar, or is it more niche than I think?
- For those who've built with AI tools like this — how do you decide how much to specify upfront vs. let the tool improvise?
Really solid approach — I'm juggling something similar myself (building Xstream4K on the side), what's been the hardest part for you so far?
The balancing algorithm is a nice feature, but I think the bigger question is what keeps groups coming back every week. I'd keep validating whether FairXI is primarily a team-balancing app, or the operating system for recurring amateur sports groups where organizing people matters as much as playing.