Why I Built PoolPlay: A Love Letter to the Group Chat That Never Was
Eight years of spreadsheets, lost predictions, and group-chat trash talk — and the app I wish I'd had the whole time.
It started, like most good ideas, with a spreadsheet.
Actually, no — it started before that. It started with an email. Euro 2016. Me, a handful of friends scattered across cities, and a chaotic thread titled something like "PREDICTIONS — REPLY ALL OR YOU'RE OUT." We picked scores. We trash-talked. We tracked points on a piece of paper that mysteriously kept getting "lost" by whoever was losing.
It was glorious. It was also a complete logistical disaster.
Eight years of duct tape
By the next tournament, I'd graduated to Google Sheets. Now my colleagues were in on it too. Conditional formatting. Locked cells. A "leaderboard" tab that I had to manually refresh every other day while pretending to work. World Cup 2018. Euro 2020 (held in 2021, because of course). World Cup 2022. Each tournament, the same ritual: build the sheet, share the sheet, beg people to fill in the sheet before kickoff, argue about the sheet, eventually fall in love with the sheet all over again.
And every single time, the same thing was missing.
The chat. The banter. The "I cannot BELIEVE you picked Germany." The 2 AM voice note after an upset. The screenshots of someone's terrible Round of 16 bracket pinned in the group like a war crime. The spreadsheet had the numbers, but the soul of the thing — the reason we were doing it in the first place — was scattered across five different WhatsApp groups and an iMessage thread someone kept getting muted in.
I kept looking for an app that just did this. Predictions, friends, chat, leaderboard. Free. Not full of ads. Not trying to upsell me into a sportsbook. Not requiring everyone to download something they'd never open again.
It didn't exist. Or if it did, it was buried under a thousand betting apps that fundamentally misunderstood the assignment. We weren't trying to gamble. We were trying to talk smack with our friends about football.
So I built it
PoolPlay is the app I wish I'd had every summer for the last eight years.
It's a social prediction game. You make a pool with your friends, your coworkers, your group chat of three guys from college who only resurface every two years for a major tournament. You predict the matches. You talk about it — actually inside the app, where the conversation lives next to the picks. You watch the leaderboard shift in real time. You celebrate. You suffer. You do it together.
That's it. That's the pitch.
No ads. No betting. No "premium tier" hiding the good features. Just the thing I've been hand-rolling out of email threads and spreadsheets for almost a decade, finally built properly.
What's next
The first big test is coming. I'm not going to lie — there's something genuinely terrifying and exciting about handing this thing over to actual humans who aren't me. Eight years of homemade prediction pools have taught me what works and what people actually care about. Now I get to find out what I got right, what I missed, and what you're going to want next.
If you've ever found yourself maintaining a spreadsheet for your friends and secretly loving it, this is for you.
If you've ever lost a prediction pool because someone "forgot" to send their picks in on time, this is for you.
If you've ever wanted to talk endless trash to your friends about football without it getting buried under twelve other group chats, this is really for you.
Welcome to PoolPlay. Let's make this tournament the most fun one yet.
— The founder, finally retiring the spreadsheet