Ayyub’s play-nearby
The problem
It is often hard to find someone nearby to play a casual sport with on short notice, especially for a sport that does not have an organised local team, and posting to find a stranger to play with raises obvious safety questions for a young person.
The solution
PlayNearby only matches people through a shared school or verified local club rather than open public posting, and every match a young user makes is visible to a linked parent account, so finding a game stays quick without turning into contact with unknown adults.
Monetisation service
Free for school and club members. A small annual licence fee lets a school or club register officially and appear as a verified match source, rather than charging individual families directly.
Minimum projected ARR
Ayyub’s story
Ayyub plays several sports casually and kept running into the same problem: wanting a game on a Saturday morning with no easy way to find someone nearby who also wanted to play. PlayNearby is his fix, built specifically to stay inside school and club networks rather than open to anyone.
In the Make It a Real App phase, Ayyub treated the safety model as the actual product, not an afterthought: matches only happen through a verified school or club connection, and a linked parent account can see every match made, shown right on the main screen rather than buried in settings. He used AI to help build the matching and posting screens while deciding the actual verification and parent-visibility rules himself.
The hardest part was resisting the urge to open matching up to anyone nearby to get more results faster, since that would have made the app more useful in the short term but far less safe, and he chose to keep it restricted to verified school and club connections instead.
What Ayyub’s parent thinks
“TBC”
— Izmy Safraz