Project overview
Arenova is a football fan companion app for supporters who never want to forget a match. Fans log every game they watch, at the stadium, at home or in a pub, add photos, friends and emotions, and build a personal football history that the app turns into stats, throwbacks and AI-generated insights.
Built by fans, for fans, Arenova covers more than 1,000 leagues down to the fourth division, men's and women's competitions alike. Kristof and Katherine Didden, first-time founders from Antwerp, came to us with a validated idea and a prototype; we took it through product definition, design and development to a launch on the App Store and Google Play.
$50k - $100k
7 months
November 2025
The Challenge
Football fans remember the moments, not the scores. Yet nothing helped them keep those moments together.
Every supporter has a mental archive of matches: the away day in the rain, the last-minute winner watched from a packed pub, the first game with their dad. Those memories live in camera rolls, group chats and ticket stubs, scattered and fading. Arenova set out to give fans one place to log a match in under a minute and to get something back for it: stats, throwbacks and stories generated from their own history. The founders arrived with a discovery-phase prototype, a long list of user stories and a fixed budget. The challenge was to cut the scope to what makes a fan come back every match week, to make the AI-generated "memories" feature technically credible without over-engineering the MVP, to keep the experience accessible, and to ship before the 2025/26 season kicked off.
Here's what we did
We ran an MVP validation sprint with the founders, redesigned the product around three loops, discover, log and relive, and built the app, backend and infrastructure in seven two-week sprints, from the first workshop to the App Store in seven months.
Features
Every feature earns its place by helping a fan discover a match, log the memory or relive it later.
The validation sprint mapped the founders' backlog against real fan problems and kept only what makes the app worth opening on match day. What shipped in the first release is deliberately lean, and the AI insights keep growing from user feedback.
Discover matches near you
Location-aware fixtures across 1,000+ leagues, with league, date and radius filters, ticket links and a throwback to the last time you saw the same fixture.
Log a memory in under a minute
Pick the match, say where you watched it, then add photos, who you were with, how it felt, the atmosphere, the weather and your matchday rituals.
Memories and throwbacks
A personal archive of every match, searchable by team, venue and date, and resurfaced when the same two teams meet again.
AI insights
Stadiums seen, matches watched, goals witnessed, and narrative insights generated from the fan's own history, with saved insights and shareable cards.
Badges and achievements
Ten collectible badges with progress bars, from Pre-Season Training Camp to Last-Minute Heroics, each unlocked by real matchday behaviour.
Daily quizzes
Quizzes built from the fan's logged matches and player journeys, with streaks that bring people back every day.
We worked with the founders to validate, design and build the entire platform: the mobile app, the backend, the AI insights pipeline and the admin tools.
“They don't behave like a feature factory. They challenge assumptions, push back when something does not add value, and are structured, reliable and pragmatic in delivery.”
Read More On G2We worked with the founders to validate, design and build the entire platform: the mobile app, the backend, the AI insights pipeline and the admin tools.
Founder, Arenova
Kristof Didden
Design System
Designing for the moment a fan reaches for their phone
Arenova's visual language pairs a navy-and-green palette with the Fustat typeface and gradient insight cards, so the app feels like a pitch under floodlights rather than a stats dashboard.
Arenova's visual language pairs a navy-and-green palette with the Fustat typeface and gradient insight cards, so the app feels like a pitch under floodlights rather than a stats dashboard.
Logging a memory happens in a stadium seat, on a bus home or in a noisy pub, so the flows were designed for one hand and short attention: a fixed bottom bar, large tap targets, and a vocabulary of tappable tags for emotions, atmosphere, weather and matchday rituals instead of free-text forms. Accessibility mattered to a founder who works in the disability space, and it shaped contrast, sizing and copy throughout. The badge family was illustrated as a collectible set with earned, locked and milestone states, so achievements feel like stickers on a scarf. Insight cards, throwbacks and the share card carry the same gradient system, giving fans something worth posting after every match.
Technologies
One React Native codebase, a NestJS backend and an AI pipeline that writes a fan's story from their own data.
The app is a single Expo-managed React Native codebase for iOS and Android. The NestJS backend on MongoDB Atlas pulls fixtures, lineups and results from API-Football, generates insights and quizzes with OpenAI on a scheduled worker and sends push notifications through Expo, all running on AWS ECS Fargate provisioned with Terraform. QA combined manual testing with Maestro automation on both platforms.
Mobile
React Native Expo Typescript Tailwind CSS Google OAuth 2.0
Backend
NestJS Node.js MongoDB (Atlas) OpenAI API-Football Sendgrid
Infrastructure
AWS Terraform Docker CI/CD Amazon CloudWatch Sentry NewRelic
Praise Be, Dream Team
Laurențiu Pricop
FULL STACK DEVELOPER
Ștefan Suciu
FULL STACK LEAD
Alita Csernyei
PRODUCT DESIGNER
Lucian Cocan
OPERATIONAL MANAGER
Alex Tudose
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
