I Built an App to Replace Our F1 Prediction Spreadsheet. Here's What I Learned.
Every F1 fan group has one. The shared Excel where someone enters everyone's qualifying and race predictions, scores them manually after each session, and maintains the cumulative standings all season.
In our group, predictions came in through an email chain. One person would enter all the picks and results into a spreadsheet. It worked for a while. Then life got in the way, as it does, and the scoring stopped. We kept predicting for the fun of it, but nobody was tracking who was right anymore. The competitive part just faded out.
That bugged me. So in January 2026, I started building Podium Prophets to automate the scoring. Predictions go in, results come in from Formula 1, scores update. Nobody has to volunteer as the spreadsheet person.
Two months later, the "weekend project" has leagues, telemetry analysis, a meme championship, 20+ blog posts, embeddable data widgets, and I haven't slept properly since.
Here's what I learned building it.
I Already Knew the Spreadsheet Was Complex
I'd been in the group for years. I knew our scoring system inside out before writing a line of code. Different point values for exact match, one-off, and two-off positions. A penalty for missed sessions. Cumulative standings across the whole season. Manual overrides for the guy who "definitely told someone" his picks but never actually sent the email.
The configurable scoring itself wasn't hard to code. One if-statement per option, pretty much. The real work was everything around it: the prediction interface, results imports, league management, session handling across four different session types. The scoring logic was the easy part.
This Was Supposed to Be a Weekend Project
I started building on January 31st. A quick Next.js app with Supabase, deployed on Vercel. The classic SaaS starter stack, picked for ease of deployment because this was supposed to be a weekend project. Submit predictions, import results, show a leaderboard. Done by Sunday, right?
By February 7th, a week in, I bought the domain. That was the moment I knew this wasn't a weekend project anymore. I decided to go all out. By then it already had Google auth, a drag-and-drop prediction interface, configurable scoring per league, a 3D animated landing page, team logos, circuit SVGs, and a full history section with lap data. I couldn't stop adding things. As the app grew, I also started realizing the Vercel/Supabase setup that was perfect for a quick start has limits I'm going to hit eventually. Moving to a VPS is something I'm actively working on.
By mid-March when the F1 season started, the app had session analysis tools (race pace, long runs, team pace hierarchies, telemetry comparisons), a blog with 13 posts, email notifications, embeddable widgets for other blogs, SEO optimizations, and legal pages. My friend group started their league on the app from day one. There was no "ugly V1" phase. The scope just kept growing because every feature felt like it naturally belonged.
The lesson people usually share here is "ship the MVP and iterate." I did the opposite. I built way more than necessary before anyone used it. That's not advice I'd give others, but I'd be lying if I said I regretted it.
What Inspired Chaos Mode
Some F1 prediction apps don't do P1-P10 at all. They're question-based: "Who will get pole?", "Will there be a safety car?", "How many cars will finish?" I liked the format but wanted to make it something different. Less serious. Community-driven.
That became Chaos Mode, which has two sides. The first is community-voted meme questions where fans predict the answers. "Are we going to see another Ferrari masterplan this weekend?" "Will Stroll have a window-licking incident?" The second is a meme submission system where fans upload image memes each race weekend, the community votes on them, and the top 3 score leaderboard points. Each fan gets 2 submissions and 3 likes per weekend. It has its own scoring, its own leaderboard, and its own visual identity (magenta accent instead of gold). Plans for a Prophet Points credit system will eventually let fans unlock extra submissions.
The analytical prediction game and the meme championship live in the same app but feel completely different. That was deliberate. Serious fans get data-driven P1-P10 predictions. Casual fans get to submit memes and vote on whether Max will swear on team radio. Both audiences, one app.
Things I Learned the Hard Way
This was my first app without a dedicated backend. I'd always built apps with a traditional backend handling everything. Supabase's serverless architecture was completely new to me. Row-level security policies, auth flows through a third-party provider, gracefully handling rate limits, caching strategies without a server to cache on, real-time subscription patterns. All stuff I had to learn from scratch. It went fine, but the learning curve was real.
Work-life balance stopped existing. I work 7 to 3. That can't be affected by a side project, no matter how out of hand it gets. But the roadmap kept growing, and I kept finding "one more thing" to build. So I regularly stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning, then dragged myself to work a few hours later. My blood at this point consists of Red Bull and coffee. That's something I need to fix. (Red Bull sponsorship inquiries welcome.)
Marketing is harder than building. I was writing code before the AI explosion made everyone a developer overnight. Building the product was the part that came naturally. Everything after that, getting people to actually find it and try it, is a completely different skill. SEO, content strategy, social media presence. Nobody teaches you that the product being good is the easy half. I had to learn all of it through trial and error.
I refuse to shove it down people's throats. The standard advice is to go all-in on visibility. Automated Reddit replies. Post your product in every remotely relevant thread. Growth hack your way to traction. All those non-authentic automations, the fake "just discovered this cool app" posts, the bots replying to keywords. I refuse to participate in that.
I get that most people recommend the 90/10 rule. Give value 90% of the time, promote 10%. That sounds reasonable in theory. But even replying to posts I would have otherwise never interacted with, just for the long game of eventually promoting the app, doesn't come naturally to me. It still feels like I'm there for the wrong reason. I'd rather grow slowly and genuinely than fast and fake. That might mean slower growth. I'm fine with that.
Two Months In
- 23 registered prophets (mostly friends and people I know, being honest)
- 4 organic sign-ups from people I've never met
- 537 predictions scored without manual intervention
- 15 active predictors this season
- 0 spreadsheets maintained
The product works. The scoring is automatic. The analysis tools are something no other F1 prediction game offers. I only started any kind of social media presence on March 26th, so the distribution side is barely a week old. Two months building, one week marketing. The hard part is just starting.
What's Next
The immediate focus is reaching the thousands of other F1 fan groups running the exact same email-and-spreadsheet setup. Blog content, embeddable F1 data widgets for bloggers (free, with attribution backlinks), and genuine community presence in F1 spaces.
The core prediction game stays free. Always. I'm also exploring how to eventually monetize it. A credit system ("Prophet Points") earned through play or purchased, unlocking cosmetics and extras like additional meme submissions. Maybe a premium analysis tier down the line. With a bit of luck and the right approach, this could become profitable in the future. But the prediction loop is never gated.
If You're Building a Side Project
Three things I'd tell past-me:
Your first fans matter more than strangers. A friend group that will actually use your app and tell you what's confusing is worth more than a thousand Product Hunt upvotes. Mine gave me feedback that shaped real features. That's hard to get from people who don't care about your success.
Automate the boring part first. The reason my group switched wasn't because the app looked good (it did, but still). It was because nobody had to score anything manually anymore. Find the one pain point and kill it.
Build something you'd use every weekend. I predict every F1 session on Podium Prophets because I want to. That's the motivation that survives the "this refactor is going to take an entire weekend" moments. And the 2am nights. And the fifth coffee.
The game is free. If your group is still arguing over a spreadsheet, give it a try.
Podium Prophets — free F1 prediction game with automatic scoring
Top comments (0)