Mooowe

Inspiration

The idea for Mooowe first came to me in 2020, during COVID.

I missed playing sport. I wanted to get outside, move, meet people and feel part of a community again. But finding somewhere to play, or simply finding people to play with, was surprisingly difficult.

The information was scattered across Facebook groups, old websites, private chats and word of mouth. You had to work out which groups were still active, message strangers, wait for replies and hope the opportunity was genuine. It felt tedious, awkward and, at times, not particularly safe.

COVID made socialising even harder, but it also highlighted a problem that had existed long before the pandemic: local sport may be everywhere, yet access to it remains fragmented.

That experience became the starting point for Mooowe, inspired by the Hungarian phrase “Mozogjunk együtt,” meaning “Let’s move together.”

I wanted to create the platform I had been looking for: one trusted place where people could discover local sport, find like-minded participants, join amateur teams, attend events and access nearby venues without the awkwardness and uncertainty.

What it does

Mooowe connects the complete community-sport ecosystem: participants, organisers, teams, venues, municipalities and funders.

A user can discover nearby people, activities and places based on their interests, ability, availability and approximate location. Every recommendation includes a clear “Why this match?” explanation, so people understand why it appears. Mooowe does not rely on opaque AI ranking, and precise home coordinates are never displayed.

From discovery, users can continue through the complete participation journey:

• Find compatible sports partners, teams, events and venues.
• Join an activity or move onto its waiting list when it is full.
• Organise community events and manage attendance.
• Add activities to a shared calendar.
• Verify participation and record programme attendance.
• Track shared costs through an informational ledger without Mooowe holding or transferring money.
• Report safety concerns across profiles, messages, teams and events.
• Access the experience in Hungarian or English.

Mooowe is deliberately more than another sports-buddy application. Its wider purpose is to help communities understand and grow participation.

Organisers, municipalities and funding partners can see anonymised programme results, target-versus-actual progress and data-completeness warnings. Outcomes are separated into system-recorded activity, user-reported outcomes and manually entered project indicators. Small demographic groups are suppressed to protect participants, and funder viewers cannot inspect individual users.

This creates a bridge between a person looking for somewhere to move on Tuesday evening and a municipality trying to demonstrate that a publicly funded sports programme created genuine community impact.

How we built it

I used Codex as a product, design and engineering collaborator to turn the original concept into a working MVP.

Instead of asking for a collection of attractive screens, I began with the problem, the people involved and the complete journeys they needed to take. We worked role by role: guest, registered participant, event organiser, team administrator, venue partner, moderator, system administrator and funder viewer.

Mooowe was built as a responsive React and TypeScript application with a reusable design system, progressive web app foundations and dedicated mobile and desktop experiences. The interface preserves one recognisable visual identity while adapting its information and available actions to each role.

The development process was highly iterative. We repeatedly audited and refined:

• Navigation and complete user journeys.
• Event capacity, duplicate joins and waiting-list promotion.
• Team invitations and ownership transfers.
• Attendance validation and programme evidence.
• HUF rounding and shared-expense reconciliation.
• Role-based access and private-record visibility.
• Location privacy and explainable matching.
• Moderation, reporting and appeal histories.
• Hungarian and English localisation.
• Keyboard access, focus states, contrast and mobile usability.
• EU pilot reporting and anonymised funder views.

Codex helped me move between product strategy, interface design, implementation, testing and refinement while keeping the original vision consistent.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the platform simple

One of the biggest challenges was creating a complete platform without making it feel complicated.

Mooowe serves individuals, communities and institutions, but it still needs to feel simple when someone only wants to find a nearby run or volleyball game. We had to make the wider platform powerful without making the everyday experience feel administrative.

Creating a genuinely safe place

Safety is one of the most important challenges for Mooowe.

Everyone should feel safe when meeting new people and joining new communities. At the same time, any platform that turns an online connection into a real-world meeting carries genuine risks. Mooowe cannot simply help people connect. Mooowe has to be a safe place in which those connections can begin.

The MVP therefore approaches safety as part of the product’s foundation. It uses approximate location instead of exposing exact personal coordinates. Blocked and hidden users are excluded from discovery. Reporting is available from profiles, messages, teams, posts and events. The moderation experience includes reasons, user notifications, appeal status and audit history.

Safe-meeting guidance also encourages first meetings in suitable public locations, with clear event information and community accountability.

This work still requires professional safeguarding, policy and legal review before a public launch, but the principle is already clear: growth must never come at the expense of participant safety.

Privacy without losing usefulness

Nearby discovery is useful only when it feels safe. However, removing too much location information can make recommendations meaningless.

Mooowe addresses this by using approximate, area-level distance information. It can explain that an activity or person is nearby without revealing a home address or exact private coordinates.

The challenge was to make privacy feel like a natural part of the experience rather than a restriction placed on top of it.

Real-world edge cases

Community sport does not always follow a simple, predictable journey.

We had to consider two people attempting to claim the final event place, waiting-list promotions, organiser cancellations, expired invitations, attendance disputes and shared expenses that must round correctly to whole Hungarian forints.

These details may not be the most visible part of the interface, but they determine whether people can trust the platform when something unexpected happens.

Measuring impact without creating surveillance

Funders and municipalities need credible evidence, but participants should never feel as though every action is being monitored.

We addressed this by aggregating results, separating different evidence sources, suppressing small demographic groups and preventing funder viewers from drilling down to individuals.

The goal is to measure whether a programme works while continuing to treat every participant as a person, not simply as a data point.

Funding and access to technology

Funding was one of the main reasons Mooowe remained on the shelf for several years.

The idea was never abandoned. I continued working on it quietly, developing the concept and thinking through how the platform should work. However, without funding, practical support or a team behind it, taking the idea forward was extremely difficult.

Technology also limited my options. Building a product of this scale meant relying on developers, agencies or companies to understand the vision, believe in its potential and have the capacity to create it. Every meaningful step required resources that were not available to me.

Codex changed that equation.

For the first time, I could work directly with the technology and turn years of ideas, notes and product thinking into a functioning experience. I was able to test decisions, identify problems, refine the interface and keep moving without losing the original vision through repeated handovers.

The challenge is not completely solved. Mooowe will still need funding, partnerships, professional expertise and a strong team to become a production platform. But technology has finally allowed me to prove that the idea can become something real.

Accomplishments that I’m proud of

I am proud that Mooowe grew from an idea I had in 2020 into a coherent, working product that can now be demonstrated from the first search through to verified community impact.

The MVP includes explainable discovery, privacy-conscious location matching, event and waiting-list management, teams, venues, attendance, shared costs, moderation and institutional reporting within one consistent experience.

I am especially proud that accessibility, safety and privacy were treated as foundations rather than features to add later.

Most importantly, Mooowe now has a clear position of its own. It is not just helping one person find another person to play sport with. It is building the trusted infrastructure through which an entire community can move together and demonstrate the difference that participation makes.

What we learned

I learned that Codex becomes most valuable when it is treated as a genuine collaborator rather than simply a code generator. The clearer I was about the problem, users, constraints and quality standard, the stronger the product became.

I also learned that trust has to be designed into every layer of a community platform. A polished interface is not enough. People need to understand why something is recommended, who can see their information, what happens when they report a concern and how important decisions are recorded.

I learned that technology can remove barriers that once kept strong ideas on the shelf. It does not replace the need for expertise, testing or human judgement, but it can give someone the ability to take a meaningful first step.

Finally, I learned that Mooowe’s strongest differentiation is the complete participation loop:

discovery → connection → participation → verified attendance → measurable community impact

Each stage makes the next one more valuable. More participants attract more organisers. More organisers create more opportunities. More venues and municipalities improve local access. Better evidence helps successful programmes secure funding and grow.

What’s next for Mooowe

The next step is a controlled pilot in two or three Hungarian cities.

The pilot will test the complete journey: onboarding, first search, first connection, first event join, verified attendance and 7-day and 30-day retention. It will also help us learn what participants, organisers, venues and municipalities need in real operating conditions.

Production development will include a secure hosted backend, authentication, live mapping and geocoding, notifications and carefully reviewed access controls. Privacy policies, safeguarding procedures and Hungarian and EU legal requirements will be reviewed by appropriate professionals before a public launch.

From there, the goal is to partner with grassroots organisers, sports venues, municipalities and suitable EU funding programmes to expand access to community sport across Hungary and, eventually, other European communities.

The idea began during a period of isolation. Its purpose is the exact opposite – to help people move, meet and belong together.

Built With

• codex
• figma
• typrescript