WatchUp

WatchUp is a city-based discovery platform that shows sports fans exactly which bars & restaurants are streaming the games they care about,while giving venues a way to list & promote their live events

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Inspiration

Personal spark After five years of travel, I kept craving our Sunday ritual, family huddled around the TV, roaring for our team. Instead, I found myself alone in generic hotel bars, clueless which place was even showing the match. That disconnect lit the fire for WatchUp.

Broad opportunity In 2024, the U.S. sports-bar segment generated $2.2 billion in revenue, and yet fans still roam the city hunting live streams. WatchUp changes that: we arm venues with instant visibility to thousands of passionate fans each game day, turning empty chairs into packed crowds and forging new communities around every match.

What it does

City-based discovery Instantly see a live, filterable map of bars and restaurants streaming today’s top games, races, and events in your city.

Rich venue profiles Each listing displays the fixture (“Liverpool vs Man City”), date/time, venue details, rating, and offers one-click “Reserve” or “Get Directions.”

Easy venue dashboard Owners sign up via email, post event details, and pick one of our flexible subscription plans, with Stripe powering seamless, automated billing.

How we built it

No-code/low-code with Bolt Bolt.new handled 90 % of UI, routing, and data binding, letting me ship design iterations in hours instead of days.

Serverless backend on Supabase Supabase Auth & Storage manage sign-ups, email verification, and image hosting, no servers to spin up or maintain.

Custom React/Next.js hooks I slotted our useSubscription logic, Supabase callbacks, and Stripe checkout links cleanly into the Bolt scaffold.

Collaboration & community I live-posted every milestone on X, when I hit blockers, fellow creators jumped in with pointers.

Challenges we ran into

Domain propagation hell Securing my custom domain took five attempts and days of DNS tweaks, but the polished brand was worth every headache.

Static vs. dynamic auth flow Next.js’s static prerendering conflicted with Supabase’s need for request.url. I forced a dynamic route and explicitly typed our callback to restore smooth email-link logins.

Strict CSP rules Bolt’s generated eval calls clashed with modern CSP. I refactored every handler into React callback, no inline scripts, no errors, full compliance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Zero-to-production in 7 days A fully functional MVP, with live filters, venue signup, image upload, and subscription billing, built entirely by someone with zero prior coding experience.

Seamless end-to-end flows From “Choose your city” to “Reserve at your favorite bar,” every step works flawlessly on desktop and mobile.

Powered by community Real-time feedback from our X and Discord followers helped me refine pricing, and UX in record time.

What we learned

Community equals velocity: Early X feedback and collaboration helped me immensely

Shipping > perfection: Every iteration uncovered new edge cases, iterating rapidly with Bolt kept me ahead of spec drift.

Customer-first is king: Real users gave me feedback on analytics needs, pricing willingness, and some other things.

What's next for WatchUp

World Cup rollout: Leverage the upcoming WorldCup to onboard users and venues.

AI-powered recommendations: Leverage generative embeddings to suggest “bars you might like” based on your favorite teams and past check-ins.

B2B growth: Partner with local tourism boards to promote fan maps; upsell premium analytics dashboards for venue chains.

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