Cricket Allrounder: thousands of downloads in three months

The problem

Cricket Allrounder wanted to put professional coaching in reach of anyone with a phone: video lessons from players like Chris Gayle and Jimmy Anderson, alongside 80-plus skill challenges people could actually practise against, not just watch. The brief also asked for social sharing, a global leaderboard, and AI moderation of whatever players uploaded to keep the platform safe — a genuinely wide product for what started as a small team.

Building for an audience that hasn't shown up yet

The hard part of a product like this is the plumbing: building it before you know how many people are actually going to turn up. The coaching content is the easy bit. We built the backend on Django with an event-driven architecture that copes equally well with a slow trickle of early adopters or a spike from a video going round a WhatsApp group, and put AWS Rekognition's AI in front of every upload, so video moderation didn't depend on someone being awake at 2am.

The leaderboard updates in real time, globally, so a player who moves up the rankings this afternoon sees it happen this afternoon, not the next day.

What players get

Coaching from professional players, 80-plus challenges pitched at every skill level, a social feed for sharing training video, and a leaderboard worth competing on — every uploaded video screened by AI moderation, so the community stays usable without anyone policing it by hand.

What happened

Thousands of downloads in the first three months, with retention that held rather than the usual post-launch cliff edge. A social feed that's actually used, not just built.

Why it worked

We treated the leaderboard and the moderation as core product, not afterthoughts bolted on before launch. That's usually where apps like this fall over — not the coaching content, which is easy to get right, but the systems around it that only get properly exercised once real people show up.