// work · case study
ONTOUR: a football platform built to be found
A social platform for football fans to organise and share match days. iOS and Android apps, a deep football data engine, and a public web presence that Google crawls 22,000 times a day.
ONTOUR Sports, a match-day social platform
Full build: product, mobile, backend, infrastructure, search
React Native · Node · MySQL · Redis · Next.js 15 · AWS
// the brief
Football fans plan match days in group chats and spreadsheets. ONTOUR needed three things at once: a mobile app fans would actually use, a data backbone with real football depth, and a web presence that could compete for search traffic against the biggest names in sports media, on a startup budget.
// what we built
The app
One app, built once, running on both iOS and Android. Live match feeds, stories, groups, achievements and a paid membership tier. We also built ONTOUR its own update channel, so a fix reaches everyone's phone the same day instead of waiting a week for app-store approval.
The data engine
A football database covering more than 30 competitions across 10 countries, filled in match by match with lineups, ratings, events and stats. Thousands of fixtures a season, updated automatically, and built so that a live match always gets served first when data is being pulled in.
The search platform
Every fixture, team and league in that database becomes its own page on the web, automatically. More than 12,000 of them, each one fast, each one built to be understood by Google and by AI assistants, and each one showing live data rather than a snapshot someone has to remember to update.
The search platform is live at ontourfootball.com, from fixtures and league tables to a full results archive.
// the moment it got real
22,000 crawls a day
Weeks after the search platform went live, Google started crawling it 22,000 times a day. 137,000 visits in a single quarter, each one asking the platform to build a page from scratch. Being found that fast is a stress test nobody schedules, and most teams only discover their limits when customers start complaining.
We found ours first, in the logs, and fixed it before a single user noticed anything. The same volume of traffic now barely registers. Pages come back faster, Google gets through more of the site on every visit, and the app stays quick for real people no matter what the crawlers are doing.
That is the part worth knowing if you are choosing who builds something for you. Launching is the easy half. What decides whether it survives is whether anyone is still watching once it starts working.
// details that matter
Search-first engineering
The pages are written to match what people actually search for, and organised so Google can reach all 12,000 of them rather than finding a few and giving up.
AI-search ready
Built for a web where a lot of answers now come from ChatGPT and Google's AI summaries rather than a list of links. The data on every page is laid out so those systems can read it and quote it.
Operational maturity
It tells us when something breaks before a user does, keeps a record we can trace a problem back through, and ships updates to three separate codebases without drama.
A platform is only as good as its ability to be found, and to stay up once it is. ONTOUR got both.
Fulcrum designs and builds products end to end, from mobile apps to the infrastructure and search platforms behind them.
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