Sports · SaaS · In-house product
Underlap — a tactics board with real players in it
Our own product, built to prove the pitch: a football tactics board with real Premier League squads, real player numbers, and one-click export. PRD to production in ten days, live at theunderlap.io.
The problem.
Independent football analysts are stuck between two kinds of tool: free ones that look amateur, and professional ones priced for clubs. Nothing in between lets someone place real, current players into real shapes and back the argument with data.
01
Free tools look improvised. Paint, Keynote, and generic tactics apps produce graphics that undercut a serious argument before anyone reads it.
02
Professional tools are inaccessible. Wyscout and StatsBomb price for club budgets, not for someone publishing weekly analysis on their own.
03
Squad friction kills output. Typing eleven player names into a board, every week, is exactly the kind of friction that ends a publishing habit.
04
Consistent output is the whole game. An analyst's track record is built by publishing every week — so the tool's real job is speed.
Our approach.
- 01
Scope it like a client project.
Before any code, we wrote a full PRD: problem statement, goals with measurable exit criteria, explicit non-goals (no simulation, no live match data, no video), and a phased build sequence. Being our own client didn't earn us a shortcut past the process we sell.
- 02
Build the board first.
An SVG pitch with correct proportions in both orientations, formation presets, and markers you drag with native pointer events — no drag library, no re-render per pixel. Arrows for runs and presses, shaded zones, and board notes carry the argument, not just the lineup.
- 03
Put real data in it.
Squad and stat data for all 20 Premier League clubs is ingested from API-Football into our own Postgres on scheduled crons — the app never calls the provider at request time. Player cards show minutes, appearances, and position-aware metrics, each stamped with how fresh the data is.
- 04
Ship it as a product.
Server-side PNG export in both 16:9 and 4:5, accounts with Auth.js, tier gating with Flutterwave billing, and a marketing page with an early-access waitlist — live at theunderlap.io on Vercel.
What shipped.
A live product at theunderlap.io.
Landing page, board editor, saved boards, accounts, and billing — running in production.
A data pipeline, not an API wrapper.
Scheduled ingestion of every Premier League squad into our own database, with data freshness shown on every stat card.
One-click publishable graphics.
Boards render server-side at 16:9 and 4:5, so an exported graphic looks the same on every device — no screenshotting, no cropping.
Proof of the pitch.
An end-to-end custom product — strategy, design, build, launch — under the Prodix brand. We ship, full stop.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Prisma + Postgres
- Auth.js
- API-Football
- Flutterwave
- Vercel
Screens.
Results.
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Results pending
Add once confirmed with the client.
Let's build it.
Tell us what you're trying to launch. We'll reply within one business day with an honest read — including whether you actually need us yet.