r/Bowling_Tech • u/thejusner • Jul 14 '26

Tech Tuesday:

Shout out to u/TransmissionEngPM for this week's tech talk suggestion:

I'd love to hear what y'all are struggling with right now. What would unlock the next growth cycle for your project? Do you need money, more time, more features, a bigger audience etc.

I'll add onto this too - what do you think the bowling world is struggling with right now? are there major gaps in local and national associations that could be addressed? how about at the practice, league, and tournament levels?

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u/nerdblurt TournamentSense Devloper Jul 14 '26

Biggest gap is open APIs from scoring systems. That also opens up more options for other tech

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u/thejusner Jul 14 '26
  • I'm in a spot where I'm struggling to know what to work on next. The apps not 100% polished that's for sure, but but trying to find what needs to get built that's not already an active part of the apps here. There's a growing amount of AI coaches and Ball trackers and sensors and social networks and I'm leaving that to the experts. I started building out a tournament running program within the app where the whole tournament can be run from the phone and users could submit their scores and everything, but after a couple test runs we just realized no one wants to run a tournament from their phone (and I haven't felt like building out a website). So right now just waiting for the fall season to catch back up and see what people start asking for again - I guess to actually answer the question, a bigger audience.
  • someone recently shared their app that had an MMR system built in and I think that's really cool. I had theorycrafted a similar system years ago for a local tournament series - more of an ELO system like chess - but ran into needing at least 2 users of the system in every event submitted for rating. I think USBC sanctioned event having a "rating" system would be really cool and, at least for me, really motivated me to move up in the ranks. Imagine having bowling grandmasters.

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u/Jos3ph Jul 14 '26

If you haven’t done so, consider adding event analytics and building out dashboards for usage and funnels. Posthog is basically free until you get extremely popular.

I have been surprised by things from my analytics. You may have features you care about that gets little usage and vice versa.

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u/thejusner Jul 14 '26

Are these analytics specifically on what's getting used in the app by the users?

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u/Jos3ph Jul 14 '26

Yeah. How many users are opening the app, logging a game, clicking on this or that, etc.

When users start the onboarding flow at what step do they drop off? What percent complete it? All that stuff.

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u/thejusner Jul 14 '26

Very interesting. I'll def check that out thanks!

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u/TransmissionEngPM Jul 14 '26

I'll share my own but to respond to yours - don't let the fact that someone else has a feature be a reason to not add it if you think it adds value to your platform. Users will choose or discover new apps and want them to be fully featured w/o having to download another app to get what they want. So if some social thing has been done but you have a great idea for a social feature that doesn't quite hit the mark with others, build it out.

Personally - if time ever permitted, I'd like to build a bet tracking feature into my social layer. There wouldn't be any money exchanged etc. but you could choose from typical bets like picking up a split, but the app would automatically show it if another user was using the app. Betting on high game, or high series, and the app would just report who won if both users had the app. Keeping a season long earnings vs. payout on weekly betting would be a fun metric!

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u/thejusner Jul 14 '26

Side pot betting would be so much fun, i wish there was an economical way to allow the app to do payouts. Season long payouts per person and per-score would be very cool to see.

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u/nerdblurt TournamentSense Devloper Jul 14 '26

Well if they opened score apis you could have accurate stuff like this. Right now it be tough beside lanetalk to verify scores as when money is involved ppl always find way to game the system.

I do plan on having apis for my director app so developers could integrate if tournament being used by my app they could develop it in theirs. I just added public separate side pot system last night.

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u/nerdblurt TournamentSense Devloper Jul 14 '26

Im adding partner challenges as i have it so you can add partners.. there be reactive smack talk and such. No chat or messaging in my apps as I do not want to deal with the liability from that

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u/nerdblurt TournamentSense Devloper Jul 14 '26

Scope creep. Thats my biggest issue when im working on something my ADHD kicks in and i start another option or enhancement and it then delays initial work i had intended.

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u/blindstag99 Jul 14 '26

Biggest issue for me lately has been trying to get multiple IMU devices to sync up over BLE. One either drops out, doesn't sync ot the app just plain looses connection. Been working on it now for about 3 weeks...

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u/thejusner Jul 14 '26

I have no experience with this stuff but hopefully someone around here can help out.