ReelRoster — Paste Your Match Video, Get 5 Shareable Highlight Clips for Every Player in 10 Minutes
Amateur sports leagues film every match but the footage dies on someone's iPhone. ReelRoster takes your game video, auto-detects key moments using timestamp cues you mark in 60 seconds, and exports per-player highlight reels ready to share on Instagram. Your players finally get the highlight clips they have been begging for since 2019.
Difficulty
beginner
Category
Creator Tool
Market Demand
High
Revenue Score
7/10
Platform
Web App
Vibe Code Friendly
No
Hackathon Score
🏆 7/10
What is it?
Amateur and semi-pro sports clubs film matches routinely but the footage is almost universally unwatched because clipping individual player highlights requires video editing skills nobody on the team has time for. Players want shareable clips for their Instagram and recruitment profiles. Coaches want to post to the club social account. The current workflow is either nothing, or a volunteer spending 3 hours in iMovie. ReelRoster provides a web-based tool where a coach uploads a match video, marks 10-15 timestamp cues with a player name and action type in a simple table, and the system uses FFmpeg to extract clips, adds the club's branded intro bumper, and exports per-player ZIP files ready to distribute. No AI video generation — just smart FFmpeg automation with a clean timestamp-driven UI. Buildable in one week. FFmpeg is stable, Cloudflare R2 handles video storage affordably, and the clip extraction logic is pure server-side automation requiring no ML.
Why now?
The June 2026 explosion of short-form sports content on Instagram Reels and TikTok has created a genuine demand from grassroots clubs who see professional teams posting highlight clips daily but lack any affordable tool to replicate it with their iPhone footage.
- ▸Video upload with server-side FFmpeg clip extraction — mark a timestamp, player name, and action type, get a trimmed clip (Implementation note: fluent-ffmpeg child_process on Vercel serverless or Railway worker)
- ▸Branded bumper overlay — upload club logo and color, auto-added to clip start and end
- ▸Per-player ZIP export — all clips grouped by player, downloadable in one click
- ▸Match archive — past matches stored in Cloudflare R2 with clip history browsable by player
Target Audience
Amateur football, basketball, and volleyball club coaches and social media managers — est. 200,000 grassroots clubs across UK, Spain, Brazil, and USA
Example Use Case
Coach Marco runs a semi-pro futsal team in Valencia. He uploads Saturday's match video, spends 4 minutes marking 12 timestamp cues, and downloads a ZIP with 8 per-player highlight clips that he shares in the team WhatsApp group — 11 players post to Instagram by Sunday night.
User Stories
- ▸As an amateur football coach, I want to mark timestamp cues in a simple table and get per-player clips automatically, so that I stop spending Sunday evenings in iMovie.
- ▸As a club social media manager, I want every clip to automatically include our club logo bumper, so that our Instagram posts look professional without a designer.
- ▸As a player, I want to receive a download link for my personal highlight clips after every match, so that I can post to Instagram and build my recruitment profile.
Done When
- ✓Video upload: done when coach uploads a video under 500MB and sees a progress bar that completes and transitions to the timestamp editor without page refresh.
- ✓Clip extraction: done when coach submits 5 timestamps and receives a download ZIP containing 5 correctly trimmed video clips within 10 minutes.
- ✓Branded bumper: done when extracted clips each begin with the uploaded club logo displayed for 2 seconds over the club's chosen color background.
- ✓Per-player grouping: done when the downloaded ZIP contains subfolders named after each player with their respective clips inside.
Is it worth building?
$29/month x 100 clubs = $2,900 MRR at month 3. $9 per-match pay-as-you-go for clubs playing 2 matches per week = additional $1,800/month from 100 casual users. Assumes 5% conversion from 2,000 cold outreach DMs to club Instagram accounts.
Unit Economics
CAC: $15 via Instagram DM outreach. LTV: $348 (12 months at $29/month). Payback: 0.6 months. Gross margin: 84%.
Business Model
Pay per match plus SaaS subscription
Monetization Path
$9 per match pay-as-you-go. $29/month for 8 matches. $79/month for unlimited matches plus white-label bumper.
Revenue Timeline
First dollar: week 2 via pay-per-match. $1k MRR: month 3. $5k MRR: month 8.
Estimated Monthly Cost
Cloudflare R2: $30 (storage and egress at launch), Vercel or Railway: $25, Supabase: $25, Resend: $10. Total: ~$90/month at launch.
Profit Potential
Solid side income at $3k–$5k MRR. Niche is underserved and distribution via club Instagram communities is fast.
Scalability
High — team plans, referee highlight packages, recruitment profile builder, integration with club management SaaS.
Success Metrics
Week 2: 5 clubs using free tier. Month 2: 30 paying. Month 4: 75 paying clubs.
Launch & Validation Plan
DM 30 amateur football club Instagram accounts offering free first match clip extraction, collect emails, iterate on timestamp editor UX.
Customer Acquisition Strategy
First customer: DM 30 amateur football club Instagram accounts in the UK and Spain with a short video showing the before/after clip quality — offer first match free. Ongoing: TikTok content showing highlight clip outputs, Reddit r/soccercoaching and r/basketballcoaching, Facebook amateur sports admin groups.
What's the competition?
Competition Level
Low
Similar Products
Veo and Hudl are professional-tier with $1,000+ hardware requirements — inaccessible to amateur clubs. CapCut handles editing but requires skill and has no per-player export logic. ReelRoster fills the zero-skill, zero-hardware gap between phone footage and shareable player clips.
Competitive Advantage
Only per-player highlight export tool built for coaches with zero video editing skills — competitors like Veo require a $2,000 hardware camera. ReelRoster works with any iPhone footage.
Regulatory Risks
Low regulatory risk. Video content featuring minors in youth leagues requires clubs to confirm parental consent before upload — add a consent checkbox to onboarding. GDPR: video files must be deletable on request.
What's the roadmap?
Feature Roadmap
V1 (launch): video upload, timestamp editor, FFmpeg clip extraction, branded bumper, per-player ZIP. V2 (month 2-3): player roster management, season clip archive, bulk share via WhatsApp. V3 (month 4+): automatic moment detection via CV, social media auto-posting, recruitment profile builder.
Milestone Plan
Phase 1 (Week 1): FFmpeg pipeline, timestamp editor, and R2 upload working end-to-end with one test video. Phase 2 (Week 2): branded bumper, per-player ZIP, Stripe billing, 5 beta clubs. Phase 3 (Month 2): 25 paying clubs, player roster feature shipped.
How do you build it?
Tech Stack
Next.js, FFmpeg via ffmpeg.wasm or server-side Node child_process, Cloudflare R2 for video storage, Supabase, Resend — build with Cursor for FFmpeg pipeline, v0 for the timestamp editor UI
Suggested Frameworks
fluent-ffmpeg, Cloudflare R2 SDK, Supabase JS
Time to Ship
1 week
Required Skills
FFmpeg, file upload handling, Cloudflare R2, Next.js API routes.
Resources
fluent-ffmpeg npm docs, Cloudflare R2 quickstart, Next.js file upload patterns.
MVP Scope
app/page.tsx (upload + timestamp editor), app/api/upload/route.ts (Cloudflare R2 presigned upload), app/api/process/route.ts (FFmpeg clip extraction job), app/api/matches/route.ts (match CRUD), lib/db/schema.ts (clubs, matches, timestamps, clips), lib/ffmpeg.ts (fluent-ffmpeg clip extraction), lib/r2.ts (Cloudflare R2 client), components/TimestampEditor.tsx (table UI for marking cues), .env.example, seed.ts (demo match with 5 pre-loaded timestamps)
Core User Journey
Upload match video -> mark 10 timestamps with player names -> submit -> download per-player ZIP in under 10 minutes -> share to team WhatsApp.
Architecture Pattern
Coach uploads video to Cloudflare R2 via presigned URL -> timestamp table submitted -> Railway worker runs fluent-ffmpeg to extract clips -> clips written back to R2 -> per-player ZIPs generated -> download links emailed via Resend.
Data Model
Club has many Matches. Match has many Timestamps. Timestamp belongs to Player and generates one Clip. Clip stored in Cloudflare R2 with download URL in Supabase.
Integration Points
Cloudflare R2 for video storage, fluent-ffmpeg for clip extraction, Supabase for match and clip metadata, Resend for download link email, Stripe for pay-per-match and subscription billing.
V1 Scope Boundaries
V1 excludes: automatic moment detection (AI), live stream clipping, mobile app, team roster management, social media auto-posting.
Success Definition
A paying coach uploads a real match video, marks timestamps, downloads per-player ZIPs, and shares clips with the team — all without contacting the founder.
Challenges
Video file size and FFmpeg processing time on serverless is the hardest technical constraint — 90-minute match files are 4-8GB. Must enforce a 20-minute highlight reel upload cap at V1 or offload processing to a Railway worker. Distribution is the real bottleneck — finding 100 clubs requires outreach to club Instagram accounts, not ProductHunt.
Avoid These Pitfalls
Do not allow full 90-minute raw video uploads at V1 — enforce a 20-minute max or processing will time out on serverless. Do not skip the branded bumper feature — it is the perceived value anchor that justifies $29/month over free tools. Finding the first 10 paying clubs will take longer than building the product — budget 3x more time on Instagram DM outreach than on FFmpeg optimization.
Security Requirements
Supabase Auth with Google OAuth, RLS on club data, Cloudflare R2 presigned URLs expire in 1 hour, file type validation (video/mp4 only), GDPR: video deletion endpoint and consent checkbox for youth league content.
Infrastructure Plan
Vercel for Next.js frontend, Railway for FFmpeg processing worker (needs persistent process), Cloudflare R2 for video and clip storage, Supabase for metadata, Sentry for errors, GitHub Actions CI.
Performance Targets
50 match uploads/day at launch, FFmpeg clip extraction under 8 minutes for 20-minute source video, download link email delivered within 1 minute of job completion, R2 presigned download URL loads clip in under 3s.
Go-Live Checklist
- ☐Security audit complete.
- ☐Payment flow tested end-to-end.
- ☐FFmpeg worker stress-tested with 500MB file.
- ☐Error tracking live.
- ☐Custom domain with SSL.
- ☐Privacy policy and consent terms published.
- ☐5 beta clubs signed off.
- ☐Rollback plan documented.
- ☐Launch post ready for Instagram DM campaign and r/soccercoaching.
First Run Experience
On first run: a demo match is pre-loaded with a 3-minute sample video and 5 pre-filled timestamp rows showing player names and action types. User can click Process and download a sample per-player ZIP immediately. No manual config required: demo mode runs with a bundled sample video stored in R2 under a public read key.
How to build it, step by step
1. Define lib/db/schema.ts with clubs, matches, players, timestamps, clips tables. 2. Run npx create-next-app reelroster with TypeScript. 3. Build Cloudflare R2 presigned upload flow in app/api/upload/route.ts with 500MB file size limit. 4. Build TimestampEditor.tsx component with v0 — a table where coach enters start_time, end_time, player_name, and action_type. 5. Build lib/ffmpeg.ts using fluent-ffmpeg to extract clips from R2 video URL for each timestamp row. 6. Build app/api/process/route.ts that queues FFmpeg jobs via a Railway background worker. 7. Build branded bumper overlay logic in lib/ffmpeg.ts using FFmpeg drawtext and image overlay filters. 8. Build per-player ZIP generation and R2 upload, then Resend email with download link. 9. Add Supabase Auth and Stripe pay-per-match checkout plus $29/month subscription. 10. Deploy to Vercel and Railway, upload a real 10-minute test video, mark 5 timestamps, and verify per-player ZIP downloads correctly end-to-end.
Generated
June 14, 2026
Model
claude-sonnet-4-6
Disclaimer: Ideas on this site are AI-generated and may contain inaccuracies. Revenue estimates, market demand figures, and financial projections are illustrative assumptions only — not financial advice. Do your own research before making any business or investment decisions. Technology availability, pricing, and market conditions change rapidly; always verify details independently.