Be Seen Be Scouted
A UK youth football scouting platform taken from a sketch on a piece of paper to a live, AI-integrated, safeguarded production product. Custom brand, custom build, custom AI, and a safeguarding model strict enough that no scout ever has direct access to a child.
beseenbescouted.com. Connecting grassroots talent with verified professional scouts.
A real problem in grassroots football, and a category nobody had built properly.
UK youth football has thousands of talented players whose route to a professional academy depends almost entirely on whether the right person happens to see them play. Scouting at grassroots level is patchy, geographically biased, and shaped by who knows whom. Talented kids in the wrong county, the wrong league, or the wrong club go unseen. Parents have no idea how to get their child in front of the people who matter, and the few platforms that have tried to solve this have either treated children as marketable products or ignored safeguarding almost entirely.
The brief from the client, Ollie Parker, was uncompromising and arrived as an idea on a piece of paper. Build a platform that connects grassroots players with verified professional scouts, powered by modern AI to make discovery actually work, and put safeguarding at the absolute centre of every decision. No direct contact between scouts and children, ever. Every scout DBS-verified before they see a single profile. Every contact request routed through the parent.
There was no design, no brand, no domain strategy, no technical scope, and no working product. There was a vision and a founder who refused to compromise on the safeguarding principle. Everything else needed to be built from scratch.
Strategy and architecture before a single pixel.
We started by mapping the three sides of the marketplace in detail: what parents need from a player profile, what scouts need from a search experience, and what administrators need to keep the platform safe and trustworthy. Every feature that followed was traced back to one of those three jobs.
The safeguarding model was designed first, before any user interface work. The principle is simple to state and hard to engineer: a scout can see a player profile, but a scout can never see a child, never message a child, and never obtain contact details for a child. Every scout request flows to the parent, the parent decides, and the platform logs everything.
Brand and design that earns trust on first impression
Youth sport platforms live or die on whether a parent feels safe within ten seconds of landing on the homepage. The brand was built around clarity, calm confidence, and a visual system that signals “this is a serious safeguarded service” rather than “this is a flashy startup.” Logo, colour palette, typography, photography direction, and tone of voice were all developed in-house and applied consistently across the website, the web app, the email system, and the marketing surfaces.
Full-stack web application, built for scale from day one
The platform is a custom React, TypeScript, and Vite client paired with a Node, Express, and TypeScript server, backed by PostgreSQL on Railway. Stripe handles payments using lookup keys so price configuration lives in code. Mux handles video uploads and playback. Cloudflare R2 stores images persistently across deploys. Resend handles transactional and marketing email. Server-side SEO meta injection ensures every public page is indexable, and code-split lazy loading keeps the experience fast on a parent's phone in a car park between sessions.
AI integrated where it actually helps, not where it looks impressive
Anthropic Claude is used in three places, each chosen because it removes a real point of friction. Parents get an AI-powered bio writer and profile tips that turn a blank text box into a credible player profile in minutes. Scouts get a natural language search that lets them describe the player they are looking for in plain English instead of hammering filters. And every page has a contextual help assistant that knows what the user is currently doing and can answer questions in context. The AI is always assistive, never autonomous, never in contact with children, and never making safeguarding decisions on its own.
Three distinct experiences, one coherent platform
Parents get profile creation, view insights, and a managed inbox of contact requests. Scouts get search, shortlisting, side-by-side comparison, and a safeguarded flow for requesting contact. Administrators get a verification queue for DBS-checked scouts, user management, an analytics dashboard, an AI-assisted blog system with auto-generated tags and cover images, targeted email campaign tools, a referral system, testimonial moderation, and a full audit log of every admin action. Three roles, three interfaces, three sets of permissions, all built on the same foundation.
Production-grade safety and reliability
Two-factor authentication on every account. Automated DBS expiry reminders at 90, 60, and 30 days so no scout slips out of compliance unnoticed. Quick-start onboarding guides for every role. Upgrade prompts and tier gating built consistently across the app. A real-time notification bell. Mobile-responsive card layouts that work on the phone a parent actually has in their hand on a Saturday morning.
From a sketch on paper to a live, safeguarded, AI-integrated marketplace.
Be Seen Be Scouted launched as a complete product covering parents, scouts, and administrators on a single platform, with AI integrated into the three places it adds the most value, and safeguarding built into every single workflow rather than bolted on at the end.
The safeguarding model is the platform's defining feature and its strongest moat. Every scout is DBS-verified before they see a profile. Every contact request flows through the parent. Every admin action is logged. The system makes the safest path the easiest path, which is the only safeguarding model that survives contact with reality.
The brand, the website, the web application, the AI features, the payment system, the storage layer, the email system, and the SEO foundation were all delivered as one coherent build by one studio working directly with one founder. No agency ping-pong, no integration hell, no stack of disconnected SaaS subscriptions held together with hope.
“Be Seen Be Scouted is the clearest example of what we mean when we say we build complete products, not features. Ollie came to us with an idea on a piece of paper and a non-negotiable principle about child safety. We built him a brand, a website, a web application, an AI layer, a payment system, an admin platform, and an SEO foundation, and we built them so they pull in the same direction from day one. If your business depends on getting something serious right, and you do not want to spend the next two years stitching together vendors who do not talk to each other, this is the way to build.”
If you have a real idea, a real principle you refuse to compromise on, and a real need to ship a product that works on day one and scales from there, this is the pattern we build to.
Most engagements start with a conversation.
Tell me what you’re working on and I’ll suggest the clearest path forward. No obligation, no hard sell.