Hey everyone,

Apologies for the delay on an update. Today I have some exciting news! I’ve made great progress on the backend admin portal that will be used to help manage the Crowd Card app - I’m calling it “Mission Control.” At the moment, Mission Control is in its MVP stages and is being tested in a sandbox environment. The most critical component of Mission Control - at least for now - is the Event Manager (described in more detail below), which is used to create and manage events that will appear on the user-facing app. The Event Manager has been roughly tested over the last few weeks using dummy data, but this weekend I will be testing it “live” during Saturday’s UFC card.

I am really excited to see how the test goes and will almost certainly be adding to-do items for Mission Control’s roadmap after the event. For now, I will walk through the three most critical components of Mission Control and describe why I built them.

Event Management

This is currently the most critical component of Mission Control. Here, I can create events (e.g., a UFC card) and add sub-events to each event (e.g., a specific fight on the UFC card). Each sub-event is then populated with micro-events, which represent judgeable instances (e.g., an individual round in a fight). That is the general structure of events on the app: Event → Sub-Events → Micro-Events, where each event can have many sub-events and each sub-event can have many micro-events.

Once an Event is created in Mission Control, it will show up in the app. From Mission Control, I can manually toggle whether an event, sub-event, and micro-event is “open” for judging. For example, as a round in a fight ends, I can open judging for that round (when this happens, users should receive a time-sensitive notification about judging) and as the next round begins, I can close judging (the exact time window for this is TBD). The long term goal for this will be to move away from a manual toggle and toward more of an automated, API-driven approach.

I’m sure Event Manager will evolve over time, but for now, it seems to be working well as an MVP. I look forward to testing it this weekend!

Automated Score Aggregation

Crowd Card exists not only to allow individual app users to score events (and share their own scores across their socials), but also to aggregate scores from (hopefully) thousands of app users to see, on net, how the event was judged. That’s why we’re called Crowd Card - we’re the aggregate scorecard of the crowd. As app users score an event, Mission Control will be aggregating scores from all users and will generate an output that we will share to our own socials and push to the app for all users to see.

Business Intelligence

I’m a data analyst by day, so I know the importance of data. Mission Control will be used to assess, among other things, growth and user engagement on the Crowd Card app. While this exists in a very basic form today (e.g., basic user counts, daily, weekly, and monthly active users, etc.), I plan to build this out as a critical component of Mission Control.

Mission Control, a brief tour

Here are a few screenshots from Mission Control, as it looks today.

Creating an event…

Viewing Live, Upcoming, and Past events…

Viewing “sub-events” on each event…

Other Development Updates

Here are a few additional updates on development:

iOS: The Mission Control MVP has taken a few weeks longer than I anticipated, but as I wrap this up and begin testing it on live events, my focus will shift toward iOS development. I already have many of the user flows mocked up in Figma and am now starting to actually develop the Crowd Card app. I cannot tell you how excited I am to start this process!
Main website: The ‘About’ page is now live on the website! Check it out and let me know what you think.
Media updates: The blogs continue to roll out…still on the fence about vlogs (see previous blog posts to find out why). Some exciting news on marketing - I designed my first ad and will be posting it across social accounts soon! Be sure to follow and keep an eye out on X and Instagram! I appreciate all of your support!

Coming Up

We have a few solid fight cards coming up! As mentioned above, I am testing the Mission Control MVP in sandbox this weekend and then looking into pushing it into a production environment while I shift my focus toward developing the iOS app. Exciting things ahead!

Okay back to work - thanks for reading.

Written by Daniel Kuhman, Founder

Business update 006: Mission Control