Consumer
CatchBuddy
Same-day pickup sports, safety first
By Hiram BarskyFounder & Principal Designer
Role
Product Design · Full-stack
Timeframe
2025-2026
Published
August 2026
Outcome
Shipped
Built with
Lovable, Supabase · Figma Design · Claude Code · Netlify
The result
Live at catchbuddy.fit: post a game or browse open ones in under a minute, across six sports. Verified profiles, public meeting spots and post-game ratings are part of the join flow, not a settings screen you’d never open.
Overview
CatchBuddy answers a simple, time-boxed want — "I feel like playing basketball right now" — with a same-day pickup game nearby. Because playing with strangers is the whole premise, safety isn’t a settings tab here. It’s designed into the first tap.
The problem
Finding a spontaneous game means group chats, stale posts and guesswork. Even when you find one, you’re meeting strangers in a park. Most people don’t stop playing sports because they stopped loving them. They stop because showing up got complicated enough to talk yourself out of.
The approach
- 1
Built discovery around the only two things that matter at 4pm: what’s near me, and what starts soon. Everything else is a filter, not a first screen.
- 2
Layered trust into the flow rather than a settings page — verified profiles, public meeting spots, parental controls for younger players, and a rating after you play.
- 3
Kept joining to one confident tap. Every extra step is another chance to talk yourself out of going.
Our thought process
The instinct with a two-sided app is to chase supply first and add safety later, once there’s something to protect. That gets the order wrong. Nobody joins a stranger’s game because the feed is full; they join because the profile in front of them looks accountable. So trust went in first, where it’s visible at the moment of doubt.
What didn’t work
The first pass buried verification and reporting in a profile settings area, which is where every app puts them and where nobody reads them. It tested as reassuring to exactly the people who were already comfortable. Moving those signals up into the game card and the join step is what made them count.
The outcome
A shipped consumer app where trust design does the quiet work that turns "I feel like playing" into actually showing up — live at catchbuddy.fit, designed and built end to end.
What this means for your project
Any product where a stranger has to trust another stranger runs on this. Marketplaces, community apps, anything two-sided. We put the trust signals where the hesitation actually happens — at the join, not buried in settings. Cautious users then commit instead of drifting away.
“His ability to translate complex user requirements into intuitive, visually appealing designs sets him apart. His work consistently garnered positive feedback from colleagues and stakeholders alike.”
