How we turned last night's match into today’s storytime

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only parent who has had a conversation about staying up late to watch the football this week.

I'm not sure we can fully solve that one. But realising that these were conversations happening all over the country did prompt us to get to work last week building something that, hopefully, will help big football fans who are little (and kids who don't want to feel left out at school!) keep up to date with the World Cup.

Let me explain. It's called Catch Up on the Match, and it does exactly what it says: while the biggest fans (who also happen to be the littlest) are fast asleep, Tandem pulls in the day's match reports, and by morning your child can read their very own story about the game they slept through. Pitched at exactly their reading level. Personalised to them. A stats sheet if they want the numbers, a poem if they want something sillier.

It launched this week, and I wanted to write a bit about how it actually came together, because it was a mad rush and I think the messy bits are the interesting bits.

It was harder than it sounds (it always is)

The idea is simple. The build was not.

The first problem was just getting the facts. You'd think live football data would be the easy part, but finding open, reliable sources for match reports and stats that we were comfortable building on top of took longer than any of us expected. Sports data is a patchwork. Some of it is great, some of it is wrong, some of it disagrees with itself depending on where you look. We spent a surprising amount of time just working out what we could trust.

Then there was the pipeline. It's one thing to grab a match report. It's another to get that information, cleaned and checked, into our book engine automatically, every night, in time for breakfast. We had to build something that runs while we're all asleep and is ready before the first "can I read about the match?" of the morning.

And the part we obsessed over most: getting the facts right. This is where it gets hard, and where we were not willing to cut corners. A grown-up reading a slightly garbled match summary will roll their eyes and move on. A child reading their first stories about the sport they love and the match they missed deserves better than that. So the options that go into a child's book are QA'd by robots and humans.

Why we bothered

Two things make this feature, for me, a little distillation of why Tandem exists at all.

The first is fun. Not fun in a vague, marketing sense, but fun for both the adult and the child at the same time. So much of what's built for kids is built to occupy them so the adult can do something else. Catch Up on the Match is the opposite. My kids want to talk about the game. I want to talk about the game. Now there's a book that gives us both a reason to sit down together and do exactly that. There's no better feeling than your child asking to read with you, about something you’re both interested and engaged in.

The second is that this is something a normal book simply cannot do. A printed book is a wonderful, finished thing. But it can't know that England played last night, or that your daughter is exactly the reader she is this week, or that she wants the version with the dramatic last-minute winner spelled out in big, readable sentences. This is the bit that excites me about thoughtful technology in shared reading. Not screens for the sake of screens, but tech doing something that the old tools, for all their magic, were never able to do. A book about last night's match, written for your child, ready this morning. That's new.

What's next

Match reports go up nightly throughout the World Cup, so every fan can wake up to their own story. And for the truly great stories about the biggest games, you can order a one-off, hardback paper printed copy to keep too.  

The match is just the start. Catch Up on the Match is the first piece of a much bigger effort for us: thoughtfully bringing more near real-time, topical, relevant content into Tandem, so that the things going on in your child's world become easy, fun reasons to sit down and connect. The World Cup is a brilliant test case, but it's really the tip of the iceberg. There's much more coming.

So if your kids are football mad, but maybe they – or you – aren’t always inspired by the books you have to hand, give Tandem a go this weekend.  

As ever, if you've got thoughts, we'd love to hear them. We're building this carefully, but in a rush, on purpose, while the tournament is on, and the feedback from families is what makes the next version better.

Rob, CEO and Co-Founder of Tandem