Steal this idea: FootballGPT, an AI assistant for the people you already teach

FootballGPT is an AI assistant for football (soccer) coaches. You tell it your age group, your number of players and your space, and it writes a session plan and draws an animated diagram of each practice.^[5] It was built by Kevin Middleton, a UEFA B licensed coach in Scotland who has coached since 2010 and says he is not a professional developer.^[6][3] He told a June 2026 audience he used Claude Code to build it.^[1]

You could take this as a story about building fast. We think the more useful part is the other half: Kevin didn't have to find coaches, because he already taught them. This page is about that pattern, what it has produced so far, and where it is thinner than the headline numbers make it look.

The pattern in one sentence

If you already serve a niche, build the assistant that answers its most repeated questions from sources you trust, remembers each person's context so they never retype it, gives a small free taste, charges for more, and uses the free pages you make along the way to bring in the next users.

What it has done so far

TrustMRR, which reads FootballGPT's revenue with a Stripe API key, showed $5,108 in monthly recurring revenue from 537 active subscriptions and $33,668 all-time on 5 November 2026. It lists the founding date as December 2025.^[13] That is the verified part. The sign-up counts are Kevin's and the site's own: 12,920 coaches signed up on 27 July, 19,025 on 14 October, and "20,000+ registered accounts" on the homepage, checked 29 October.^[3][4][5]

1. 14 Dec 2025

   The first date in FootballGPT's own activity records.^[8]

2. 30 Jan 2026

   Kevin: "Two months ago, I had zero live products. Today I have four", each started as a conversation with Claude Code (founder-reported).^[2]

3. 5 Jun 2026

   He publishes a talk walking through how he built it, the week version three launched, by his account.^[1]

4. 27 Jul 2026

   12,920 coaches signed up (founder-reported).^[3]

5. 15 Oct 2026

   19,025 coaches use it, per the FootballGPT account he quotes.^[4]

6. 29 Oct 2026

   Homepage says 20,000+ registered accounts, rounded down.^[5]

7. 5 Nov 2026

   TrustMRR: $5,108 MRR, 537 active subscriptions, $33,668 all-time.^[13]

Put the two kinds of number side by side and a rough picture appears. 537 paying subscriptions against 20,000+ accounts is at most about 2.7%, by our arithmetic. The dates differ and the site says the account figure is not a subscriber count, so treat it as a ballpark, not a conversion rate.^[13][5] The data page adds that 4,043 accounts used Coach mode, and that 44.7% of the messages it counted were Football Manager (the video game), against 47.5% in Coach mode.^[8] So part of the audience isn't coaches at all. The assistant found a second niche next to the first.

Why it works, in his words

He expected to be copied, and planned for it. In the talk he said other football apps had started to appear and he could replicate them "in half a day, a day. So there is no moat anymore." His answer was to give knowledge away freely and make the product about something a copy-cat can't grab quickly: the context and the sources.^[1]

A general chatbot doesn't know your players. His example: ask ChatGPT for session plans and you get generic ones, and it might suggest "tactical periodization with your under six players" because it doesn't know the age group, level or formation.^[1]

So the profile does the prompting for you. He teaches a prompt recipe (context, objective, numbers, tone, examples, what to exclude) and says FootballGPT does it automatically from a profile: the age group you coach, game format, favourite formation, years coaching and qualifications. For players it takes age and years played; for Football Manager players, the game version and the team they play as.^[1]

And he picked the library it reads from. He described controlling the "data layer": only verified sources, such as the FA's England DNA youth model, UEFA grassroots material, the FIFA Training Centre and US Soccer, plus material from several other national associations, with "no blogs", "no Reddit posts" and "no random opinions". They sit in his database, and the assistant is told to ignore everything else.^[1]

He calls the whole set of instructions a "pre-match team talk": act like an FA-qualified coach, use a development model for youth, prioritise fun, never recommend adult training for young players, and cite official sources.^[1]

The stack, as he described it

The audience and the free pages around the product

The audience was there first. The About page says Kevin has educated 10,000+ coaches across his coaching products and communities, and the 360TFT shop sells football coaching resources, lists a free Coach Education WhatsApp group, and has a "Grassroots Coaching Data Report 2026" and a "Football AI Skills Bundle" on its shelves.^[6][15] TrustMRR shows about 10.4K followers on X, and Shipped & Paid notes the app is built in partnership with the Football Coaching Academy and that he already had a large coaching audience.^[13][14] That head start is the part you can't copy by prompting; it's the part you can copy by already being useful to a group.

Free tools that stand alone. The Labs page lists free tools such as a session warm-up generator, a session audit and a "dogma detector", behind a Google sign-in with no card.^[10]

A data report others can cite. The data page publishes an 18-page "Grassroots Coaching Data Report 2026" from anonymised product activity, and asks readers to cite it as "360TFT (2026), FootballGPT Grassroots Coaching Data". It is unusually frank about what it can't show: generated practices are not delivered sessions, and its users are not all grassroots coaches.^[8][9]

Plain comparison pages. There is a "FootballGPT vs ChatGPT" page that says to use ChatGPT for everything else and FootballGPT for football work.^[11] The sitemap lists 625 URLs, and the TrustMRR listing says 40+ SEO pages drive organic traffic (founder's text). We can't see any traffic numbers, so we don't claim these pages work.^[12][13]

The price ladder

The pricing page shows: a free tier, a one-week Pro trial at $2.99 a week, Pro at $10.99 a month or $99 a year, a $19.99 a month "CoachOS" plan that also reads your own coaching documents and session reflections, a $4.99 a month Football Manager-only plan, and a $4.99 a month API add-on for using it inside Claude Desktop and other MCP tools. Club plans are quoted separately.^[7] The free tier has shrunk: in the June talk he called four questions a day "very generous", and the site now says one message a day.^[1][7]He explained the pressure himself: every question costs him an API call.^[1]

A second example: Drop Studio and the 60,000-seller community

Drop Studio runs the same play in a different niche. Kerry Egeler founded Shirt School, which his site calls a community of over 60,000 apparel sellers, and built a tool that makes t-shirt designs and lifestyle mockups on named blanks like Bella Canvas and Comfort Colors, replacing the Ideogram, Canva, Placeit, Midjourney and upscaler stack with one app from $14.99 a month.^[16] He describes himself as a non-coding marketer and says Claude Code builds all the new features.^[20]

All of Drop Studio's figures are Kerry's own posts, without payment-provider proof. What the two stories share is the order of events: a community first, the tool second, and a pitch written in that community's words ("It knows apparel so I don't have to train it", says a customer quoted on his page).^[16]

How to run it yourself

Most steps follow what Kevin and Kerry describe. Anything marked as ours, or a sentence that says so, is our own suggestion.

1. 1

   Pick the question people ask you at a specific moment

   For Kevin it is the blank page the night before training, which he says is why he built it.^[5] Write down the 10 questions you answer most often. The assistant is those, with memory.
2. 2

   Collect the sources you would trust, and only those

   Kevin loaded official federation material into his database and told the model to ignore the rest.^[1] Check the licence of anything you load; we haven't seen how he handled that.
3. 3

   Ask for context once, then reuse it

   A profile page (age group, level, format, qualifications) fed into every answer is what makes it beat a blank chat, on his argument.^[1]
4. 4

   Write the team-talk prompt like a rulebook

   Short rules about what a good answer must consider and must never do, as in his "pre-match team talk".^[1]
5. 5

   Build it with the cheapest boring stack

   Next.js, Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, Resend and Claude, the list he showed, and Claude Code to write it.^[1]
6. 6

   Give a small free taste, then a low-priced way in

   A free tier, a one-week plan, then monthly and annual.^[7] Decide your free limit from your per-question cost, not from what feels generous.
7. 7

   Publish something useful that isn’t the product (our suggestion)

   Kevin's Labs tools and data report do this job.^[10][8] A free calculator or checklist your niche would share is the cheapest way in.
8. 8

   Write an honest comparison page (our suggestion)

   His ChatGPT page concedes where ChatGPT is better, which is what makes it believable.^[11]
9. 9

   Count your users carefully (our suggestion)

   His methodology page says how accounts are counted and what they are not.^[9] Do that before you put a number on your homepage.

Gotchas before you copy it

• You need a niche audience, or a way to build one. Shipped & Paid notes Kevin's head start and that his follower count is an October 2026 figure, not a pre-launch one.^[14] A great assistant with no one to tell about it won't get far.
• Every free question has a price. About $300 a month in June, at a much larger free tier than today's.^[1][7]
• Registered is not paying. About 537 paid subscriptions against 20,000+ accounts.^[13][5]
• Generic chat is the competition, and it's free. The site itself answers "Why pay when I can use ChatGPT for free?" on its About page, so he knows.^[6] Your sources and memory must be visibly better, not just present.
• Be careful with advice that affects people. His site tells coaches to check each answer against their own players and safeguarding rules and points safety and medical questions to qualified people.^[6] If your niche carries real-world risk, copy that humility.
• Your first niche may not be your biggest. Football Manager players sent almost as many messages as coaches did.^[8] Read your own usage data before assuming who the product is for.

What to take from this

1. 01

   Start from an audience

   Kevin and Kerry both taught the niche first.^[14][16]
2. 02

   Sources and context are the moat

   He said the app itself can be copied in a day.^[1]
3. 03

   Make the free tier match your costs

   Four questions a day became one.^[1][7]
4. 04

   Publish proof, with limits

   A cite-able data page that lists what it can't show.^[9]
5. 05

   Watch who really uses it

   Football Manager was almost half the messages.^[8]
6. 06

   Count accounts and payers separately

   20,000+ accounts, 537 subscriptions.^[5][13]