PAMETNA HRVATSKA Romano Glavač i Rafael Slekovac

Guest Romano Glavač i Rafael SlekovacHosted by Boris ŽivkovićMay 3, 2026

Romano Glavač i Rafael Slekovac

About this episode

What you'll hear in this conversation

Most sports apps focus on professional leagues, on the polished, top-tier spectacle. But what if the real energy, and the real data problem, lay in the amateur game — the local club, the weekend warrior, the village derby? Romano Glavač and Rafael Slekovac saw that gap and built Hrnogomet, an app designed to bring real-time scores and statistics to Croatian amateur football. What they didn't anticipate was the sheer scale of the community response. Within months, the app saw nearly 50,000 downloads, not just from fans, but from players and local club enthusiasts eager to input results themselves. The app became a living, self-sustaining record, maintained by thousands of volunteers on the ground. This conversation explores the mechanics of building a platform so useful, so essential to its users, that they become its primary data providers. You'll hear how Glavač and Slekovac navigated an unexpected boom, turning server crashes into proof of life, and what it means to build a product that users don't just consume, but actively co-create.

Insights from the conversation

What to take from this episode

Hrnogomet tracks "over one hundred and twenty leagues with more than fourteen hundred teams" — all amateur. The lesson isn't to chase the top tier of any market, but to serve the long tail: the cumulative demand from many small, underserved communities can often outweigh the focus on a few marquee ones.

With "over nine thousand registered users" and "around fourteen hundred and fifty collaborators" inputting results, Hrnogomet turned its users into its content engine. The most scalable content strategy isn't to hire more editors, but to build a platform so useful that users become eager to maintain it themselves.

When "twenty to thirty thousand users" hit the app simultaneously, the servers crashed. This initial technical challenge, however, proved the platform was "alive and developing," turning a temporary failure into a powerful validation of demand.

"Mr. Sever from the Velika Gorica area" independently contacted clubs, collected data, and pushed to get his local league included in the app. When users take initiative to expand your product's scope without being asked, you've built something they genuinely own.

The app's creators found "many, many amateurs reactivated" in their local clubs because Hrnogomet gave them visibility. A digital platform that organizes fragmented real-world activity can create value far beyond its screen, drawing people back into the game itself.

"We didn't expect such a boom," the founders admit, referring to nearly "fifty thousand downloads in less than six months." Sometimes, the market validates a product so quickly that you're forced to build out support infrastructure reactively — a good problem to have, and a reminder not to over-plan for a product whose demand is yet unknown.

The Hrnogomet app is free, relying on ads to cover "server and maintenance costs," with an option for users to buy an ad-free version. When your product provides clear utility, a simple, non-intrusive monetization model can sustain it without ever feeling like a barrier to access.

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