Impact11 · Naseer Ahmed

Impact11 branding over a floodlit cricket stadium at night.

The premise

A friend of mine builds apps and wanted to make one for IPL 2023: predict the playing eleven before each match, score points on how accurate you were, see where you rank. I did the design.

The one non-negotiable was in his brief from the start. No betting, no entry fees, no cash prizes. Free to play, points only.

The hard part

Money is not a feature of fantasy cricket, it is the mechanism. It creates the tension before the toss, the reason to check at the innings break, and the reason to come back tomorrow. Remove it and you are left with a quiz.

So the design question was narrow and specific: where do the stakes come from instead? Everything I drew was an answer to that.

Where the stakes came from

Five substitutes for money, each doing a different job.

Accuracy

Points scale with how right you were, not whether you won. A near miss still scores, so a bad prediction does not end your interest in the match.

Per match

A leaderboard after every game rather than a season total. The reset is the point: you are never so far behind that tomorrow is pointless.

Rank

Global position, shown plainly. Rank is the reward. It is also the only thing anyone actually wants to screenshot.

Proof

The count of people who already predicted this match, shown before you commit. It turns an empty form into a room with people in it.

A head start

A hundred points just for entering a prediction. Nobody’s first screen is a zero, which is where most points systems lose people.

The whole product, in eight screens

One loop, repeated every match. Short enough that a prediction fits into the gap between deciding to open the app and the toss.

SplashSign inPick matchMatch detailPredictPointsLeaderboardShare rank

The loop restarts at the next match, which in an IPL season is tomorrow

Three Impact11 launch screens showing upcoming matches, match detail and playing-squad prediction.

What shipped

It went live in May 2023, part way through the IPL season, on iOS and Android. Free, no transactions, exactly as briefed.

My friend has run it himself since then, through several tournaments and a lot of releases. Those updates are his work and I take no credit for them. What I am claiming is the launch version: the structure, the flows, and the screens it went out with.

There are numbers, and they are the developer’s, not a dashboard I had access to. They cover the app’s life to date rather than the launch version alone, so read them as the product’s rather than as mine.

16,200
Registered users: Organic. No paid acquisition behind any of it.; 533
Matches run: Continuously since launch, across every tournament since.; 350+
Active in season: A cricket prediction app lives and dies by the calendar.

Downloads run slightly ahead of registrations, which means very nearly everyone who installed it went on to create an account. That is the sign-in decision showing up in the data. Google and Apple only, no phone number, nothing to verify between opening the app and making a first prediction, which is exactly where most apps lose people.

The active figure is seasonal and I am not going to dress it up. Outside a tournament there is nothing to predict, and the number reflects that. The one I find more telling is 533 matches: the thing has been running without me since 2023.

Figures supplied by the developer, current as of August 2026. They cover the app’s life, not the launch version alone.

What I would change

There is no notification anywhere in what I designed, and for a prediction app that is close to fatal. The entire product depends on someone opening it before the toss, and nothing in it tells them a match is about to start. The highest-leverage thing I did not design was not a screen at all.

The points system got one line in my spec: educate the user on how prediction points work. In an app with no money in it, the points are the stakes. I under-designed the exact mechanic the whole product rests on.

And I designed nothing for December. A cricket prediction app is dead for months at a time, and there is no off-season state anywhere in the flow. That gap shows up in the numbers: plenty of people registered, far fewer active, because there is nothing to come back to between tournaments.