Outlap

Over the past number of months (I think about 8 at the time of writing), I’ve spent some nights and weekends working on an online system. It’s less something that I truly believe to be the next chapter in my career or the future of humanity solved. But something that aligns me obsession with technology as a means to improve things, and motorsport.

And so I’ve been toiling away on Outlap. A system that started simple and grew over time.

I started early in the year with Lovable. Where I used it as a way to get real-time AI advice on racing. Largely for track day attendees or similar. And I was super excited. It worked, was (kinda) cool and I used it myself for some track day events. I even had other folks that I know use it. I had users!

I then started building it out more and more as an all-in-one system for motorsports. Drivers, clubs, event organisers, track owners, etc. All sorts of personas co-existing in a single platform. Events could use Outlap for tickets and organising the track days (with running groups, live timing, etc. etc.). Drivers could live-time laps with their phone rather than requiring expensive hardware. Clubs can create social spaces for drivers. And track owners can update facilities or the track itself in the system.

But it was wonky. I think I hit the upper limit of what Lovable could ever handle.

And so over time I took the data over to Supabase, the core app over to Vercel and slowly turned off the Lovable APIs. Now, Outlap fully exists on it’s own infra. And I noted during the migration an enormous number of bugs built out by Lovable. It turned out over time, Lovable was lying about what was working. Which is on me for not being setup to test more deeply.

The system is vastly improved. It now uses Stripe to allow people to run their business on top of Outlap (which is very cool). Ticketing, event organising and everything else really works. It has a full docs section, to allow for how-to guides as well as API integrations with, for example, third party lap timing systems.

I have very limited users who’ve done things on it. But all-in, there are almost no competitors to Outlap. No one else covers the ground. And given my software background, it’s my opinion that no one covers this space so well, so robustly and while so focused on the craft & beauty of how it all works, ties together and operates. It should, like all software, make life easier for the personas in the app.

The issue, which is common in modern software, is that marketing and sales is tough. It’s easier to go from 0 to 1 in software than ever before. But the same cannot be said for marketing. At least, not without budget.

So while I keep tinkering with the app, updating things, making it better and adding (and removing!) features, I’ll think about the best next step to market this. I have a few months when the northern hemisphere stops doing track days and motorsports kind-of shuts down. I need a good plan, budget or investment before February, in essence.

All-in though, this is a lot of fun. I’m delighted I spent the time building this stuff out.

And if you’re reading this, go to Outlap.xyz, create an account and give me some feedback.