Highlights
- Company: FlagStat, "the operating system for flag football." Co-founders: Bradley Metrock, CEO of the voice-AI ecosystem Project Voice, and a veteran Alabama high school football coach.
- Use case: scorekeeping, stats, rosters, and team communications for flag football leagues, schools, and tournaments. The web app was built entirely on Bolt.new.
- Before: the fastest-growing sport in America was keeping score on paper and borrowed software.
- After: customers in at least 16 states, the official scorekeeping app of Florida's state flag football playoffs, the official and exclusive flag football statistics platform of the NFHS as of September 2026, a fully subscribed pre-seed round, and a seed round underway.
- Key metric: coach feedback collected on a Thursday, shipped on web and iOS by Tuesday.
Two-a-days
The beta test started at 7:30 in the morning at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers practice facility and ended at midnight. Bradley Metrock scored eight consecutive playoff games that day at Florida's state flag football championships, where FlagStat had just been named the official scorekeeping app. Four more championship games followed the next morning. Twelve games, two days, one founder with his own software in his hands, learning exactly where it sang and exactly where it broke.
"There was plenty of holes that we learned about that needed to be fixed," he said. "That was an accelerator, to say the least."
Most founders beta test with a survey. Bradley ran two-a-days.
Out of the booth, onto the field
Bradley is the CEO of Project Voice, the ecosystem he built around voice and conversational AI over the past decade: a podcast now in its ninth season (Mark Cuban was his biggest guest), an annual conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a venture firm, and a newsletter that reaches tens of thousands. He got there without a lab coat. "I'm not an engineer, I'm not a PhD," he said. "I'm just some guy who thought it was interesting."
For years he had the best seat in the press box: a public perch on AI and nothing of his own on the field. That changed when a good friend, a well-known high school football coach in Alabama, showed him the numbers behind flag football: how many teams already existed in their state, across the Southeast, up the Northeast, out on the West Coast. The statistics blew his mind.
The two of them decided to build a scorekeeping app for the sport, partly as a business and partly as a dare Bradley issued to himself. "I'm out here pontificating on a daily basis on the wonders and potential of AI," he said. "Let me see what I can do."
The sport that ran a reverse
Flag football's rise is the kind marketers invent, but this sport earned. It's a girls-native sport that expanded to boys, a reverse of almost every sport's path. Parents wary of tackle injuries are choosing it for younger kids. The NFL has pushed its Pro Bowl in flag's direction and bought Super Bowl airtime for it, and the sport debuts at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
What the sport didn't have was software that understood it. Flag football is full of laterals, a play tackle football almost never sees. The pace of play is relentless: one play to the next, faster than most sports, no mercy for a scorekeeper fumbling through menus. Paper scorebooks and apps borrowed from other sports weren't built for any of it.
First snap
Bradley found Bolt.new, an AI app builder, while surveying the field in 2025. "I really don't remember how," he said. "But I remember trying it out. It's a spellbinding experience. It's just really hard to describe."
The first prompt was close to "build a flag football scorekeeping application." What came back convinced him the task was within reach, and what followed taught him what building with AI actually is. "Not everything might come out of the oven the very first time flawless," he said, "but this is a road to get where you want to go." He pushes back on the magic-wand framing entirely:
"There's a ton of work. It's just very different. It's deeply iterative. It's a more thoughtful, visionary type of work than a brute force type of work."
The skeleton was sound early. "Bolt reduced the complexity of the problem down to 30 or 40 more prompts after that," he said. "Shape this, tweak that, fine-tune this, remove that."
The craft shows in the details a scorekeeper never has to think about. Coaches set default players at key positions, so a 12-yard pass doesn't require re-selecting the same quarterback for the fortieth time. The team designed the interface around flag's pace, laterals included. The word the team keeps reaching for is "joyful."
Today FlagStat supports the three major U.S. rule sets (NFL FLAG, NIRSA, and NFHS), tracks stats across seasons, and manages rosters and team communications. The premium tier exports stats to MaxPreps, the high school sports data repository, with one click, and lets players build Instagram posts inside the app. "All these girls want to do is throw touchdowns and dominate their opponent," Bradley said, "but very close behind that, post Instagram about such endeavors."
Two platforms, one playbook
The FlagStat web app was built entirely on Bolt.new. The mobile app, FlagStat Go, came later and from a newer AI tool that specializes in native mobile apps; it now ships on iOS and Android. Both run on the same Supabase database, and the shared backend gave Bradley a trick he didn't see coming: the two platforms message each other.
"When I have Bolt make a change to something, I will tell Bolt, send a message to the other platform, and it will do that through this database backend," he said. "They will just talk to each other and it reduces my work by at least 50 percent."
No copying prompts between tools, no drift between web and mobile. One playbook, two formations.
The no-huddle offense
On a Thursday in August 2026, Bradley and his COO drove to Atlanta to meet an educator who coaches flag football and heads the Georgia Flag Football Coaches Association. He had three feature requests, minor things that mattered to how he works. The updates shipped on web and iOS the following Tuesday.
"Are we in a position to execute on whatever is told to us? Yes, we are," Bradley said. That loop, request to release inside a week, is FlagStat's no-huddle offense, and it's how a team this small serves customers in at least 16 states, double the eight states FlagStat counted earlier this year.
Anyone could try to build super-FlagStat tomorrow, but without being on the sidelines and understanding this new, faster gridiron, they won't succeed. "You need real close proximity to the user. That's going to be your defensibility," he said. "The quality of what goes in is the quality of what comes out."
Going deep
The ambition is bigger than a scorebook, and the sport's institutions are signing on. In September 2026, FlagStat was named the official and exclusive flag football statistics platform of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), the body behind one of the three rule sets the platform already supports. The strategy stays inside one sport on purpose: MaxPreps' API covers 11 sports, and FlagStat is not chasing the other ten yet. The pre-seed round filled by early summer; a seed round kicked off in August to fund what comes next, including a hardware prototype: a mesh network of smart flags, belts, and down markers that score the game on their own and feed FlagStat live, no human at the scorer's table.
For a sport sprinting toward its Olympic debut, that's the deep ball. The game is growing and evolving quickly. And now, because of Bradley, flag football has software that can keep pace.
"Our tagline for it is the operating system for flag football," Bradley said. He has advice for anyone tempted to fake their way there with AI instead of walking the sideline: "You can use AI to create things. You'd be stupid if you didn't do that. But that is not the point. The point is you need to be authentic in what you're doing."
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