The job, in short
50% Fishing. 50% Community building. 100% fun.
The Mallacoota Flatty Classic is a fishing competition run out of Scallywags Bar in Mallacoota, Victoria, under the Aus Fishing Classics banner. The 2026 comp runs 23 to 25 October. The whole platform was built from scratch: public site, registration, waivers, payments, admin tools, email system, and an AI assistant the organisers use to keep track of all competition data from their phones. It went live on 6 July 2026 and is running right now.
Live 6 July 2026. Running right now.
The whole platform, piece by piece
What was built.
The public site. Event info, the schedule, and a hero video that actually plays properly on iPhones. Plenty of sites get mobile video wrong and the layout falls apart, so this one was built for Safari's quirks from day one.
Registrations and payments. Waitlist signups, an early-access window so waitlist members get first crack before the public round opens, and Stripe handling the money. Everyone on the waitlist gets the same early link. No secret handshakes. Last year's anglers were imported from the 2025 comp too, so the regulars got looked after first.
Waivers and check-in. The waivers are digital and built into registration, with a mandatory 18+ date-of-birth check for team captains. Kids' waivers get signed by a parent or guardian through a proper guardian flow, and every angler gets a QR code for check-in at the bar on comp weekend. Nobody has to chase paper around the pub.
Admin dashboard. Registrations, traffic and emails in one place, built for a phone first because the organisers run this thing from the bar, not a desk. Analytics are self-hosted (Plausible), so there's no Google tracking on entrants.
Flathead Fred, the AI assistant. The organisers can look up a competitor or fix a wrong email straight from a chat app on their phones. Fred uses AI to understand what they're asking, but the AI can never touch the database on its own. Every change needs a human to tap a confirmation button, and every change goes into a permanent audit log. The AI suggests, a human decides. Only approved organisers can use it.
The email system. Reminder emails go to past competitors who haven't confirmed their details, with a mandatory dry-run preview before anything sends, so nobody can accidentally blast the whole list. And if the email provider has an outage, emails queue up and retry instead of vanishing. Nobody misses a confirmation because a service hiccuped.
The numbers.
Coming after 2026 registrations close.
The deep dive.
Next.js on Vercel. Supabase for the database, functions and auth. Stripe for payments. Resend for email. Cloudflare for images and the video. Plausible for analytics. Upstash for rate limiting. Fred runs on the Telegram Bot API with the Anthropic API behind him. The hero video is a native video element, not an embed, which is why it plays properly on an iPhone.
Most comp sites are a stock photo of a boat and a PDF entry form. This one's a pub comp, and half the point is the weekend, so the site was designed to feel like a flyer on the pub wall: big blunt signage type, handwritten notes, hard shadows that make everything look stuck down, and an ink-dark background that makes the photos punch. It's all one design system, so every page and email looks like it came from the same hand.
Card payments are handled entirely by Stripe, so card numbers never touch the site or its database. Pricing is set on the server, not in the browser, so nobody can tamper with what they pay. Public forms are protected against bots. Waivers are versioned, so every signature is tied to the exact wording the person agreed to on the day. Behind the admin side there's an append-only audit log, allowlisted access, dry-run gates on bulk email, and a security audit before launch.
A full SEO pass (titles, descriptions, structured event data so Google understands it's a real event with real dates) put the comp at #1 on Google for “flatty classic 2026” within four days of launch. The comp is listed on ATDW, the official Australian tourism database, so it shows up across the Visit Victoria network. A Google Business Profile was set up for the event, description and first post included. And a reminder campaign went to the 107 anglers from the 2025 comp; confirmations doubled within hours.
A sponsor wall that actually works.
This is the sponsor wall from the comp site. Local sponsors get a spot, every logo click gets counted, and the organisers can show each sponsor what they got for it.
G'day, this is your bubble. Your pitch, your offer, your link, right in front of every visitor. Try it: 10% off any order, code FLATTY10.
Fair questions.
Not just fishing comps. Anything with entries, payments and a schedule: markets, festivals, fun runs, footy tipping, car shows. If people register and turn up, the same bones work.
These start at $2,000. Where it lands depends on what your event needs: a comp with payments, waivers and an admin bot is a different job to a simple event site. Get in touch and you'll get a straight number for yours.
The organisers do, from their phones. The Flatty crew look up registrations and confirm entries through a chat app. No logins on a laptop, no tech skills needed.
Handled on the site: entrants pay and sign digitally when they register. No cash tins, no paper waivers in a folder behind the bar.
The comp's in Mallacoota and Your Mate's in Gippsland, which helps. But the whole thing runs online, so no.
Events change: dates move, sponsors come on, prizes get announced. The site keeps up. Ongoing changes are quoted during discovery, so you know the cost before anything's built.