Twenty21Labs Open Five5

Twenty21 Labs · Johannesburg, South Africa

Built from the pitch.
Shipped for real life.

Twenty21 Labs is an independent, founder-led product studio. Our first product is Five5, built to make organising regular five-a-side football easier.

Open Five5 Our story
Five5
Five5 home screen: a fixture card for Tuesday 18:00 at Discovery Soccer Park, Wanderers, marked OPEN
Five5Live at five5.football
No app storeInstalls from the browser, with push
ZAR, pay how your crew paysIn app, to the organiser, or at the venue
Founder-ledProduct, design and engineering under one roof

The product

Five5 competes with the WhatsApp group, not with other football apps.

Find the person who already runs a weekly game, make their next Tuesday easier, and let the group follow them in. Everything in the app exists to kill one piece of organiser friction.

Home screen with the next fixture on one card

Your next game on one card

Date, kickoff, pitch and who’s in. Everything for match day lives inside it, with a 24-hour and a 1-hour reminder sent for you.

Club poll heatmap of weekdays by time slot

Find the night everyone can play

An anonymous weekday-by-slot heatmap replaces the 40-message poll. The organiser turns the winning slot into a match in one tap.

Team selection pitch with Diamond, Y and Box formations

Pick teams without drama

Drop players onto a Diamond, Y or Box formation. Captains settle the rest with a penalty-shootout mini-game.

R700 pitch ÷ 10 players = R70 each

The facility rate is split automatically and each player’s share is on the match. Unpaid spots release at T-24h so the organiser never chases a R70 again.

The story

Before Five5 was an app, it was years on the pitch.

Twenty21 Labs is founder-led. Five5 grew from first-hand experience of the weekly game: finding players, settling teams, splitting costs and getting everyone to kickoff.

2016–2019

Four years of seasons, medals and match nights.

First Division and Premier Division wins at Discovery Soccer Park are part of the experience behind Five5. The product starts with the game as it is actually played and organised in South Africa.

Founder-led

One accountable builder, with modern tools.

Twenty21 Labs brings product direction, design, engineering and operations together. AI tools support the work, while the founder remains responsible for what ships and how the product serves its users.

How we work

Small studio, short loops, real screens.

Nothing ships unless the suite is green

Every push to develop runs the full unit and integration suite against a real database and deploys to staging. Production only moves on a tagged release, after a backup and a migration.

Design system first

Tokens, components and copy rules live next to the code. One accent per screen, sentence case everywhere, 24-hour times, rands as R70. If it isn’t in the system, it isn’t in the app.

Real screens, every week

Our marketing is captured from the running app after each release, never mocked up. The product is good enough to show, so we show it.

Built with Next.jsReactPostgreSQLPrisma PusherWeb PushSnapScanStripeMapLibreVercel

Contact

Run a weekly game? We want to hear how it goes.

Organisers, venues and players: tell us what still gets organised on WhatsApp. That is the next thing we build.

Email Twenty21 Labs