Yelp for Triathlons and Marathons Race Discovery Tool

What to build

A community-driven race review and discovery platform — a Yelp for endurance sports — where amateur triathletes, marathoners, and ultra runners can read and submit structured ratings covering course difficulty, logistics, value for money, and organization quality. Target athletes spending $200–$900+ per race entry who need reliable peer reviews before committing.

No comprehensive, cross-discipline review platform exists for endurance races despite athletes spending hundreds of dollars per entry. One builder already scraped 5,800 race reports to fill the gap, proving the data is accessible and the need is real.

Demand

Amateur endurance athletes — triathletes, marathon runners, ultramarathon participants — routinely spend $400–$900 on a single Ironman entry and have no Yelp-style resource to vet race quality before registering. The timing is right because one solo builder already validated the concept by bootstrapping a dataset of 5,800 race reports and sharing it publicly.

• r/SideProject (Reddit)Primary

  Reddit post on r/SideProject: 'Race Ratings - I couldn't find a Yelp for triathlons and marathons, so I built one from ~5,800 race reports.' The builder scraped and structured thousands of race reports themselves, directly confirming both the market gap and the tractability of building the dataset.

• Signal Author (Reddit/Blog Post)Primary

  The signal creator states they searched for a Yelp-equivalent for triathlons and marathons, found none, and subsequently built their own dataset from approximately 5,800 race reports, implying a clear market gap.

• Triathlon and Marathon Industry Data (General)Industry

  Ironman triathlon entry fees range from $400–$900+ and major marathons such as Boston or NYC charge $200–$350+, confirming high per-event financial commitment by amateur athletes who have strong incentive to research race quality before registration.

• Existing Platforms (BibRave, Athlinks, RunRepeat)Competitive

  Partial solutions like BibRave (running race reviews), Athlinks (race results aggregator), and RunRepeat (running shoe and race reviews) exist but none offers comprehensive cross-discipline (triathlon + marathon + ultra) community ratings with logistics and difficulty comparisons, leaving the identified gap partially open.

Stack

• Next.js (frontend + API routes)
• Supabase (auth, Postgres DB, row-level security)
• OpenAI API (auto-summarize race reports, extract structured ratings from text)
• Algolia or Typesense (fast faceted race search and filtering)
• Stripe (premium tier payments)
• Race registration affiliate APIs or direct links (RunSignup, Ironman)

Solo + AI difficulty

The core review-and-search MVP is straightforward — roughly 4–6 weeks with AI coding assistance — but the cold-start problem is the real challenge: you need enough race reviews to be useful before community contribution kicks in. Bootstrapping with scraped/public race reports (as the signal author did) solves this, but quality control and moderation will require ongoing attention. Legal review of scraping terms and negative-review liability is a non-trivial overhead for a solo builder.

Entry threshold

The core app is buildable solo with AI in a few weeks using a standard web stack with structured data, filtering, and user-submitted reviews. The main barrier is content bootstrapping — the builder here scraped 5,800 reports to seed it, which is the real moat, but a leaner MVP could launch with a smaller dataset and rely on community UGC from day one.

Window

6-18 months

Where to find first users

• Post in r/triathlon, r/running, and r/ultrarunning with the scraped dataset as a hook — lead with data value, not a product pitch
• Engage directly on Slowtwitch.com forums (the dominant triathlete community) and LetsRun.com for runners
• Product Hunt launch timed around a major race season opener (spring marathon season or Ironman registration windows)
• Partner with endurance sports newsletters and YouTube race-recap channels for affiliate-driven audience seeding

Competitors

• BibRave
• RunRepeat
• Athlinks

Counter-signals & risks

• Partial competitors such as BibRave, RunRepeat, and Athlinks already occupy segments of this space and could expand their offerings to close the gap before a new entrant scales.

• Endurance race communities are fragmented across discipline-specific forums (Slowtwitch for triathletes, LetsRun for runners), making aggregation and network effect difficult to achieve for a generalist platform.

• Race organizers may resist or fail to engage with a third-party rating platform, limiting the depth of logistics data and potentially creating legal or reputational friction around negative reviews.