TorAlarm

Maurice Eisterhues, Founder

Düsseldorf, Germany

2024

TorAlarm’s ultra-fast notifications score big with football fans

When Maurice Eisterhues’s dad said he wanted an app to keep up with football scores, his sons quickly whipped up a solution. A decade later, that fun father-son project has turned into a business — and an essential app for millions of football fans.

A hobby becomes a business

While it’s hard to imagine today, it took quite a bit of work to keep up with your favorite sports teams before the internet.

“My dad used to cut out his favorite football team’s schedule from the newspaper and carry it around in his pocket,” says Maurice Eisterhues, with a laugh. “So years ago, when I worked on an app development project that involved push notifications, my dad immediately asked if I could make an app that tracked his favorite team and notified him when they scored.”

Luckily, Maurice had been working for years in freelance app development, so he and his brother, Marcel, got to work making their father’s dream app. It would track schedules from Bundesliga, Germany’s professional soccer league and send push notifications to alert fans of real-time results and scores.

Maurice presented the app to his father as a joke Christmas gift, and warned him that it was a “dummy” app with no real back-end functionality. But his father was intrigued and urged Maurice to go further with the app — and with that, TorAlarm was born.

TorAlarm is a combination of the German words “Tor”, which means “Goal” and “Alarm”, which means “Alert”. The core function of the app enables you to subscribe to your favorite team, then get an alert the moment they score a goal or finish up a match.

“We never set out to start a business,” says Maurice. “This was purely a hobby and a way for us, as football fans, to keep up with our favorite teams. But quickly we realized these notifications were an essential way for fans to stay connected to the sport.”

Off and running

One year after developing the app, TorAlarm saw a surge in interest with 500K downloads. Maurice realized TorAlarm was more popular than the other apps he was working on — so he quit his freelance projects and started working on TorAlarm full-time.

Best of all, TorAlarm became more than just a business — it became a family business. Maurice’s brother joined in a user acquisition role, then his father — the app’s initial inspiration — joined the team in a content role.

“Working with family is always interesting,” says Maurice with a smile. “Is it always easy? No, but it’s really cool to me that the three of us get to work together on something we’re so passionate about.”

With the user base growing, Maurice and his team were ready to monetize their site. “We started out using Google AdMob for programmatic campaigns and supplemented that with Google Ad Manager, which we use to set up direct deals carefully tailored to our audience of die-hard football fans,” he says.

“While we offer a premium subscription providing Bundesliga video highlights and other features, 99% of our revenue is driven by ads,” says Maurice. Most TorAlarm users enjoy the app for free.

“While we offer a premium subscription providing Bundesliga video highlights and other features, 99% of our revenue is driven by ads.”

Football fans unite

Ads have enabled TorAlarm to grow organically without outside funding for the first decade. Their success did however attract attention and the family decided to partly sell to German media brand BILD to further accelerate their growth plans.

The steady ad revenue has helped Maurice grow the company’s workforce, which now numbers close to 30 people. While Maurice is proud that he’s managed to combine his own love of football and tech into a career, he’s also happy to have passed that on to his dedicated staff — who are largely football fans like him.

The app has spawned a community of fans bonded by a shared passion. Across all platforms, they have over 800,000 reviews from fans who appreciate just how reliably TorAlarm keeps them tuned into the fast-moving work of professional football.

“Hearing from fans of the app is also particularly gratifying,” says Maurice. “For instance, one fan actually came to our office to ask for help with a small glitch with the app. His wife was with him, and when we were able to fix the app for him, she gifted us all chocolates. That was one of the more unexpected perks from TorAlarm!”

Going forward, Maurice and his team want to expand beyond their core markets. With convenient, super-fast notifications ready to go, TorAlarm is excited to help sports fans around the world keep up with their favorite football teams.

About the Publisher

TorAlarm is a German-based sports app that provides real-time updates and notifications for soccer matches. It offers live scores, match schedules, and goal alerts for various leagues and tournaments around the world. Users can customize their notifications based on their favorite teams and competitions.