Back in the summer of 2021, when Euro 2020 finally got underway, I decided to organise a little football prediction competition for family and friends.

Nothing fancy.

Just a spreadsheet, a few willing participants and the chance for some friendly rivalry. Everyone predicted the scores, points were awarded, and a league table decided who had the best football knowledge.

Or, as it turned out, who was the luckiest.

It was brilliant fun. The competition. The banter. The bragging rights. Even people who knew absolutely nothing about football had a chance of winning.

There was just one small problem. Someone had to run the whole thing.

And that someone was me.

Running a prediction competition sounded simple enough.

Until the matches started.

Templates went out by email. Predictions came back by email, by text and by WhatsApp.

One of my nephews, with no Excel, filled his in using Paint.

I was collecting them, chasing people who hadn't sent theirs, entering the real scores, working out the points, updating the league positions and sharing the latest standings.

Then another match would finish. And I'd do it all again.

• And again.
• And again.

What was supposed to be a bit of fun had become a surprisingly time-consuming operation.

So, naturally, rather than making things simpler, I decided to make the spreadsheet more complicated.

At some point I became slightly obsessed with making our competition better.

• What if the points calculated themselves?
• What if the league table updated automatically?
• What if we could see who was climbing, who was dropping, and who was actually in form?

And so began a summer of spreadsheet development.

• Formulas.
• Lookups.
• Conditional formatting.
• More formulas.
• Broken formulas.
• Fixed formulas.
• And occasionally, formulas to fix the formulas.

We built automatic scoring, league tables, position movements, performance stats, and even a colour-coded form guide showing everyone's recent results.

We probably spent more time building the spreadsheet than watching the football. But it worked.

Well, mostly.

And the cleverer it got, the more we enjoyed using it.

Despite all those clever formulas, there was still one rather obvious problem.

It was still a spreadsheet.

We still had to collect everyone's predictions, make sure everything was entered correctly, and share the results. And every new feature made the whole thing that little bit more complicated.

That's when the idea started to take shape. What if we took everything we'd built, everything we'd learned and everything we loved about our little family competition…

…and turned it into something that did absolutely everything for us?

• No chasing predictions.
• No copying scores into spreadsheets.
• No updating league tables by hand.
• No sending everyone the latest standings.

Just open an app, make your predictions and let everything else happen automatically. And better still, what if anyone could use it to take on their own family, friends or workmates?

What started as a simple idea gradually became something much bigger: an app where you predict football results, compete in tournaments, join Grigger Circles with friends and family, follow your performance and watch the tables change as the football unfolds.

We even brought some of our favourite spreadsheet creations along for the ride.

• The form guides.
• The performance stats.
• The league tables.

All the little details that made the original competition so addictive.

Only now, they're automatic.

And because we wanted to make things a little more interesting, we added a few twists of our own. Griggle It doubles your points for a game week. Peek It lets you see everyone else's predictions once the deadline has passed.

The sort of things we'd have loved back in the spreadsheet days.