Case study
QUIZZIQ
Live pub-quiz tournament platform for venues in Bosnia and Herzegovina — designed, built, and operated end to end.
Think Fast. Win Big.
QuizzIQ (quizziq.ba) is a live trivia platform for venue quiz nights in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Players join from their own phones by scanning a QR code — no app to install — and play in teams, with the captain's device locking in each answer. A host console drives the night while the venue's big screen shows the current round, live standings, a prize wheel, and the evening's soundtrack.
It's not just software — it's a business I run. QuizzIQ event nights happen in real venues, with real teams, prizes, and sponsors: I author the question content, host the events, and operate the platform end to end. Beyond tournament nights, venues run a daily solo challenge (Slagalica, via paid single-use QR cards), with a 40-day Fan Zone league built to keep regulars coming back between events.
Every night is assembled from the same engine — 13 round styles mixed into distinct formats.
QuizzIQ Nights
Quiz Night
The classic team quiz night. Themed question rounds with escalating stakes: standard rounds, speed rounds, all-or-nothing, lightning. Live standings between rounds, podium at the end.
Ultra Quiz
The full arsenal. Classic rounds interleaved with game rounds drawn from Balkan TV-quiz culture: Skočko (code-breaking), Asocijacije (the associations board), Moj broj (build the number), Najduža riječ (longest word), Ko će bliže (closest guess), memory and matching games.
Slagalica
The solo daily challenge. Guests buy a single-use QR card at the bar and play a seven-round gauntlet against the clock, competing on the venue's daily leaderboard.
Themed Nights
Special editions built around one theme — music, film, sport, history and more — with the round lineup and question pool tuned to it.
The challenge
Venue quiz nights traditionally run on paper answer sheets and manual scoring: rounds drag, answers get disputed, and the venue has nothing to show sponsors afterwards. Moving the game onto players' phones fixes that — and creates three harder problems.
Fairness under real incentives. There are prizes on the table and every player carries a search engine in their pocket. If a correct answer ever reaches the browser before it's earned — in a network payload, a database read, or a fast finisher's recap screen — someone at the venue will find it.
Pub reality. Venue Wi-Fi drops, phones lock mid-round, batteries die at the worst moment. A team's night can't be lost because the captain's screen went dark two seconds before the deadline.
A crew of one. The person who built the platform is also authoring the content, selling the sponsorships, and holding the microphone. Operations have to run themselves.
How it's built
QuizzIQ is a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo: an Angular 21 single-page app (standalone components, signals, OnPush change detection throughout) serving players, hosts, and the big screen; ~50 Cloud Functions (europe-west1) that own every decision that matters; and an Astro 5 + Svelte 5 marketing site — all on Firebase: Auth, Firestore, two Hosting targets, Cloud Messaging, Storage, and Scheduler. The core design rule is simple: the client sends raw inputs, the server decides outcomes — scoring, timing, and answer reveals are all server-authoritative. Around the game sits the production plumbing a real business needs: transactional email with HMAC-signed one-click links, web push, GDPR export and deletion, and an analytics pipeline. Everything ships bilingual, Bosnian first.
Engineering highlights
1 · Cheating is a spec, not an afterthought
A formal 22-row threat register covers every vector, from reading the answer out of the payload to a captain's lag voiding the whole team's round — each with a documented status, and the accepted-risk rows naming their residual exposure. Correct answers were moved off the player payload into admin-only documents, and secured rounds reveal only through the server; submitted timings are clamped to server wall-clock; team rounds are captain-gated on the server, not in the UI.
2 · Zero-install live play
Scan a QR, type a nickname, you're in — phones are the controllers, the venue screen is the stage: live standings, a prize wheel, and the night's music, all driven from the host's phone.
3 · Built for pub Wi-Fi
Every submission is persisted locally before the network call and replayed on reconnect — a locked phone, a dead battery, or a dropped packet can't erase a team's round. Team submissions that arrive honestly late still count; their timing can never beat the wall clock.
4 · Thirteen round styles, one engine
Six classic quiz variants plus seven mini-games from Balkan TV-quiz culture (Skočko, Asocijacije, Moj broj, Najduža riječ, Ko će bliže, memory, matching) — behind a typed registry where adding a style without declaring how it plays and scores is a compile error.
5 · Security rules as tested code
~47KB of Firestore security rules, backed by emulator tests that actively try to forge hostile reads and writes — plus server-only collections that even an admin's browser can't read.
6 · Solo scale, test discipline
~400 test files across a ~1,400-file TypeScript codebase: unit tests, Cloud Function integration tests against the emulator, security-rules tests, and Playwright end-to-end — because a one-person team can't afford regressions on event night.
- round styles
- 13
- Cloud Functions
- ~50
- test files
- ~400
- security rules
- ~47KB
- curated questions
- 1,050+
- Asocijacije boards
- 129
Where it stands
QuizzIQ runs real nights, early-stage and growing deliberately: 3 partner venues (3 more in negotiation), 30–80 guests a night, 6–9 events a month. The sponsor program is live — 8 in-event placement surfaces across 4 tiers, with per-sponsor reports (opens, clicks, QR scans, reach) measured server-side, not in the guest's browser. Next: launching the 40-day Fan Zone league — one shared leaderboard across venues — and growing the venue network. These are the same numbers published for sponsors on quizziq.ba — modest, real, and verifiable.
QuizzIQ is what it looks like when I own a product end to end — architecture, code, content, and the operations on event night. If you need something real designed, built, and actually shipped — let's talk.