Scout

Scout is a talent-discovery venture we’re building at Mustard.

Scout turns real-world word of mouth into a product. If you’ve ever heard someone say, “No, seriously… that kid is special,” Scout is the system that helps talent travel further than your local ends, gym, school, or city.

Simply, the idea is: give talented people a clear path to visibility

The problem we’re solving

Talent exists everywhere, but isn't found everywhere.

A lot of talented people lose out for reasons such as:

• nobody 'important' saw them at the right time,
• they didn’t have a platform that fits what they do,
• or they didn’t have an existing audience to amplify them.

Meanwhile, the internet is noisy. If you’re not already 'someone,' it’s hard to break through.

How Scout works

Scout is built around short-form video and a simple recognition loop.

You post, people react, Challenges are formed, and the community validates what’s real. In Scout, that validation is expressed through Kudos, a lightweight way for peers and fans to back what they’re seeing.

Over time, that creates something that’s missing today: a public signal of momentum and credibility. I often describe it as a “Billboard charts” dynamic, but for talent.

Scout is focused: talent, proof, recognition, and pathways to opportunity.

Where Mustard fits in

Mustard is our venture studio focusing on story-first, brand-led, and designed around building communities and platforms from the ground up.

We build systems: product, narrative, distribution, and real-world activation.

Documentary and content

A big part of Scout is storytelling.

One of the clearest examples is the long-form documentary we released on YouTube around Mpumi. Mpumi, as well as being a Paralympic Gold Medalist, is the founder-partner of Scout, and the doc was our way of putting a face, a philosophy, and a real origin story behind what we’re building.

The Scout app

Here is where I make the bulk of my contributions to this venture. Scout is an ongoing build currently in pre-beta and as such I decided to lean on tools which help us iterate and develop fast. These choices include:

• Supabase hosted backend for auth and storage
• Typescript API gateway
• React Native Expo for cross platform development

Although we are using a cross platform app framework we are still targeting and optimising for iOS right now.

Desigining and building out the Scout digital system taught me a lot about how to model systems of this scale as well as handle real issues such as consistent video streaming , user security and privacy, local authority compliance.

One of the main lesson I took from this project, development wise has been how bad technial debt can hit you after a few months of consistent feature roll out. I now strive to build all products and projects with maintenance in mind.

Closing

Scout is still early, but the direction is clear.

We’re building the place where talent gets seen because the community insists it should be seen—then the product does the rest.