How Techiebutler built a full-scale sports tagging operation from zero
Overview
We said yes, before we fully knew what tagging meant. What followed was years of trial, error, and process-building that turned a single favor into a dedicated sports data operation running out of Maharashtra, staffed by 700+ people at peak.
Every game generates a story that raw footage alone can't tell. A tagger watches a game and marks every meaningful event as it happens; every pass, shot, and possession change, every movement that matters. That tagged data becomes the foundation for analytics, broadcasts, and performance insights our clients build on.
We tag games across six sports:
Every sport moves differently, and so does the time it takes to tag one. A single hockey game currently takes our team around 18 hours to tag end to end. Turnaround for football, basketball, cricket, lacrosse, and volleyball varies by sport.
The Challenge
We came in confidence. We're based in India; cricket is second nature here. Other sports, we assumed, couldn't be that different to learn.
They were. Every new sport meant a new learning curve: new rules, new rhythm, new ways of reading the game.
Ice hockey was the hardest adjustment. It's fast, fast enough that in our first few days, our team couldn't consistently follow the puck, only the general movement of players across the ice. It took roughly a month and a half of concentrated effort before the team could reliably follow the game, and longer still before they were tagging it well.
Beyond the learning curve, the operational challenge was bigger than training: finding the right people, not just training the ones we had. At this volume, clients don't choose between fast, accurate, and scalable; they expect all three, every time. Many of the people we hire have never held a structured job before, which meant the system itself had to do most of the heavy lifting, not individual judgment calls.
We designed a four-stage pipeline to take someone from new hire to production-ready tagger, with quality gates at every step:
Quality doesn't stop being checked once someone reaches live games. Taggers who fall below the quality bar get a warning on their dashboard; if performance doesn't recover, they're rotating back to test games until they're ready to return. There are no exceptions to this; quality holds regardless of tenure or sport.
Our tagging season runs nearly year-round, starting around April. The peak window, December through February, is when every sport we cover is live simultaneously, and headcount climbs past 700, supplemented by part-time staff to cover the surge.
Growth wasn't instant. On ice hockey specifically, the team scaled from 10 people to 20, then 30, then 40 over the course of a full year before we expanded the model across additional clients and eventually spun sports tagging into its own dedicated operation.
It's taken 4.5 years of running this at scale to get the process to where it is today, and most of what we've learned came from fixing a real mistake, not from planning ahead of it.
This operation isn't only a data pipeline for clients. It's also a source of steady, skill-based work for people who are often left out of structured employment, many of them women, many living near the poverty line. Every game we tag is data for a client and income for someone who didn't have consistent work before.
700+
trained taggers at peak season
6
sports covered: ice hockey, football, basketball, cricket, lacrosse, volleyball
18 hours
to tag a single hockey game end to end
4.5 years
running and refining the operation
10 → 40
person growth in the first year of the hockey tagging team alone, before scaling further
We have built and scaled engineering teams for a US market leader and the Middle East’s first prop tech unicorn. We know how to find the right people, vet them, and get them delivering fast, and we shape the process around the way you work.
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