Built on Real Bones
Why I hired a human engineer first, and what I'm building now that I have a sound foundation
There’s a narrative taking over the founder internet right now. You’ve seen it. Someone opens Claude or Cursor, types a prompt, and three hours later they’re demoing an app on Twitter to 50,000 people. The replies are always the same: fire emojis, “bro we really live in the future,” someone asking what the stack is.
I’m not here to tell you that’s wrong. It’s genuinely remarkable that this is possible. But I want to tell a story about what happens when you care about the idea too much to risk becoming slop.
The Personal Business Thesis
I didn’t start Fantasy Fútbol because I was looking for a way to avoid consulting after getting an MBA, or because I was a disaffected software engineer nervous of becoming obsolete. I started Fantasy Fútbol because I was running it manually on a Google spreadsheet with a group of friends, and it was the most fun I’d ever had with fantasy sports.
The concept is simple but novel: instead of drafting individual players like Fantasy Premier League or MLS Season Pass, you draft entire European clubs. Your team earns points across every competition they play, which includes domestic league, domestic cups, Champions League, Europa League, all of it. A manager who drafts Arsenal gets points from every single match Arsenal plays, across every tournament, all season long. (I am an Arsenal fan, and don’t want to talk about our domestic cups right now.)
I knew the idea was good because I’d already lived it. I was the commissioner, the scorer, the rules lawyer, and the most obsessed player all at once. I was (still am) every team member but the engineer.
Think about what that actually means. I am the product manager who knows exactly what a user needs to feel informed and in control. I am the designer who has a taste for what the app should feel like (clean, European, serious about the sport). I am the community manager who runs the subreddit, onboards every beta tester personally, and is in DMs with users at 11pm on a Tuesday. I am the business operator handling banking, legal, contractor agreements, and investor materials. I am the content strategist, the newsletter writer, the Reddit lurker looking for people who are desperately searching for exactly this product.
The one hat I couldn’t wear was engineer. And in 2024, when I decided to take this seriously, that was still a real constraint.
Why We Hired a Human First
Here’s the thing about 2024: genuinely capable AI-assisted coding for non-technical founders was just beginning to exist. Cursor was gaining traction. Claude was getting better. But the tools, the harness, the models and the workflows that make a non-technical founder dangerous as an engineer? That wasn’t mainstream yet. It arguably still isn’t. If I had tried to vibe code Fantasy Fútbol from scratch in early 2024, I would have ended up with a sh*t pile of AI-slop code I couldn’t understand, couldn’t debug, couldn’t hand to an investor, and couldn’t safely build on.
So Sam and I hired Deepali, a real engineer based in India, to build the foundation properly. Real database schema. Real backend architecture. Real IP assignment agreements. Real code review from Sam, who has years of engineering experience at Meta. She built something with structural integrity: a mobile app live on the App Store, a scoring engine that processes legally-acquired match data across five leagues and multiple European competitions, a league management system that handles drafts, lineups, and standings.
I made that decision with sheer luck more than foresight. But looking back, it was the right call. Why? Because I was about to found a company at the exact onset of the moment when AI-assisted coding would start to genuinely matter for people like me. And I needed something real to build on top of.
Shipping code you don’t understand whatsoever into a production environment from the jump is genuinely risky. Not just in the abstract, but because you accumulate technical debt you cannot see, security vulnerabilities you cannot anticipate, and architectural decisions that make the next feature three times harder than it needed to be. I wanted none of that inside Fantasy Fútbol. This idea is too good for that. Fortunately, it wasn’t even an option then.
What I Have Now
It’s April 2026. Fantasy Fútbol is live on the App Store. We have active beta leagues running with real managers making real lineup decisions every month. The codebase has been built by a professional engineer and reviewed by another. The architecture is sound. The bones are real.
And now something has shifted, both in the tools available to me and in what I’m ready to do with them.
The AI coding tooling that exists today is categorically different from what existed when I started. A non-technical founder with (meager) design taste, domain knowledge around soccer, and clear product vision can now move with genuine engineering capability. Not by generating slop and shipping it blindly, but by using AI as a collaborator on a foundation that was built right. The distinction matters enormously.
Starting this month, I’ll become the lead engineer of Fantasy Fútbol.
Not because Deepali didn’t do excellent work. She did. But because the next phase of this product needs me inside the code in a way that wasn’t possible before. Feature velocity, personalization, the V2 roadmap… All of it benefits from having the person with the most product context also have the ability to build. I am, finally, putting on the one hat I never could.
What Vibe Coding Off Real Bones Actually Means
I want to be clear: I’m not anti-AI. I’m not even anti-AI-generated content in general. If someone wants to scroll AI slop on Instagram or TikTok, genuinely, go crazy.
But Fantasy Fútbol is a great idea. There is a real gap in the market. There are soccer fans who have been locked out of meaningful fantasy participation because the dominant products are structurally constrained to a single league, a single competition, individual players. We cover all of it. Every club, every competition, all five major European leagues. And that’s just the start…
That idea deserves a great product. And a great product means every layer has to hold up: the architecture, the UX, the scoring logic, the community, the brand. This is not a place where I’m willing to let slop win.
What I’m doing now is not vibe coding from zero. It’s building intelligently off a real foundation, using AI as a force multiplier for a person who already knows exactly what needs to be built and why. Dan Koe said something that I loved: now that technical work and intelligence are on tap, what’s left is taste, agency, and coherence. Those are things I like to think I have when it comes to this product.
The features can be copied. The mechanics can be replicated. But two years of living inside this idea, building its community from scratch, and caring deeply about every detail of the experience? That’s my moat. And now I have the tools to defend it myself. Both by being human in a competitive landscape of corporates, and by playing rapid offense.
The Personal Business Payoff
The conventional startup wisdom says you need a star-studded team, venture funding, and a growth curve that trends toward the moon or toward zero. I don’t believe that’s the only model worth building.
A personal business — one you started because you love the idea/product, one where you are close enough to your users to have real conversations with them, one where the founder is also the most obsessed customer — has a kind of integrity that’s hard to manufacture. I bet that it won’t be replicable in a weekend. When everything becomes abundant and AI-generated and frictionless, the human desire for something crafted with genuine intention gets stronger, not weaker.
Fantasy Fútbol started on a spreadsheet between friends. It’s now a live app with a growing community of beta testers, a subreddit, and a V2 roadmap that I’m about to start building myself.
I think we got the order of operations right here. Real bones first. Acceleration second.
May the one-person-business games begin…
Fantasy Fútbol is available on the App Store here. If you want to join the Android beta, find us at fantasyfutbol.co.