It's a Jeff Bezos type beat the way I'm next-day shipping
0% developer. 100% responsible for the codebase.
I’m flying by seat of my pants here. While the biggest soccer story of the summer is the World Cup, the second biggest is my Fantasy Fútbol output courtesy of AI-assisted coding.
Since my last update here it’s been a blitz of offseason infrastructure, features and bare bones stuff that in my view as a user of fantasy American football products, are 100% necessary. These are things that didn’t make the MVP, but suddenly became in play as a result of Claude Code being so good.
If you’re new here, my name is Luke and I am a 100% non-technical founder that’s now the lead engineer of Fantasy Fútbol, a fantasy soccer mobile app that covers all Big 5 European leagues and their cup play. Come tap in if you watch any European soccer/football.
Additions include:
The automatic reset of your league in the offseason so that you and your friends can run it back every year (duh! but that wasn’t in the MVP…. so I had to build it)
Push notifications that remind you when your draft is, and when it’s your turn to pick
And the ability to turn off any or every notification you want! I appreciate when an app respects my time and attention, and I’ll be that way with you
The ability to be in multiple leagues on your one login credential (again, DUH. But this wasn’t in the MVP)
Making the tool tips actually work, so any of the tables, sections, or anything else in the app that you don’t understand, just click the “?” icon and it explains what you’re looking at
The ability to tap on the day or month in all date toggles and snap right back to the current day/month
Bruh how could I forget… I got a daily backup of the entire codebase dumping into an S3 bucket (just a digital storage space) so that a freak accident at AWS doesn’t delete the entire two years of work. DUH!!!!
GA4 installed so that I can start to understand where my users are from and what they like doing in the game (and what they don’t like!)
Tons of simple cosmetic fixes that just matter… I will do a full re-design if this season goes well, b/c this is just my simple Figma skills at play. But in the meantime, I tightened up margins, centered text where it should be, and aligned colors/fonts/and sizes wherever it made sense to
It’s maniacal the fact that I’ve merged 38 pull requests in less than 30 days. I didn’t even know or understand what a PR was until PR #29! I still don’t know what the “squash” in a squash/merge is. Literally couldn’t tell you… I haven’t had to know yet.
ASIDE: shoutout to Sam my technical co-founder who reviews the most important/severe PRs to make sure I’m not destroying the app… Which I almost did twice already. Impossible to understate his contribution here. Thank you Samuel.
Back to the chaos though… I’ve been taking good advantage of Fable coming back online for the last two weeks. 75% of all off-season improvements have come during this period, and I will miss Fable dearly if we really do lose her on the 19th. (When Fable went down, I spun up this parody merch site to ‘Free Fable,’ but you can actually buy the stuff lmao.)
Okay but with all this said, I am not going to fall into the trap of building for building’s sake. As mentioned at the top, I am building ONLY what I believe are table stakes, non-negotiable baseline features for a fantasy sports app. The moment I start getting into luxuries and other ‘nice to have’ stuff… that’s when this becomes a hobby and not a business. And at the end of the day, I want this to be a business. It costs money to run and sustain even at this stage (AWS, Claude, at one point Figma), and you only get the start of the European soccer season once a year.
So here we are: I have a small handful of last clean up and chore commits to figure out, I have to jam a new binary (read: Apple update) through App Store Connect without ruffling Apple’s feathers, and at that point… I will only be arriving at the starting line.
The second that the new App Store version goes live (I’ll lyk when that happens, targeting August 1), then the real work of getting users onto the app and actually playing the game begins.
I can’t undersell how fun it’s been to make software for the first time. It’s a genuine joy to someone like me who has always loved using consumer tech, but has never been able to participate at the point of creation. This offseason gave me the chance to dive head first into development, and I loved basically every second of it. Even the confusing and mundane parts.
But the rubber meets the road in early August. Matches in the new season start in the middle of the month, and I’ve got to start getting my 60-70 beta testers installed with accounts created, friends recruited, leagues formed and drafts scheduled. That is the real next hurdle. It’s not so much about the terminal anymore, but the real world.
Time to exit my bot/hacker summer and get back to being very, very human once again.
Godspeed.
If Fantasy Fútbol sounds cool to you, please download it! If you ever want to get in touch, you can comment here, or email me at hello@fantasyfutbol.co — I’ll personally reply to you!