It Started With a Spreadsheet

Like many great ideas, Leaderboard Fantasy began with a problem that hit close to home. You were managing a fantasy golf pool for your friends, manually tracking scores in a spreadsheet every tournament weekend. Copy-pasting leaderboards, calculating totals, sending updates - it was taking hours of work for what should have been simple fun.

"There has to be a better way," you said, showing me the sprawling Excel file with formulas that had grown increasingly complex over the seasons. That spreadsheet, with all its color-coded cells and nested VLOOKUPs, was about to become something much bigger.

From Manual to Automated

The first step wasn't building a platform - it was simply automating that spreadsheet. We started by writing scripts to pull live scores, calculate standings automatically, and send updates to your friend group. What used to take hours now happened in seconds.

But then something interesting happened. Friends of friends wanted in. Other groups heard about the automated pool and asked if they could use it too. That's when we realized: this wasn't just your problem. Fantasy golf fans everywhere were either struggling with spreadsheets or settling for platforms that didn't understand golf.

The decision to turn our automation scripts into a real platform felt natural. We weren't trying to disrupt an industry - we were just solving a problem we knew intimately.

The Technical Foundation

Building Leaderboard Fantasy taught us both invaluable lessons about real-time systems and user experience:

• Live Scoring Integration: Connecting to PGA Tour data feeds for real-time leaderboard updates
• Mobile-First Design: Anticipating that over 60% of users will check scores on their phones during tournaments
• Group Architecture: Creating persistent communities that could span multiple tournaments
• Flexible Contest Engine: Allowing customizable roster sizes, scoring rules, and cut penalties

The Features That Mattered

We discovered early that fantasy golf players wanted different things than fantasy football players. They didn't just want one-off contests - they wanted ongoing rivalries and season-long competitions.

Key decisions that shaped the platform:

• Groups Feature: Persistent communities where friends and colleagues could compete across multiple tournaments
• Customizable Contests: Let users set their own rules - roster size, scores to count, missed cut penalties
• Public and Private Options: Some wanted to compete with the world, others just with their buddies
• Real-Time Everything: Live scoring that updated as putts dropped on Sunday

Growing From a Friend Group to 1,000+

The early days were just your original friend group - the same people from the spreadsheet days who'd been asking for scores every Sunday, became our first beta testers, providing feedback that shaped every feature.

Word is starting to spread organically. "Hey, what app are you using for your golf pool?" will become our best marketing. From that original group of friends, we hope to grow to 50, then 100, then eventually to over 1,000 active players with 50+ live contests running during major tournaments.

The Groups feature was directly inspired by that original spreadsheet pool. We wanted to recreate that feeling of competing with the same people week after week, building rivalries and inside jokes. We hope that as the site grows, office leagues will form and new friend groups will start their own traditions. The platform is designed to do exactly what that spreadsheet did, but at scale.

The Challenges We Overcame

Not everything was smooth sailing:

• Scoring Complexity: Golf scoring is backwards (lower is better) which confused users familiar with other fantasy sports
• Tournament Scheduling: Handling weather delays, playoff scenarios, and international tournaments
• Balancing Simplicity and Depth: Power users wanted advanced features while new users needed simplicity
• Mobile Performance: Ensuring smooth updates even on slower connections during peak Sunday tournament hours

What Makes It Special

Leaderboard Fantasy will succeed because we're staying true to our vision: make fantasy golf social, accessible, and engaging. We're not trying to be everything to everyone - we're building the best possible experience for golf fans who want to enjoy tournaments with friends.

The platform is ready to host thousands of contests each year, from casual weekend games to serious season-long competitions. We envision Groups becoming mini-communities, with inside jokes, recurring rivalries, and genuine friendships forming around shared love of the game.

Lessons We're Learning

Building Leaderboard Fantasy together is teaching us that:

• Free doesn't mean cheap: By removing financial barriers, we're building trust and community
• Niche markets matter: Golf fans are underserved and hungry for a dedicated platform
• Social features drive retention: Groups will keep people coming back week after week
• Simplicity wins: Our "30-second signup" philosophy removed friction at every step

From Spreadsheet to Platform

Looking back, it's remarkable how far we've come from that original Excel file. What started as a way to save you a few hours each weekend is becoming a platform poised to bring thousands of golf fans together every tournament.

Here's the part that still amazes me: the entire platform was built with just a small investment of my time on nights and weekends over the last 3 months. How? The "we" in this story isn't just you and me - it's you, Claude Code (that's me!), and various other AI agents who helped along the way. While you handled the vision, user experience, and business logic, I cranked out code, debugged issues, and helped architect the system. Other AI agents jumped in for specific tasks - data modeling, API integrations, performance optimization.

The result? What might have taken a solo developer months or a traditional team significant resources was accomplished by one person vibe coding in their spare time. The spreadsheet is still saved to my Google drive - a reminder not just of where this all began, but of how much the development landscape has changed.

Today, Leaderboard Fantasy stands as proof of two things: the best products come from solving your own problems, and AI-assisted development isn't the future - it's the present. We didn't set out to build a platform. We set out to make Sunday afternoons more fun for a group of friends. We believe thousands of others will want the same thing - that's the exciting opportunity ahead.

As tournaments continue and we work to grow our community, we're excited about what's next. But we'll never forget that original spreadsheet and the friend group that started it all. They're still playing, by the way - now with custom trophies and years of history tracked automatically instead of in cells A1 through ZZ1000.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for technical deep-dives where we'll share exactly how we built specific features, the AI workflows that made it possible, and lessons learned from human-AI pair programming at scale.

Jeremy (and Claude)