Pt 1: Using AI in Football Pick'em Pool App

So in the app that we developed, obviously, you know, all that it really is, is us trying to make something for our friends.

And that's why we haven't been diligently working on it.

We haven't been trying to put together something, hoping that we're going to make money off of it.

We built something that was just fun.

It started with, we wanted to be able to put together an app in the middle of a season where where it still made sense.

So what we came up with was a process of individuals guessing two winners for a week.

So two NFL winners and one loser.

And we had a group of about five or six individuals and They really didn't know a whole bunch about football.

We wanted something that was really lightweight.

It's not super easy to keep up with the tallies of all of these different picks from all of our friends.

And so...

I looked at, okay, how can I pull this data together? Because I'm a nerd.

And we were like, okay, so where's this data coming from? Where can we get the data for the weekly picks? And how can we put that into a database system? to be able to make it so that our friends can pick the games, and there's an interface there for them to be able to do that, and it keeps up with their picks, keeps up with their scores, so on and so forth.

And so over the course of multiple weeks, we made multiple iterations.

We had...

Five friends actively making picks in this makeshift Excel document that was interfaced with a Google Docs document that was interfaced with Power BI.

And so as individuals were picking their picks from Power BI, it was going into an Excel document.

And then as the NFL data was refreshing, it would go into the Excel document.

And then the results would update in the Excel document and then go back to Power BI.

Needless to say, it's kind of clunky, but it got the job done.

It made a lot of sense for what we built for our friends.

And I really enjoyed making it and we had it all set up for the next year.

And then that's when it took the next step, if you will.

Before the next step, though, Sean, really just wanted to kind of highlight for everybody who didn't play with us what the process was like for our friends slash users, right? So we, every week, texted out a form and had people fill out the form with all the teams that they wanted to pick out.

And they had to remember on their own which teams they'd already selected because we set up the rules that once you picked a team, you couldn't pick them again.