What was the specific moment or frustration that made you decide to build BrackIt?

Running a league for close to two years, building out the schedule was always the most stressful part. Looking online, I found most scheduling websites and apps to be extremely basic, and didn't offer the customization I needed in order to make the schedule work with our specific league. I would spend hours creating schedules in Excel, just to find a conflict or a mismatch during the 7th or 8th week into the schedule, causing everything to break. Between scheduling multiple matches on different fields at the same time, making sure each team plays an even number of times across the time slots allotted, and ensuring each team plays each other the same number of times, my head would be spinning. I would spend 6+ hours trying to build the perfect schedule, only to have to start over. I made BrackIt to solve the issues I had, along with many other league organizers. I wanted to create something that allowed organizers to spend less time being frustrated, and more time on the field playing the sports they love.

What's one growth tactic that worked and one that completely flopped?

One growth tactic that has been working is networking. Being a league organizer myself, I am in contact with other league organizers who share the same frustrations I had. Before moving forward with creating the app, I listened to every problem they had and how frustrating it was to deal with. Since showing them, they've gone on to tell other organizers in their network, and this was without spending any money. I don't have a growth strategy that flopped (yet!) because I haven't put any money into advertising. I am two days away from being able to apply for production of the app, and before I began advertising it, I wanted to flesh out all the features I built based on feedback from those organizers testing the app over the last three to five months. I plan on using some form of advertising upon release, but I am a firm believer that first impressions matter and want the app to be in its best possible state before sharing it with everyone. Thankfully, we are pretty much there, and while I have a roadmap for future features, the app itself is ready to be used by anyone who is organizing a tournament.

What do your customers complain about most, and how have you handled it?

Not knowing if your schedule is actually correct. I built a conflict checker that reviews multiple things such as making sure games are evenly distributed, the timing is correct, the field distribution is correct, and more. I also built a schedule matrix that confirms which teams are playing against each other and for how many games. A lot of tournament schedulers will take your parameters and generate a schedule that makes no sense, but it doesn't tell you. My app allows you to have a lot of flexibility in how you create your tournament, while still keeping the schedule correct. Don't want two teams to play against each other? We have that. Want to schedule last season's final as the last game of this season? We can do that too. Most schedule generators only take into consideration the number of participants, the length of the season, and the location. We do all of that and allow you to fully create your tournament in a way that's uniquely yours.

What's one thing about your market that most people get wrong?

What I've found is this is an untapped market. Just from the people in my area I've talked to, everyone has the same struggles but nobody has done anything about it. I wasn't just creating something that people had no use for. At the very least, if nobody used my app, I could be happy knowing it at least solved my problems and saved me time when running my own leagues throughout the year. While creating something to solve my own problems, I shared it with other people who also run tournaments and they quickly told me how something like BrackIt can be extremely useful. Not only could it help local organizers, but it can be used for little leagues, e-sports, and game nights with friends. I wanted to create something that took away the friction and time spent creating something that's necessary before you can start having fun with your tournament.

What's next for BrackIt in the next 6-12 months?

I plan on releasing additional features such as: - The ability for organizers to send out notifications to people in the tournament. This includes weather cancellations, reschedules, event information, and more. - The ability to create playoff games for seasonal tournaments. - The ability to create a tournament on the computer. Currently, BrackIt is an app but I want to build a web version next. - Creating a version that can be whitelisted and sold to organizing platforms such as LeagueApps and Sideline. Currently, these platforms have very basic tournament organizing tools.

Before you started building, what was your relevant experience? Had you worked in this industry, built other products, or were you starting from scratch?

I had no prior experience with building an app. All I had was the frustration of making schedules to drive my desire to build something to fix my problem. I used Claude chat and FlutterFlow to build an app. Although there are many vibecoding tools out there that allow you to build an app quickly, I'm glad I used FlutterFlow. I wanted to learn how an app works, and how to properly build one and troubleshoot it should I encounter problems. I've enjoyed learning how to build an app over the last nine months, and I feel like I can take what I learned and apply it toward another app if I wish.

What's the biggest mistake you've made so far building this product, and what did you learn?

I got frustrated and walked away from the project for close to a month because I couldn't figure out why my schedule generating algorithm wasn't working. After almost giving up, I went back and found my mistake - one letter wasn't capitalized in my code. Since then, I learned to test frequently and often before spending two hours straight building something only to find out it doesn't work during testing. Having to go backwards and debug two hours of work or more can be frustrating. Thankfully, since then, I've been learning how to properly create an app, and things have gotten easier, with fewer mistakes along the way.

If you could go back to day one, what would you do differently?

Build in public. Because this was my first app and I had no idea what I was doing initially, I was scared to tell people about it in case I failed. Now that I'm really close to the finish line, I do wish I had started building an audience for my app before I released it.