Product case study · 2026
I built the fantasy football platform I wanted to play on.
Knife Fight is last-team-standing fantasy football. No weekly matchups. Every team shares one scoreboard, the lowest score gets cut, and the fallen roster is released to waivers.
Product · lifecycle · brand · growth
The premise
One rule changes the whole product.
Normal fantasy products revolve around weekly matchups. Knife Fight revolves around one line. Stay above it and keep playing. Fall below it and your season is over.
That pressure changes live scoring, waivers, the draft, lifecycle, and how the product feels on a phone. It could not be a side mode. The whole product had to start there.
Three product calls
Three calls that made it Knife Fight.
Waivers are not a side feature. They are the game.
One fallen roster can put fourteen useful players on the wire at once. A flat list of bids is not enough.
I built claims around priority groups, conditional choices, backup drop chains, and up to four runs a week. A $20 claim in the first group beats $95 in the second because by then the player is gone. The mechanic teaches the strategy.
The Scramble Report turns a backend job into the week's best league argument: who won, what they paid, and who got outbid.
The draft should feel like the product.
Snake drafts work, so Knife Fight still supports them. But the default format did nothing to express what makes this game different.
In the Knife Fight Draft™, every player is available to everyone. Every bid is sealed. The money left after the board clears becomes your FAAB for the season, so draft strategy and waiver strategy share one wallet.
Pre-bidding lets owners build a board before the room opens. Ties still become blind re-bids, so nobody learns the other owner's number first.
No draft order. No dead turns. The reveal is the product moment.
A wrapped website still has to feel at home on the phone.
The web product became the iOS app, but I did not treat the phone as a smaller browser. Navigation, scrolling, keyboard behavior, sharing, push, haptics, and session storage all had to follow the device.
The Gallery is the clearest example. It is a drawer on the web and a full bottom-nav page on iOS. One screen, one scroll surface. Pull to refresh works because there is no gesture fight inside an overlay.
League links are Universal Links. A tap opens the exact league screen in the app when it is installed, and the same route on the web when it is not.
Same product. Different interaction model where the platform earns it.
Lifecycle
The product state is the campaign.
Drafts start. Pick clocks run. Trades need review. Teams slide onto the line. Waivers clear. Those moments run the message plan.
Email keeps the durable record. Opted-in SMS replaces push for covered moments that cannot wait. Every alert carries the product route, opening the app when installed and the same state on the web when it is not.
See the lifecycle journey →
How it got built
The first version took a week. The product did not.
A fast first build proved the loop. The real work came after: commissioner tools, live scoring, simulation leagues, rankings, trades, chat, SMS, push, native interaction, App Store release, and the small product rules that only show up when you use the thing.
AI coding tools help me implement and review. I own the product decisions: what gets built, how it behaves, what is safe to ship, and when the answer is still not good enough.
The result
The thing I wanted now exists.
Knife Fight is live on the web and available on the App Store. Free. No ads. No prizes. No real-money anything. Just the format, built around the parts that make it great.
Ownership and attribution. Knife Fight is owned by Leeloo Labs LLC. Knife Fight Draft™ identifies Knife Fight's distinctive blind-bid draft format. Leeloo Labs LLC owns the Knife Fight software, original rules text, interface, artwork, original rankings content, and presentation.
© 2026 Leeloo Labs LLC. All rights reserved.