Draftnik

After multiple posts on Reddit and Twitter, and talking to people using it and who want to use it, Draftnik has crossed 100 signed up users!

It still is a free app, so the number itself has no direct impact. But this is the first time I saw a side project to completion and had people using it, so to reach this number is a huge personal milestone for me.

Draftnik is officially live! The API has been deployed using Zappa (https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa) to run it on AWS Lambda. The Chrome extension has been published to the Chrome web store. The dashboard app is also live (and accessible through http://app.draftnik.cc/). And the landing page is up! https://draftnik.cc/

Reddit was my primary source to find people to try this out. By the start of the season (on September 12), I had around 70 signed up users.

A couple of weeks before the end of the 2019-20 English Premier League (a few weeks after the league restarted, following the COVID shutdown), I had the idea for a browser extension that allowed FPL players to save team drafts and access them through a separate dashboard. Until then, I had always used screenshots to record my drafts, and I had seen others do the same. I knew there would be people who would find this useful. At the very least, I knew I would use it.

Because I had a very small window before the league season ended and the FPL game ended for the season, I knew I had to work on the browser extension part of it first, while the game was still active. A bit of research later, I figured out the best way to get the list of players selected on the page. I set up a simple API to save team drafts and got to work on the extension.

I knew the time Draftnik would be most useful was before the start of the season, so the goal was to have the whole thing ready to use at least a couple of weeks before the start of the 2020-21 EPL season (in early September).