FLP Picks and Chips

Inspiration

There are an insane amount of permutations and combinations in Fantasy Premier League. The Premier League is set up in such a way that content is overwhelming on how to optimize your squad. There is literally an entire industry of influencers and in-the-know insiders (within professional clubs) who dedicate time and energy into Fantasy Premier League on a weekly basis.

I am an avid football (soccer) fan, and play Fantasy Premier league increasingly so each year - mostly to escape how mundane and terrible my preferred team (Manchester United) have become to actually watch. I also believe wholeheartedly - and with a fully cogent argument (try me) - that MUFC's current manager will prove to the world why AI will never fully replace humans. But that Humans with AI will be able to achieve the impossible.

FPL PicksAndChips is my small endeavor to building something to help with this journey, and also make something fun and unique in the meantime.

What it does

FPL PicksAndChips is the dream of any Fantasy Premier League manager. It is an AI Companion that acts as an Assistant manager, throughout the FPL season. It provides as much or as little input as you choose to receive from engaging with it - so power FPL users who think they know the system best do not feel threatened by it, while casual players can use it like crazy and improve their outcomes manifold.

PicksAndChips gives weekly recommendations for transfers, strategies for optimizing on player selection, and planning for future periods and gameweeks for when to optimally play FPL Chips. Chips are limited booster tokens within the game, that allow for additional point earning opportunities. It also allows users to see Captain Choices, and predicted Price change alerts for players that a user may want to trade in the near future. Importantly, PicksAndChips also scrapes all online articles and official team lineups and news, to notify users of injuries, squad lineup likelihoods, and high probability scorers and benched players - so that users can plan their starting XI accordingly, and make their weekly transfers with all information at hand. Lastly, there is a fully built-in AI "Assistant Manager" chatbot within the app, that allows users to not only get intelligent feedback on their current team and captaincy picks, but also allows them to chat with the AI on their strategies and goals going forward. For example, if they think that several of their players are about to hit rough forms of patch, either due to injury or fixtures, they can simply validate this with the AI. Or they can be more proactive than that, and ask the AI to offer strategic plans to shift away from those players in the coming gameweeks. The AI assistant chatbot is pre-populated with suggestions on how to get the best Smart Advice from it.

How we built it

I used Bolt.new to prompt it to build me a mobile-friendly app, and added feature by feature. I tested it on Expo Go, and I bought an IONOS website to deploy it on a user-friendly URL.

Challenges we ran into

My Bolt was getting hung quite a few times in the past week. This lost me about a day or two, just because I had to keep closing it in and out, in between deploy runs, or coding updates.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI looks very FPL friendly. I am also happy that I was able to do this without needing other engineers' help. I built this within just 5 days - and managed to spruce up all the UI, and fix all the code issues within a couple of hours. I love the name i came up with for the website - and wouldn't have thought about it, AND DEFINITELZY NOT PAID ANYTHING TO SECURE THE WEBSITE (!) if there wasn't a $25K cash prize promised to the more creative URLs deployed for this Hackathon. I also thought of a few others, but decided against it - because of the creative competition prize potential.

What we learned

Lots of other inputs needed, aside from just the code and production review. The UI interface is a big decision, but the navigation mechanisms are not as difficult as I thought they might be. I really loved the process of getting feedback from potential users. When I started building this, I thought it would just be for fun and nobody would really be into it - because why would they when they can browse a website or look up a Youtube video. WHat I didn't realize is how much the convenience of being able to play around with the UI yourself, and the built-in AI Chatbot allowed users to feel empowered and like it was their personal companion. That energized me to get more and more useful feedback, and keep making it better. Lovely virtuous cycle!

What's next for FLP Picks and Chips

If I win the IONOS creative competition prize for the website, I will 100% take this FPL AI Companion app and distribute it to my first 200 users - whom I already have their names and emails for. And see where it takes me. I also want to keep building features, and tinkering with how I can bring the maximum value for any and all users out of this app. This app has real scale potential - because the 11 million users who play Fantasy Premier League every year are as dedicated as they come. Since I used to work at EA (Electronic Arts) as the Product lead of Cloud Infrastructure and Engineering, I am also able to get feedback from the likes of EAFC (previously FIFA) and consider how I can leverage their customer base for adoption of this app, or as a pipeline of gamers back to their EAFC FC25 game. Finally, I want to partner with YouTube content creators and offer them this app for free. I am also affiliated with local football clubs in Seattle (one of the founding members of Strangers United FC) and we have corporate sponsorships as well as weak ties to Seattle Sounders FC and other sports organizations here in the Seattle area. So, through that network, I would want my entire 1K+ SUFC member base to start using this app, and giving me the feedback that I can digest and weed out the signal from the noise, to continue iterating to become the one and only FPL Companion app on the market that rules them all.

Built With

• bolt
• chatgpt
• expo.io
• fpl
• ionos
• perplexity