Overview
Rival Nights runs game-night leagues for friends. Cornhole, pickleball, darts, ping pong. It handles the invites, the schedule, live scores, standings, and playoffs, all in a mobile browser.
It is my first consumer app, launched in September 2026 as part of The Ship Monthly Challenge. The motive was simple: have more fun with my friends and make it easier for other groups to do the same. I also plan to give a portion of the proceeds to charity, so a league night can raise money for a cause as well as settle a rivalry.
Where It Stands
Rival Nights is in a limited pilot. The feedback has been good, but it is too early for numbers that mean anything, and good feedback from a small group is not proof of a market.
How It Is Built
The delivery pipeline has four parts:
- Spec-driven development: every change starts as a written spec covering what the user needs, what the change does, and how we will know it works
- Agent implementation: a coding agent does most of the implementation against that spec
- Testing and review: automated tests and a pull request review check the work
- Automatic deployment: once a change passes, it deploys to Vercel
Early in the pilot, players asked for calendar integration and changes to how scheduling worked. Both were designed, built, tested, and shipped later that day.
Why It Matters to My Day Job
It gave me something I do not get in an enterprise role: a chance to run a lean consumer launch end to end, and to see what that process could teach enterprise delivery. I wrote about the lessons in What a Consumer Launch Taught Me About Enterprise Delivery.