The Greatest Wasn’t True Yet

There was a moment in this project where I had to sit with a very uncomfortable question:

Am I building something great, or am I just writing great-sounding words about it?

Top Corner Entertainment started with a big idea. Maybe too big. My first prompt was not even “build me an app.” It was, “How would you suggest we build the greatest global soccer trivia game ever?”

The AI came back with a blueprint that sounded amazing to me. Daily quizzes. Career mode. Head-to-head play. A kind of Wordle-meets-Sporcle-meets-FIFA idea. I got excited, chose a dark navy and lime look called “Stadium Night,” and within an hour I had a working trivia version live.

For a non-technical person, that was intoxicating.

Then, only a few hours later, I asked, “Should we build a fantasy league?”

That was the point where the little trivia game became something much bigger. Suddenly we were talking about season-long leagues, weekly matchups, salary caps, and a paid soccer data feed. I even said yes to a $25/month API bill — an API is just a data connection from another service — for an app I had not launched and did not know if anyone would use.

That alone made me pause.

But the real doubt came later, when I kept asking the AI versions of the same question over and over:

Do we have the greatest trivia game and fantasy league so we can make that claim?

Do we have the best trivia game on the planet with the deepest knowledge and best user experience?

I wanted reassurance. I wanted the AI to say, “Yes, absolutely, this is world-class, go shout it from the rooftops.”

Instead, its answers were sobering.

The trivia side was not deep yet. It had around 25 static questions sitting in one file. There were no real-world image rounds. No audio. No huge database of soccer history. No meaningful depth compared with what the words “greatest” and “deepest knowledge” were promising.

That stung.

Not because the AI was mean. It wasn’t. It was just honest. And honestly, I needed that more than encouragement.

I had been moving fast, which is one of the strange gifts of building with AI. You can go from idea to screen so quickly that your brain starts to believe the whole thing is farther along than it really is. A working page can look like a finished product. A bold headline can feel like proof.

But it isn’t.

I had to face the fact that “greatest” is not a headline you paste onto a landing page. It is a bar you have to earn.

There was another moment that made me feel ridiculous in a different way. The “Create your account” button in the fantasy section did not seem to work. I clicked it, nothing happened, so I clicked again. Then I got red text telling me to wait 49 seconds before trying again.

I felt genuinely stupid.

It turned out the back end — the behind-the-scenes part that handles things like accounts — actually was working. It had sent a confirmation email. The problem was the screen gave me no feedback. No spinning indicator. No “check your email” message. So I kept tapping and hit the rate limit, which is basically a temporary slowdown to stop people from hammering the system.

The fix was simple. Add a loading message and tell people to check their email.

The feeling was not simple.

That little broken-feeling button reminded me how easy it is to be in over my head. I was building trivia, fantasy, accounts, paid data, weekly matchups, and eventually trying to avoid the legal mess of paid-entry fantasy by using LeagueSafe links instead of handling cash pools myself.

Somewhere in there, I thought: should I be doing this at all?

I still do not fully know the answer. The app is real. Trivia is live. Fantasy is functional. Weekly and live head-to-head duels are built. Some days it looks like a product I would actually pay to use.

But the doubt is still useful. It keeps me from believing my own marketing too early.

My takeaway: big claims are easy to type, but the product has to catch up.