← Chris Meisner

Co-founder and the only designer for four years — the identity, the product, the embed publishers dropped into their own articles, the SMS flow that let a fan play without installing anything, and the fundraise deck. It ran wherever the conversation already was: its own site, a hundred-plus publishers, cable and OTT. Topps, USA Today and Xfinity all shipped it, and it reached 8.5 million people before closing in 2022.

www.sportico.com/business/finance/2021/startup-raises-3-million-pickup-prediction-1234639386 ↗

The challenge

Sports fans have an opinion about every headline and nowhere useful to put it. The conversation was scattered across group texts, feeds and comment sections — loud, unmeasured, and invisible to the media companies whose own content had started it. The bet was that the headline itself could be the question: answerable in one tap, wherever the fan already was, with no download and no signup form standing in front of it.

Owned

Co-founder and the only designer, so the brand, the product and the story investors read were all one job. The identity; the Pick itself, and the fan profile, points and rewards loop behind it; the embed publishers dropped into their own articles; the SMS flow that let someone play and get graded without installing anything; the marketing site; the fundraise deck. On a company whose whole proposition was low-barrier participation, where the friction went was the business model, not a detail of it.

Outcome

A platform that ran wherever the fan conversation already was — its own site, more than a hundred publishers, cable and OTT, and SMS. Topps gave memorabilia away through it in 2019; USA Today and its publisher network embedded the technology across 2020–21; Xfinity put it on the ten-foot experience for March Madness in 2021, where the SMS loop drove a 500%-plus lift in TV engagement. By mid-2021, backed by KB Partners, DRIVE by DraftKings and Connetic Ventures, it had reached 8.5 million people across 8,415 props and 688,084 picks, and a reader spent 1:55 on an article carrying a Pick against a 1:00 industry benchmark. It closed the following year: the distribution worked, the business under it never caught up. Four years as the founder rather than the designer a founder hires is the part that carried forward.