Falling into SPURTS:
Inches Add Up

Fall is my favorite time of year. It feels like a giant exhale.

The air cools, the jogs outside are easier, and the kids turn our piles of leaves into a full-contact sport. Football dominates screens every weekend, hockey comes back, and baseball saves the best drama for October.

After a long, hot summer (which didn’t want to give up down the stretch), everything is starting to feel more sharp and alive. A strange thing to say about the time of year when leaves are literally falling off trees, but to me, fall has always felt like a fresh start - definitely more so than Spring. And this year, Fall is exceptionally refreshing.

Our house is in deep right now. Everett’s playing hockey and flag football, Cooper’s got hockey and soccer going, and basketball awaits once winter cracks. So, most of my week is a combination of rinks, fields, snack duty, and searching for a missing shin guard at 6:40 in the morning.

I don’t think I would trade it though… (Ask me again mid-drive between activities on opposite ends of town.)

Somewhere in the middle of this beautiful chaos, I finally pulled back the cover on something I’ve been building for the last 3 months. PlaySPURTS.com is live. It’s the first of many products launched by Newthos. It’s for both the casual fan and America’s Top Sports Brains… the people who want to do something with all of it. The stats they hoard, the takes they defend in the group chat daily, the competitive streak and (let’s be honest) the control-freak tendencies they can’t quite switch off. The Apple App Store and Google Play versions are in review, just weeks from public download.

Here’s the teaser, if you want the 1-minute version:

Shrugging off warnings and keeping up

I figured building the games would be the hard part. Some days, it is.

I’ll spend a whole afternoon chasing one bug through the codebase, squash it, and watch two more pop up… the world’s least fun game of whack-a-mole. Other days the hard part has nothing to do with code at all. It’s an account, an approval, a compliance check, or a form asking for the exact same info I typed into a different form three forms ago.

I get why a lot of those hoops exist. Some protect people and keep bad actors out, and I respect that. I just didn’t expect this many of them, or how much of my day a “quick, simple step” could quietly eat.

Then there’s a part that really gets me: keeping up with everything.

Some stretches, my main job feels like replying “yes, I’m aware of that” to the same handful of things on repeat, while a dozen new ones line up behind them. It’s genuinely hard to keep pace. Some days I’d give a lot for three times the people helping me push this forward.

(For now, the team is me, a very long to-do list, and a son who keeps asking to play what I’m building… and to build a new one together.)

A business owner friend warned me. “Give yourself six months to a year just to get all the BS set up,” they said. I nodded politely and figured they were exaggerating.

They were not exaggerating. I shrugged it off, assumed it was something they went through but I somehow wouldn’t. I was wrong.

Then, mid-week, deep in the weeds on one small thing, something clicks. A mechanic finally works the way I pictured it. A screen that felt clunky last night is finally fixed and honestly kind of amazing by lunch.

And just like that, I remember why I started.

That’s the strange rhythm of building SPURTS. The rough days make progress feel impossible. The great days make the whole future feel inevitable. Same project, same week, wildly different forecasts… and neither one is telling the truth.

So I’m learning not to fully trust either. Stay humble when it’s flying, keep my head when it’s sinking, and just keep showing up.

One day at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is this.

It’s hard. But when I zoom out, I can see the inches adding up.

More on SPURTS

Front Office Franchise League is fantasy football rebuilt to be smarter, quicker, and a lot more strategic… and it only asks about fifteen minutes a week. Bid smart, tag the guy who balled, wheel a trade, make your picks.

You run your franchise like a real GM. A weekly warchest for sealed bids on players, five quick pick’em calls, and the commissioner’s drop of the week, all feeding the standings. Slap a franchise tag on a performance to lock it in, work the GM wheel to trade any time (the front office never closes), and cash in GM Tokens on side-challenges for a boost. Whatever you don’t spend rolls over… bank it for a bidding war later.

It’s rolling out across SPURTS soon, but right now it’s in the hands of a tight-knit beta crew… my closest sports friends, family, and the fans who won’t lie to me.

Daily Drops hand you a quick set of plays on the day’s biggest sports moments. Challenges put you head-to-head with friends. Takes & Predictions get your opinions on the record, so the group chat finally has receipts.

Then there’s the Arcade… a whole grid of brain games and puzzles built from the players, stats, history, and weird little connections that make sports so fun to obsess over. And with baseball rolling into its biggest month, October Heat is coming too… a postseason challenge built for the tension of every series.

There’s a lot in there. That’s because sports fandom has a lot in it. It’s competition, memory, staying current, instincts, and the joy of saying “I told you, man.”

MVP is Live, GTM Capital Raise

Honest status, founder to reader: I feel genuinely strong about SPURTS as an MVP right now.

Not finished… MVPs never are, and I’ve made peace with that… but real, tangible, and good enough to put in front of people who’ll tell me the truth. After years of thinking about building products, that milestone means a lot.

So the next step is a real one. I’m starting early preseed capital raising… enough to expand the team, move faster, and keep growth realistic instead of reckless.

I don’t want to over-hire, over-promise, or build a rocket I can’t steer. Just enough fuel to do the next chapter well and keep this thing standing on its own.

If you’re an investor, an operator, or you know the person I should be talking to, those are the doors I’m starting to open. If you can make an introduction, or want to forward along my pitch deck, please reach out to me.

Fall Bops That Fuel Me

I always carry a few songs into fall. Here are five riding along this year… the first three are regulars, the last two earned their way in. Tap any to open in Spotify:

Bonus: "The Boys of Fall" has one of my favorite videos every fall.

Fall is exactly the right time to bring SPURTS into the world. There’s a real road ahead… marketing, business calls, monetization, and a lot of hard work still to do.

But after all the building, the revising, the forms, the setbacks, and the unexpectedly great afternoons, I’m glad to finally have a meaningful update to share.

So please, give PlaySPURTS.com a try. Report the bugs, send feedback, email me, forward it to a friend. All of it pushes the product forward.

There are a few other Newthos products waiting in the wings too, and some have nothing to do with screens at all. I can’t wait to dig into those when the time is right, dabbling here and there until then.

For now, my hands are plenty full with SPURTS, and another pile of leaves the kids can immediately destroy.