Blake Taylor · Chicago, IL
I'm a founder and product builder. I spent three years inside high-volume sportsbook operations at DraftKings, where small process failures get expensive fast. In 2025 I started building my own products around that lesson, and in 2026 — after my role was eliminated — I stopped building around a job and went all in.
Everything here started as a real problem in my own life. This is the working record: what I'm building, where each thing honestly stands, what broke on the way, and what it changed my mind about. The studio sells outcomes. This site shows the machinery.
5 builds, one operating idea. Each one exists because I lived the problem first — they're evidence of how I think, not inventory. Every status is the real one, checked against artifacts on August 13, 2026, including the ones that aren't in anyone's hands yet.
Started from my own layoff.
When my DraftKings role ended I had the same problem everyone in that seat has: a hundred scattered applications, no feedback, and advice too generic to act on. The job search is the highest-stakes project most people ever run, and almost nobody runs it as a project.
Read the Career Forge storyStarted from watching good ideas die before the record button.
Most creators don't run out of ideas. They stall in the ninety seconds between having one and pressing record, because a thought in your head is not the same thing as words you can say on camera. I watched people abandon good ideas at exactly that gap, including me.
Read the Trendi storyStarted from a lifetime of sports arguments.
Sports takes are the most passionate opinions most people hold, and they evaporate into group-chat noise within an hour. Nobody keeps score. Nobody has to defend anything. The most fun argument you had this week left no trace.
Read the You Know Ball storyStarted from refusing to give my own studio a fake front door.
Every business front door forces a bad choice: a dead form that flattens a messy situation into dropdown fields, or a chat widget that cheerfully improvises answers it has no right to give. My studio needed a front door too, and I wasn't willing to ship either.
Read the Labs Concierge storyStarted from not wanting to rent my own context back.
Every tool that promises to organize your work wants your work on its servers, on a subscription, forever. I wanted the leverage without renting my own context back from someone else.
Read the Koi Cave storyThe studio is the same idea pointed at other people's businesses. That work lives on its own site.
The record itself — releases, defects, reversals, and the decisions in between. Updated July 26, 2026.
The same cycle runs through everything here — the products, the studio's client systems, and the safety work: find where a process quietly costs someone time, money, or nerve; replace the repeated decision with a system; then try to break my own release before anyone else can.
Every product here started as my own problem — a job search with no feedback loop, an idea dead before the record button, an argument nobody kept score of.
Deterministic cores before AI polish: a résumé engine that can't hallucinate your history, a debate score a player can reconstruct by hand.
I audit my own releases like an adversary. One audit closed Career Forge's checkout the day it found a payment could vanish without a trace.
Two Trendi defects survived weeks of green simulator runs and fell within hours of a genuine install on a real phone. The device decides.
Trendi's better-writing pipeline is switched off on purpose. A better sentence doesn't beat a broken written mode.
Builds 120, 121 and 122 went to TestFlight in one evening once the loop was tight. Then the cycle starts over.
Off the clock it's hoops arguments, the gym, and anime — which explains at least one of the products above. The longer version, and why the site is called koinophobia.
Six doors, depending on who you are. Every one ends somewhere specific — I read everything that comes in.
