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.
Four builds, one operating idea. Each one exists because I lived the problem first — they're evidence of how I think, not inventory. Every status below is the real one, including the two 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 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 visible symptom is rarely the real problem. I look for the point where a process quietly starts costing people time, money, or nerve.
Repeated decisions get replaced with a reliable system, so judgment is saved for the calls that actually deserve it.
Real status labels, documented decisions, no invented proof. If something is a concept or a work in progress, it says so.
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.
I read everything that comes in. To save you a guess about where to start:
