Bracket tournaments for very unserious decisions.
Bracket Bonanza
People love a bracket-style tournament, especially when the stakes are low and the opinions are loud. Bracket Bonanza lets anyone set up a tournament, seed it, share a link, and let the group vote its way to a champion.
At a glance
Role: Solo. Product, design, and build
Built with: Lovable, as a deliberate test of it as a rapid prototyping and building tool
Timeline: January to February 2026
Live at: bracket-bonanza-buddy.lovable.app
The problem
I've run bracket tournaments at a couple of workplaces: best marketing slogan, best 90s TV dad, best emoji, best animal. They were a reliable way to get people talking to each other who normally wouldn't. (For the record, Danny Tanner and the sea otter took their crowns.)
All of it ran in Slack, by hand. I built every bracket myself, posted each matchup, and assigned an emoji to each contender. For favorite Christmas movie, Elf got an elf and Home Alone got a house, and whichever had more reactions won.
The voting was the easy part. The work was everything around it: deciding who faces whom, tracking who advances, and making sure two crowd favorites didn't knock each other out in round one. That last problem is where seeding came from.
Screenshot of the voting screen, Round of 64.
What I built
Bracket Bonanza turns the commissioner's job into settings.
An item pool. Drop in as many contenders as you want. The app builds the right-sized bracket from the pool, so 70 cakes becomes a clean 64-competitor tournament with play-in rounds. Drop in up to 300 items, which most other bracket tools won’t let you do.
AI seeding. The app ranks the contenders so the strongest ones are spread apart and the early rounds stay fun. This is the exact problem I used to solve by hand.
Tunable drama. Settings for seeding, a "chaos" level, and round names, so a goose-naming contest and a serious team decision can feel different.
Zero-friction voting. Share a link or QR code, add your name if you want to (anonymous is fine), and vote matchup by matchup with a progress bar for the round.
Two voting styles: quick picks, or scoring when a decision deserves more nuance.
Screenshot of the tournament dashboard with the seeded bracket and QR invite.
The real test: MeGoosta
My best friend Megan has a porch goose in her office, and the goose needed a name. She set up a tournament, ran it, and got 24 coworkers to vote, all without me. The winner was MeGoosta.
That's the result I care about most. A tool I built for fun worked for someone who isn't me, in a workplace I've never seen, with no help. The only snag was a tie that the app couldn't break. She told me, and I fixed the bug right away.
What Lovable taught me
Lovable is great at getting an idea out of my head and into something people can click on. For a prototype or a quick proof of concept, I'd reach for it again.
If I rebuilt Bracket Bonanza today, I'd use Claude Code. I want more control over the stack I build on. I also work from a Linear backlog: Claude Code connects to it, helps me pick the next ticket, and builds with me from there. That's how I built my other side projects, and it's become how I like to work.
What's next
Slack integration is in progress, which feels right, since Slack is where this whole thing started. Looking forward to more real user feedback to improve the product.