The Problem Nobody Built For
In 2021, the NCAA changed everything. After decades of blocking athletes from earning money from their own names, images, and likenesses, the rules finally shifted. Overnight, more than 500,000 college athletes became eligible to sign brand deals, collect licensing fees, and build businesses around their athletic identities.
It was one of the most significant policy shifts in the history of amateur sports. And the tooling response was almost comically inadequate.
What did athletes actually get? Some spreadsheets. A lot of DMs. And a handful of NIL marketplaces that positioned themselves as the answer โ charging 20 to 30 percent on every deal they brokered, turning themselves into yet another middleman between athletes and the money they'd earned.
The compliance tools that emerged were built for athletic departments and compliance officers, not for athletes. They tracked eligibility status and legal exposure. They did not help anyone run a business.
Nobody built the athlete's workspace. Nobody built the actual operating system for running your NIL business โ tracking who you're talking to, knowing what you're worth, delivering what you promised, and making sure you actually got paid. That gap is where NilPilot was born.
What Athletes Actually Need
When we looked at what was failing for athletes, it wasn't one thing. It was four distinct problems, stacking on top of each other.
None of these are athlete failures. They're infrastructure failures. The system handed athletes a business opportunity and zero business tools. We decided to fix that.
Ready to run your NIL like a business?
NilPilot gives you the full operating system โ valuation, pipeline, deliverables, media kit, and scam protection โ in one place.
Start Your Free Trial โSo We Built NilPilot
NilPilot is the workspace every NIL athlete should have had from day one. It's not a marketplace. We don't take a cut of your deals. We don't sit between you and your brands. We give you the tools to run the business yourself โ and run it well.
Here's what's inside:
The Vision
The way we think about it: think Nike app for athlete identity, Robinhood for NIL revenue. The athlete is the business. NilPilot is the operating system.
Right now, the NIL economy is shaped by a simple reality: the people who understand how the market works are getting paid, and the people who don't are leaving money on the table โ or worse, getting taken advantage of. We are here to close that gap. Every athlete who uses NilPilot should know their worth, run their pipeline, and get paid what they're owed.
NilPilot is built by DRACONES โ a company obsessed with building software ecosystems that give power to the people who create value, not the middlemen who extract it. We build for creators, athletes, and entrepreneurs who deserve professional-grade tools but have historically been handed spreadsheets and good luck.
This is the first product in what we intend to be the complete athlete stack. The NIL piece is urgent and real, and it's where we're focused now. But the bigger picture is an infrastructure layer for the modern athlete's business โ built from the ground up for the people who are actually doing the work.
About DRACONES
DRACONES builds software ecosystems for new categories. NilPilot is the first product in the athlete infrastructure stack โ built for the 500,000+ college athletes who finally have the right to earn, and deserve the tools to do it right.
Your NIL business deserves a real workspace.
NilPilot is free to try. No middleman. No 20% cut. Just tools that work.
Start your free trial โThe app is live. Founding member spots are still open. The first 100 athletes who join get three months free and permanent founding member status โ the kind of early-adopter acknowledgment that stays on your profile permanently. The deal doesn't get better from here. But your NIL situation will.