Speaker 1The other day I got a DM from this guy named Frank. He said, hey, I built this app. It took me a few hours. I'm making real money. Want to chat? I was intrigued. So I said, sure. It's a very simple game in nature. And I think that's one of the reasons it's been successful. When he showed me his website, I thought it was pretty awesome. But then when he told me how much money it was making, I knew we had to bring him onto the channel.
Speaker 2I built this game in just a weekend and we make about $40,000 monthly.
Speaker 1So in this episode, we're going to dive into the dead simple website he built that now makes over $40,000 a month, how he built the entire thing in just a few hours of the cloud, and his advice for building apps here in 2026. Trust me, this is one you do not want to miss. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. All right, Frank, welcome to Starter Story. Excited to have you here. Tell us who you are, what you build, and what's your story.
Speaker 2It's great to be on. My name is Frank Michael Smith. I built the GSM. GeoSports web game. Right now, it's making about $40,000 per month. But three months ago, I built this game in just a weekend. Since then, we've created several spinoff games. We've been featured on national TV twice. Today, I'm excited to be on Starter Story and share more.
Speaker 1Awesome, Frank. Yeah, I'm so excited. When we first talked, I played the game and I kept playing it a couple of days after that. And so it's so fun. And when we first talked, you were making only a couple thousand dollars. And now you're up to $40,000 a month so fast. So I'm really excited to dive into all of this. So let's get into it. GeoSports or GeoGames, just explain what it is in a few sentences and who your users are.
Speaker 2GeoGames is the name of the app. It hosts all the spinoffs. Right now, we have several. We have GeoSports, GeoHistory, GeoFooty. They're all the same game, just for different niches. We have about 700,000 monthly active users, and we make about $40,000 monthly. A smaller percentage of this is the pro subs, which I just showed you. That's about 1,800 pro subs right now. The much larger number comes in through the ads, which is closer to 30,000, 35,000. So it's a lot of $5,000 in programmatic right now. And what keeps this game running is how sticky and shareable it is. This is my favorite stat. We have a 53% organic share rate, which means if we have 100,000 people who play around in a given day, which we've done before, 53,000 of those people are going to share their score. All right, so here we have our programmatic ads. As you can see, they're very young here. We actually don't even have a full 30 days yet. So we hover around $1,200 a day. So here we go. Here is our stripe. This is last four weeks, stripe on here for much longer. All right, here's our landing page. As I mentioned, very simple on purpose, GeoSports, daily sports geography game, tap where it happened, five questions. This is part of the magic here is that we never had to teach people how to play this game. So play today's round. You get a clue right here at the top, tailgating super fans, hurl themselves through tables in this NFL town. Tap right there, and it's going to score you. Oh, I didn't even get 100. I didn't get close enough. Now you see if I click very far away, the score is going to be much different. This one's going to be 72, and it's, a yellow dot instead of a green. You go for all five and you get your result.
Speaker 1Hey, real quick. I hope you're enjoying Frank's story about how he built this awesome website. We're going to get back to it in a second, but I wanted to share something really exciting. If you're a big fan of Starter Story, which I hope you are, then you've watched a ton of our videos and are probably wondering, how can I start my own side project or my own business? Well, that's exactly why Starter Story exists, to figure out ideas that are working right now, how to grow them, and ultimately how to build a successful business. If you check out the link in the description, you're going to see a brand new Starter Story website. You can really think of it like a research platform now. Inside, you're going to find literally thousands of business ideas, all with the actual data behind them. Stuff like revenue, how they grew, cost to start, and everything else that you might need to validate your idea and start building. Every month, we're going to be rolling out a ton of new and free resources, and the latest one is a database of over 100 business ideas that you can start for less than 500 bucks. We want to show you that capital and money doesn't have to be the biggest constraint when it comes to starting your business. So if you're interested in this or any of the other thousands of business ideas we have inside Starter Story, just head to the link in the description and check it out 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the story. Well, Frank, that is awesome. Yeah, it's a cool game. It's fun. It's easy to use. And like you said, it's really shareable, which I imagine is going to be something we talk a little bit about later when it comes to growth. But let's take a few steps back and just talk about your background. What were you doing before this? What were you doing before you launched this website or this game that now makes. It's roughly $40,000 a month.
Speaker 2Sure. So I've been working as an independent sports creator since 2020. Right during COVID is when I got my start. I've grown the audience now to over 4 million followers across social media. I'm very well known for that. Most people don't know me as someone who created a game, although it's becoming more popular. They know me as someone who creates very high quality, short form sports videos, mostly commentary. But I have always had a passion for games. Very, very shortly after I became an independent sports creator, I launched my first game. It was called Five Car Draw. We probably had 100,000 subscribers. And I was like, I'm going to 10,000 people play it. It was not a small game, but it was very, very niche. But I have been doing this for a while. I launched several games after that. It's funny that GeoSports even happened because we were very set on launching a different game. And this kind of just exploded out of nowhere after a weekend of work.
Speaker 1At this point, I want to just kind of talk a little bit about something I know, because I know a star-studded audience. They're probably thinking, you're only successful, Frank, because you have this huge audience. You mentioned 4 million followers early on. You have this huge audience. You have this huge audience on social media. We talk to a lot of founders who have an audience. And that's a common thing that we see on the channel. But I just want to give you an opportunity to share, like for anyone who is watching and thinking, well, I can't do this because I don't have an audience or I have 200 followers on X or whatever the case may be. What would you say to someone watching who kind of has that objection in their head or objection about your story?
Speaker 2Number one, I'd say it's always smart to build an audience. Even if that's a small audience and you're building in public, it is a good strategy. Today, yes, it helps. I have 4 million followers. I've worked very hard to do that. However, GeoSports relies very, very little on my audience. And I have the stats to back it up here. I've made one video about GeoSports. What I do every day is I post GeoSports, one of the five questions on X and I post it on my Instagram story. We drive roughly about 2000 clicks from those two posts I do every day. So in other words, that's about 2% of our daily traffic. The other 98% is daily players that probably don't even know that I'm doing it. So I post it on my Instagram story. This game is about word of mouth. Most of these people are people who are in group chats. One of their buddies sent them the game and they just decided to play. They had no idea who the founder was. Look, it's always helpful to have a following. I recommend building a following, but that is definitely not why this game has succeeded.
Speaker 1Cool. Yeah. So let's get into that then. So you kind of said it came a little bit out of nowhere. So I can imagine the answer because you've been working in sports for a long time. But how did you come up with the idea for this particular website?
Speaker 2Yeah. So I have to give credit to my friend, my brother here. He showed me this game called MapTap and I loved it. I was always someone who loved maps and globes and Google Maps in particular. I loved it. And I was, you know, I was at a buddy's wedding and I was driving home that Sunday. I just had this thought running through my mind on the way home where it's like, you know, I really am. I'm excited to play MapTap when I get home. What if I had a sports version? Because MapTap doesn't do any sort of trivia. It doesn't have a sports twist on it. I thought I could do my own thing and make a remix of sorts. And I did. And I just got to work right away. And it slowly blossomed.
Speaker 1So you mentioned earlier, kind of like you coming up from this wedding, you started working on it. It's my understanding that you built this kind of really quickly, but tell us a little bit about the build story. How'd you build it? How long did it take you? Stuff like that.
Speaker 2You know, I went to regular Cloud first and I just gave it a bunch of detail. Here's all this information I have for a game, you know, do some research on MapTap. And I had to build a spec. I'm not technical. I don't know how to code. You know, every step of the way, when I would get stuck, I would just ask Cloud and we'd refer back to the spec. And, you know, when we needed to install other tools, it recommended a lot of these things. You know, it's really beautiful how much you can accomplish now having my background and not being technical. So on that Sunday, I worked for about eight hours. I kind of just canceled my schedule on that Monday and kept working on this. And it got to a point where I was able to send it
Speaker 1out. So, you know, you say you're not technical. What is the tech stack that you use to build this?
Speaker 2Okay. We have Cloud Max, the 20X version. We have Vercel Pro for hosting, Custom Domain, which I bought from Vercel. We use MapLibre for the globe, Threadist for leaderboards and stats, Google Sheets for the questions, and Stripe for the pro subscriptions. Pretty lean tech stack. I think that's awesome.
Speaker 1Let's get into a little bit of advice. I think people who are watching this might be thinking to themselves, oh, I have like a niche or a strong interest in a particular space, kind of like you had for sports and you ended up building this game. What would be your, you know, a couple of pieces of advice that you would give to people who are interested in building maybe their first app or their first project? Yeah. What kind of advice would you give to them?
Speaker 2Don't be afraid to build for web. I've had success here. One of the main reasons that GeoSports was able to become so viral was that there is near zero friction. People could play this, you know, the game blew up on social media, specifically on X. So people could play without ever leaving X. They found it, they played it, they shared it all there. It was a very seamless experience. So that's number one for me. I think that's very important and something that, you know, people shouldn't just skip over. Sure. Number two would be make your product shareable. This sounds obvious, but it's not. So GeoSports is only a success because of word of mouth. That is true still to this day. You know, most people might think that I'm a content creator and I'm pushing it. It's really not like 99% of the traffic. 98% of the traffic is from word of mouth because the product is shareable. We reached over 1 million unique players in less than one month without a fancy email campaign. So make your product shareable. Lastly is do not wait to get started. Try to block off eight hours of uninterrupted work to give yourself a chance to build something. You know, again, it sounds obvious, but you, but getting started is so difficult and that's not lost on me. And if you do get stuck, in those eight hours, just ask your LLM and keep building. This is what I did to build GeoSports. sports. I was taking a ridiculous amount of screenshots when I was using Vercel and having to pinpoint the different platforms and the domain and all of this stuff. I don't know how to do this stuff. So I relied on screenshots and tons of questions and recommend everyone else do
Speaker 1the same. I remember doing that for the first time that I built stuff. I would literally just like take an entire screenshot of my screen and say, can you explain what the heck I'm even looking at? And then when I'm doing it, I say, is this right?
Speaker 2Is what I'm putting in here right? Make sure it's right. Yeah. Okay. It's right. Let's go. Exactly.
Speaker 1And so the cloud didn't always get it right, but it got it right most of the time. So let's switch gears here and talk about the growth of this game because, you know, you grew really fast, zero to 40K per month in three months. Give us an overview of that growth timeline and maybe at a high level or like how it grew so fast.
Speaker 2Like I said, we had a stealth launch. I sent it to a couple family members, friends, and I noticed that they were sharing it. So I felt comfortable. So I made a couple posts about it on X, you know, interestingly, the post I made about it on X wasn't even a post about geosports. It was, you know, a post about the NBA or something. And I replied to my own tweet saying, Hey, by the way, I made this game. I'd really appreciate if you guys all checked it out. And that reply went completely viral. I had about 40,000 players. And then that following day, that Saturday we did 150,000 players in one day. It's, it's the type of launch that every founder dreams of, but we were also very unprepared on the retention side. You know, this game was only five days old, so I was not expecting this type of growth. So we got to work very quickly.
Speaker 1So, yeah, thanks for giving that overview. Let's just go a little bit deeper on growth. Like give us some of the tactics you use. I know you already kind of mentioned a few of them, but just give us a little bit more around like what you did to take this from zero to where it is today, $40,000 per month and growing.
Speaker 2What we rely on is a large group of players coming back and playing every day. It's a very habitual game. So I realized very early on that GeoSports was extremely viable and shareable on X. So I created this new role called a hosting role specifically designed for sports media personalities and athletes on the platform. And basically what I did is I realized some of these people were playing. So I DM people with large followings who had been liking the posts about the game and asked if they wanted to host. And naturally they asked, what does that mean? All it means is they would write the five daily questions, which oftentimes they're very excited to do. You know, when the game, with their questions goes live, I make a post saying, Hey, you know, we have this person as host today. And almost always they retweet it and the game reaches a new audience. This still feels like a cheat code that people are willing to do this, but it's also an amazing networking tool. I get to connect with all these people and we both grow together.
Speaker 1Final question for you, Frank. A question we ask all founders who come on the channel. If you were standing on your shoulders three months ago, a couple of years ago, for people watching or just getting started, what would be your final piece of advice to them?
Speaker 2If I could go back, I would say stay in the game. I learned this lesson from my career in video production. I started producing YouTube videos when I was in middle school. This was about 2007. YouTube was very new. My videos didn't really become popular until 2020. I had a few that took off, but I didn't make a name for myself really until 2020 when I became an independent short form creator. You know, for those who are bad at math, that's about 13, 14 years. When I started making digital games later that same year in 2020, I had this lesson in my back pocket. I knew that you had to be patient. You have to keep your feet in the water. And ultimately that paid off. The games exploded in 2026. But again, that's six years later, this did not happen overnight. So none of this happens if I don't stay in the game, if I don't practice patience and suffer through some of the hard times that come with that.
Speaker 1Frank, that's great advice. Thanks so much for coming on Starter Story. For whoever's watching, leave a comment for Frank, any other questions you might have or what your thoughts are on this episode. Thanks for coming on Starter Story. Maybe we'll talk to you again when you're at a hundred K per month or more. Bye. Bye. I look forward to it. Thank you, Gus. Okay. I just wrapped up with Frank. That was a really fun interview, but it's really coming down to like two main takeaways for me, which we mentioned kind of throughout the interview. The first one, and this is like the obvious one we talked a lot about was whatever you're building, think about the shareability of it. I've created a few different apps myself, and I'm just starting to think about for some of them that are like moderate, slightly, very slightly successful. How do I get more users to this? There's lots of, you know, lots of ways to grow something, but something that he made really obvious to me was try to build some shareability into it, whether that's sharing a screenshot or sharing some stats or something that someone can use your app for and tell someone else about it is a really obviously smart way to grow. The second thing, and this was one of the main reasons I wanted to bring him on the channel in general, was sort of this theme of like tools like Claude and ChagiPT Codex have really changed the game on who can be a builder. A small example of someone like me, I have zero technical experience and I'm not successful by any means like these guys that we feature on the channel, but it's a lot of regular old Joe Schmo like me to have an idea and actually bring it to life and make a couple hundred dollars, which is what I've made so far. And for someone like Frank and other people we feature on the channel who already have this sort of like content creator mindset, those kind of people are the folks that are most successful in the coming wave of apps that are built or built because they have the distribution in mind. And now the technical aspect of building that blocker is completely gone. And I think it's really fun that he just started this as a fun project for himself and now it's become this $40,000 per month business that is probably changing his life. So one of the things we always say here at Sutter Story is you just have to go build something and you can and will figure out the rest later. That's why at the link in the description, you can find over 100 side projects that people have started. So if you yourself are looking to build your first side project, but are still trying to find the right idea that might work, go ahead and check that out. Download it 100% for free. All right. Thanks for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
PodcastTranscript AI