I built this website in 8 hours with Claude. Now it makes $40K/month

The 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 on to the channel. I built this game in just [music] a weekend, and we make about $40,000 monthly. So, 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 [music] the entire thing in just a few hours of the quad, and his advice for building apps here [music] 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 built, and what's your story. It's great to be on. My name is Frank Smith. I built the Geosports web game. Right now, it's making about $40,000 per month, but three months ago, I built this game in just a [music] weekend. Since then, we've created several spin-off games. We've been featured on national TV twice. Today, I'm excited to be on Starter Story and share more. Awesome, Frank. Yeah, I'm so excited. Um, when when we first talked, I played I played the game and I kept playing it a couple days after then. So, it's so fun. And when we first talked, you were making only a couple thousand 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 Geo Sports or Geo Games. Just explain what it is in a few sentences and who your like users are. Geo Games is the name of the app. It hosts all the spin-offs, but right now we have several. We have uh Geo Sports, Geo History, Geo Footy.

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 uh comes in through the ads, which is closer to 30 $35,000 in programmatic right now. And what what keeps this game running is how sticky and sharable it is. This is my favorite stat. We have a 53% organic share rate, which means if we have, you know, 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 they're very young here. We actually don't even have a full 30 days yet. So, we hover around um $1,200 a day. So, here we go. Here is our Stripe. This is last 4 weeks, but we've had 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, [music] play today's round. You get a a clue right here at the top. Tailgating super fans themselves through tables in this NFL town. Tap right there and it's going to score you. Oh, I didn't even get a 100. I didn't get close enough. Now you see if I 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'll go for all five and you get your result. Hey, 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 [music] exists. to figure out ideas that are working right now, how to grow them, and ultimately how to build [music] 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. [music] Now, inside you're going to find literally thousands of business ideas, all with the actual data behind them. Stuff like revenue, [music] 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 a 100 business ideas that you can start for less than 500 bucks. [music] 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 that is awesome. Yeah, it's a it's a cool game.

It's fun. and it's easy to use and like you like you said it's really sharable 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 uh this website or this game that now makes roughly $40,000 a month? Sure. So, I've been working as an independent sports creator since 2020. Right during co 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. Um, but I have always had a passion for games. You know, very very shortly after I became an independent sports creator, I launched my first game. It was called Five Card Draw. We probably had 110,000 people play it. It was not a small game, but it was very, very niche. But I had been doing this for a while. I I launched several games after that. You know, it's funny that that Geos Sports even happened because we were very set on on on launching a different game and and this kind of just [music] exploded out of nowhere after a weekend of work.

You know, on this point, I want to just kind of talk a little bit about something I know cuz I know Star audience, they're probably thinking, you know, you're only successful, Frank, because you have this huge audience. You mentioned 4 million followers early on social media. We talked to a lot of founders who have an audience, and that's that's a common thing that we 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, you know, I have 200 followers on X or whatever the case may be. Uh, what would you say to someone watching who kind of has that objection in their head or objection about, you know, your story? Number 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 that I have 4 million followers.

I've worked very hard to do that. However, geosports relies very very little on my audience and I 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, [music] you know, one of the question, one of the five questions um on X and I post it on my Instagram story. We drive roughly about 2,000 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 the founder of this game. Now, 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. Cool. Yeah. So, let's get into that then. So, you 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 [music] website? >> Yeah. So, I I have to give credit to 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 uh 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 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 and and make a remix of sorts and I did and I I I just got to work right away and it slowly blossomed.

>> So you mentioned earlier kind of like you you coming home 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. >> You 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 map tab 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 Claude 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 for me. You know, it it's really beautiful how much you can accomplish now having my background and and not being technical. So, on that Sunday, I worked for about 8 hours. I I kind of just canceled my schedule on that Monday and and kept working on this and it got to a point where I was able to send it out.

>> So, you know, you you say you're non-technical. Uh what what is the tech stack that you use to build this? >> Okay, we have cloud max the 20x version. Uh we have Verscell Pro for hosting. Uh custom domain which I bought from Verscell. We use map libre for the globe. Up stash reddish for leaderboards and stats. Google sheets for the questions and stripe for the pro subscriptions. Pretty lean tech. I think that's awesome. Let'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 pieces of advice that you would give to people who, you know, are interested in building maybe their first app or their first project? Yeah. What kind of advice would you give to them? Don't be afraid to build for web first. [music] 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 sharable. 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% [music] of the traffic, 98% of the traffic is from word of mouth because the product is sharable. We reached over 1 million unique players in less than one month without a fancy email campaign. Uh so make your product sharable. Lastly is do not wait to get started. Try to block off 8 hours of uninterrupted work to give yourself a chance to build [music] 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. I, you know, I was, I was taking a ridiculous amount of screenshots when I was using Verscell and having to pinpoint, [music] you know, 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 [music] questions and recommend everyone else do the 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?"

>> Yeah. And it would >> And then when I'm doing it, I say, "Is this right? is what I'm putting in here right. Make sure it's right. Yeah. Okay. It's right. Let's go. >> Exactly. And sort of the fud didn't always get it right, but I 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 3 months. Give us an overview of that growth timeline and maybe at a high level or like how it grew so fast. Like 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 putting it on some of my social media stories. So, I I, you know, 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 [music] then that following day, that Saturday, we did 150,000 players in one

day. Uh it's the 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 5 days old. [music] So I I was not expecting this type of growth, so we got to work very quickly. So 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 give us a little bit more around like what you did to take this from zero [music] to where it is today. $40,000 per month and growing. >> What 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 sharable and 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 post 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 often times 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 I get to connect with all these people and we both grow together.

>> Final question for you, Frank. Um, if a question we ask all founders who come on the channel, if you were standing on your shoulders 3 months ago, a couple years ago, or for people watching who are just getting started, what would be your final piece of advice to them? If 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 [music] 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 [music] 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 [music] 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 6 years later. This did not happen overnight. So, um, 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. >> Frank, 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. U, maybe we'll talk to you again when you're at 100K per month or more. >> I look forward to it. Thank you, Gus.

>> Okay, I just wrapped up with Frank. That was a really fun interview, but I 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 sharability 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 mo 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 sharability into it.

Whether that's sharing a screenshot or sharing some stats [music] 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 is one of the main reasons I wanted to bring them on the channel in general, was sort of this theme of like tools like Claude and [music] Chad GBT codeex have really changed the game on who can be a builder. A small example is someone like me. I have zero technical experience and I'm I'm not successful by any means like these guys that we feature on the channel, but it's allowed a regular old Joemo like me to have an idea and actually bring it to life and make, you know, a couple hundred, which is what I've made so far. And for someone like Frank and other people we featured 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 products that are 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 Sertory 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.