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The other day I got a message from a 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 interested in this. So I said, "Sure." It's a very simple game at its core, and I think that's one of the reasons for its success. When he showed me his website, I thought it was pretty cool. But when he told me how much money he was making, I realized that we had to invite him to the channel. I created this game in just a weekend, and we're making about $40,000 a month. So in this episode, we'll dive into the incredibly simple site he built that's now bringing in over $40,000 a month, how he put it all together in a few hours, and what tips he has for building apps in 2026. Trust me,
you definitely don't want to miss this video. They drove. I'm Gus and this is Starter Story. So, Frank, welcome to Starter Story. Glad to see you here. Tell us who you are, what you've created, and what your story is. Very happy to be here. My name is Frank Smith. I created a web game called Geosports. It's currently making about $40,000 a month, but three months ago I made this game in just a weekend. Since then, we have created several additional games. We were featured on national television twice. Today I'm excited to be on Starter Story and share the details. Great, Frank. Yes, I am very excited. Um, when we first talked, I played the game, and then I played it for a few more days in a row. She is very
interesting. When we first talked, you were only making a couple thousand, and now you're making $40,000 a month, and it's happening so fast. So I really want to delve into all of this. So, let's move on to Geo Sports or Geo Games. Explain in a few sentences what it is and who your users are. Geo Games is the name of the app. All our projects are collected there, there are several of them now. We have Geo Sports, Geo History, Geo Footy. It's the same game, just for different niches. We have about 700,000 monthly active users and we make about $40,000 each month.
A small part of that is the paid subscriptions I just showed you. Now it has about 1,800 professional subscriptions. A significantly larger amount comes from advertising, which is about $30-35 thousand in programmatic advertising now. And what makes this game work is how catchy it is and how much you want to share it. This is my favorite statistic. We have 53% organic reach, which means that if we have, you know, 100,000 people playing during the day, and we've done this before, 53,000 of them will share their result. Okay, so here we have our programmatic advertising. As you can see, she's still quite new here. We actually do n't even have a full 30 days yet. So we're hovering around $1,200 a day. So, let's go. Here is our Stripe.
This has been the last 4 weeks, but Stripe has been with us for much longer. Okay, here's our landing page. As I mentioned, it is intentionally very simple. Geosports-a daily game about sports geography. Click on the place where it happened. Five questions. That's part of the magic, because we never had to teach people how to play this game. So, play today's round. You get a hint right here, at the top. Picnicking superfans throw themselves on tables in this NFL town. Click right there and the game will give you a score.
Oh, I didn't even get 100 points. I didn't get close enough Now you see, if I press too far, the result will be completely different. This one will be 72, and it's a yellow dot instead of a green one. You will pass all five and get your result. Hey, very quickly. I hope you enjoy Frank's story about how he created this wonderful website. We'll come back to that 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 bunch of our videos and are probably asking yourself, "How do I start my own side project or business?" Well, that's why Starter Story exists. To find ideas that work right now, how to develop them, and ultimately, how to build a successful
business. If you follow the link in the description, you will see the brand new Starter Story website. You can think of it as a research platform. Inside you'll find literally thousands of business ideas, all backed by real data. Things like revenue, how they have developed, startup costs, and anything else you might need to validate your idea and get started. We'll be releasing a bunch of new free resources every month. The last one is a database of over 100 business ideas that can be launched for less than $500.
We want to show you that capital and money don't have to be the main obstacle to starting your own business. So, if you're interested in this or any of the thousands of other business ideas on Starter Story, just follow the link in the description and check them out for absolutely free. Okay, let's get back to our story. Well, Frank, that's just incredible. Yes, it's a cool game. She is interesting. It's easy to use, and like you said, it's really something you want to share, which we'll probably talk about later in the context of growth. But let's take a few steps back and talk about your past. What did you do before this? What were
you doing before you launched this website or game that now brings in about $40,000 a month? Of course. I have been working as an independent sports creator since 2020. I started just during Covid. I have now grown my audience to over 4 million followers on social media. I am very well known for this. Most people don't know me as a game developer. Although this is becoming more and more popular, I am known as the author of very high- quality short sports videos, mostly with commentary. But I've always had a passion for games. You know, shortly after I became an independent sports creator, I released my first game. It was called "Five Card Draw". It must have been played by 110,000 people. It
wasn't a small game, but it was very niche. But I've been doing this for some time. After that, I launched a few more games. It's funny that Geo Sports came about at all, because we were set on launching another game, and this one just shot out of nowhere after a weekend of work. You know, on this occasion I want to talk about something that, I know, comes to mind for our audience: "Frank, you're only successful because you have a huge audience." You mentioned 4 million followers on social media. We connect with a lot of founders who have their own audiences, and that's something we often see on our channel. But I just want to give you a chance to share this with those who are 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 something like that. What would you say to a viewer who has such objections in their mind or doubts about your story? First, I will say that it is always smart to build your audience. Even if it's a small audience and you're building everything publicly, it's a good strategy today. Yes, the fact that I have 4 million followers helps. I worked very hard to achieve this. However, Geosports depends very, very little on my audience, and I have statistics to back this up. I only made one video about Geosports. Every day I post Geosports, well, one of the questions, one of the five questions, in X, and I put it on my
Instagram Story. We get about 2,000 clicks for these two posts that I make every day. So, in other words, that's about 2% of our daily traffic. The remaining 98% are everyday players who probably don't even know that I'm the founder of this game. This game relies on "word of mouth". Most of these people are those who communicate in group chats. One of their friends sent them the game, and they just decided to play. They had no idea who the founder was. Look, having followers is always helpful. I recommend building an audience, but that's definitely not the reason for this game's success. Steeply. Yes. So, let's get to it. You said it came out of nowhere. I can guess
what the answer would be, since you've been working in the sports industry for a long time, but how did you come up with the idea for this particular site? Yes. I have to give credit to my brother. He showed me a game called MapTap, and I loved it. I have always loved maps, globes, and especially Google Maps. I liked it, and once I was at a friend's wedding and was driving home on Sunday. On the way home, I had a thought: you know, I'm really looking forward to getting home and playing MapTap.
What if there was a sports version, since there aren't any quizzes in MapTap? It has no sports focus. I thought I could do something of my own and create a kind of remix. So he did, immediately got to work, and gradually everything blossomed. So, you mentioned earlier that when you got back from the wedding, you started working on this. As I understand it, you created this quite quickly, tell us a little about the creation story. How did you build it? How long did it take? Something like this. You know, first I turned to regular Claude and gave him a bunch of details. Here is all the information I have for the game, please explore Map Tap. And I had to write a technical specification. I am not a technical expert. I don't know how
to code. You know, at every stage when I got stuck, I just asked Claude, and we checked with the TK. And when we needed to install other tools, he gave me a lot of advice. You know, it's really amazing how much can be achieved now, with my experience and not being a technical expert. So that Sunday I worked for about 8 hours. I just canceled my things on Monday, kept working on it, and it got to the point where I was able to release it. So you're saying you're not a techie. What tech stack did you use to build this? Okay, we have Claude Max, version 20x. We have Vercel Pro for hosting, a custom domain that I bought through Vercel. We use MapLibre for the globe, Upstash, Google Sheets for questions, and Stripe for Pro subscriptions. Quite an economical stack. I
think that's great. Let's move on to the tips. I think people watching this might think, "Oh, I have a niche or strong interest in a certain area," like you had in sports, and you ended up creating this game. What would be some advice you would give to people interested in creating their first app or project? Yes. What advice would you give them? Don't be afraid to create for the web first. I succeeded right here. One of the main reasons GeoSports has gone so viral is that the barrier to entry is almost zero. People could play it, you know, the game exploded on social media, especially
on X. So people could play it without leaving X. They found it, they played it, and they shared it right there. It was a very comfortable experience. So for me, that's number one. I think this is very important and people should not Number two-make your product something you want to share. This sounds obvious, but it's not. So Geosports is successful only thanks to "word of mouth". This is still relevant today. You know, most people might think that I'm a content creator and I promote the game myself. This is not true at all. About 99% of traffic, 98% of traffic comes through " word of mouth," because the product is shared.
We attracted over 1 million unique players in less than a month without any fancy email campaigns. So, make your product something you want to share. And lastly: don't delay getting started. Try to set aside 8 hours of continuous work to give yourself a chance to create something. Again, this sounds obvious, but starting is really hard, and I understand that. And if you get stuck during those 8 hours, just ask your LLM and keep building . That's exactly what I did to create Geosports. You know, I took a lot of screenshots when I used Vercel because I had to accurately identify different platforms, domains, and all that stuff. I didn't know how to do all this. So I relied on
screenshots and a bunch of questions, and I advise everyone to do the same. I remember doing this the first time I created something. I literally took a screenshot of the entire screen and said, " Can you explain what the hell I'm even seeing?" Yes. And then, as I did it, I asked, "Is this right?" Is what I'm entering here correct? Make sure everything is correct." Yes. OK. That's right. They drove. That's right. And LLM didn't always get everything right, but mostly she guessed. So, let's change the subject and talk about the growth of this game, because you grew very quickly: from zero to 40 thousand per
month in three months. Tell us about the timeline of that growth and maybe on a general level why it has grown so quickly. As I said, we had a covert launch. I sent it to a few family members, friends and noticed they started sharing it. So I felt confident posting it on my social media stories. So, I, you know, did a few posts about this in X. Interestingly, the post I did about this in X was n't even about geosports. It was, you know, a post about the NBA or something. And I replied to my own tweet: "Hey, by the way, I made this game. I would really appreciate it if you all checked it out." And that response went completely viral.
I had about 40,000 players. And the next day, Saturday, we had 150,000 players in one day. This is the type of startup every founder dreams of, but we were completely unprepared for the maintenance issues. You know, this game was only 5 days old. So I didn't expect such growth. So we got to work very quickly. So, yeah, thanks for this review. Let's delve a little deeper into the issue of growth. For example, tell us about some of the tactics you use. I know you've already mentioned a few of them, but tell us a little more about what you did to get from zero to where you are today $40,000 a month and growing. We rely on a large group of players who come back and play every day. This is a game that is addictive. I realized very early on that geosports was extremely
viable and easy to deploy on X. So I created a new role called " host," specifically designed for sports media personalities and athletes on the platform. And, essentially, I realized that some of these people were playing. So I wrote to people with large audiences who liked posts about the game in direct messages and asked if they wanted to be hosts. And, of course, they asked what that meant? It just means they write five questions a day, and they're often very happy to do so. You know, when the game with their questions becomes available, I make a post: "Hey, today we have a host-this person." And almost always they retweet, and the game reaches a new audience. It still seems like a cheat code that people are willing to do this, but it's
also a great networking tool. I can connect with all these people and we both grow together. Last question for you, Frank. Um, the question we ask all the founders coming on the channel is: if you could give advice to yourself three months or a couple of years ago, or to those who are just starting out, what would you tell them in closing? If I could go back, I would say: stay in the game. I learned this lesson through my career in video production. I started making videos for YouTube back in high school. This was around 2007. YouTube was brand new back then. My videos didn't really become popular until 2020. There were a few successful videos, but only made a real name for myself in 2020, when I became an independent short video creator.
You know, for those who are not strong in math, it's about 13-14 years old. When I started making digital games later that year, this lesson was in my arsenal. I knew I had to be patient. We need to stay afloat. And in the end, it paid off. Games became popular in 2026. But then again, that's 6 years later. This didn't happen overnight. So, none of this would have happened if I hadn't stayed in the game, been patient, and gone through the tough times that accompany this journey. Frank, that's great advice. Thank you for visiting Starter Story. For everyone watching, leave a comment for Frank. Any other questions you may have or your thoughts on this release.
Thank you for coming to Starter Story. Maybe we'll talk again when you reach 100k a month or more. I'm looking forward Well, I just finished talking to Frank. This was a really interesting interview, and for me, two main takeaways that we mentioned throughout the conversation stand out. The first, and this is an obvious thing that we've talked about a lot: whatever you create, think about the opportunity to share it. I've created a few apps myself and am just starting to think about how to attract more users for those that are having any success. There are many ways to develop a project, but what he made obvious to me is to try to build the possibility of distribution into the product. Whether it's sharing a screenshot, or statistics, or
anything else-it's a really smart way to grow when people can use your app and tell others about it. The second thing, and this is one of the main reasons why I wanted to invite them to the channel in the first place, is the topic of how tools like Claude and ChatGPT Codex have fundamentally changed the idea of who can be a developer. Here's a small example- someone like me. I have no technical experience whatsoever and certainly haven't achieved the same success as the guys we feature on the channel. But it allowed an ordinary person like me to take an idea, bring it to life, and make, you know, a few hundred
dollars-which is what I've made so far. And for people like Frank and others we invite who already have a content creator mindset, they become the most successful in the new wave of app or product creation because they're thinking about distribution, and the technical barrier to development has completely disappeared. And I really like that he just started it as a fun project for himself, and now it's a $40,000 a month business that's probably changing his life. So one of the things we always say here at Sertory is just start creating something and you'll figure out the rest later. Therefore, at the link in the description you will find over 100 side projects that other people have launched. So if you want to create your first project yourself, but are
still looking for a good idea, be sure to check it out. Download it absolutely free. Well, thanks for watching. See you in the next video. See you later.
