This app replaced my 9-5 ($155K/year)

0:00My revenue jumped from roughly 1,000 a month to 10,000 a month almost overnight from that one single post. This is Ken. He spent most of his career working at some of the biggest tech companies in the world. He was successful, making good money until he walked away from all of it to build a game. But here's the thing, he had never built a game before in his life, and he

0:19honestly had no idea if it would work. At that point, I hadn't written a single line of code in over 4 years. But just a couple years later, this little game is already making him over $10,000 a month. So, I wanted to have Ken on the channel to break it all down for us. And in this [music] episode, we're going to dive into why he left his dream tech job to build a tiny mobile game by himself, how he grew it to over $10,000 a month without spending a dollar on [music] marketing, and the massive opportunity in games that almost nobody is talking about. All right, I'm excited for this

0:49one. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Hey, real quick before we hop in. I'm Gus, producer of the Starter Story YouTube channel. You've probably seen me near the back half of the interviews. I'm filling in for Pat this week because he's out traveling the world. But don't worry, he'll be back. In the meantime, enjoy this interview. I think it's going to be really fun. This is one of the

1:07first interviews I'm hosting by myself. So, enjoy. Ken, welcome to the channel. Excited to have you and talk about games today. Can you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story? Yeah. Hey, my name is Ken and I've been building a mobile game called Harpia for the past couple years. I officially launched the game a little over a year and a half ago while still working a full-time job. Growth was slow because I didn't do any marketing. After a single Reddit post, my revenue grew from about a thousand a month to over 10,000 a month. I had no audience, no publisher, and I had no budget for marketing. I'm

1:38excited to share how building a game for a small audience can be enough to build a profitable business. Yeah, I'm excited to get into quitting your job, building a game. But before we get into that, let's talk about Harpagia [music] itself, your game. So, can you pull up your website or landing page and just tell us what your game is, who it's

1:56for, give us a little overview of that. Yeah, absolutely. Harpagia is a textbased idol RPG. Players level up skills, battle monsters, collect loot, and upgrade their character over time. The game is mainly played by fans of incremental games like Runescape. And in this type of game, you're not actively playing most of the time. The main point is to make meaningful progress while you're away, come back to collect rewards, and then decide what to do

2:16next. Awesome. That sounds cool. I'm not a big gamer myself. The closest I ever got to gaming was like Pokemon on my Game Boy, but I think it's really cool that you built this. Can you pull up your revenue screenshots or dashboards to kind of show off your revenue, show us that this thing is legit? Okay. Harpagia is a free-to-play mobile game on iOS and Android. The game generates revenue through optional inapp purchases that unlock premium features or speed up progression. A lot of the pricing ranges anywhere from the $2 to $10 range. What I've learned through a lot of monetization experimentation is anything around $4.99 to $9.99, players

2:50will generally be okay to spend. Anything that's above $9.99, it's a little bit harder to convert. Over the past year, the game averaged over $3 in revenue per active user. The average monthly revenue has been around 13,000 a month, which totaled over 150,000 in the past year. The monthly active users ranges anywhere from 3500 to 4,000 with daily active users around 5 to 600. The game has reached over 50,000 downloads combined with both iOS and Android with roughly a 6% conversion rate, which I would consider pretty decent considering the typical conversion rate for games is anywhere from 2 to 5%. My ongoing operating expenses such as purchasing

3:24assets, freelancing art, subscriptions, and so on is roughly 500 a month. And I did not spend anything on ads, so my ad spend was zero. Awesome, Ken. That is really cool to see. And I'm really excited to get into your background, how you even got to this place, how you grew this game. What were you doing before you were building

3:40Harpagia? Yeah, so starting off growing up, I took the traditional path. I went to college, studied computer science at UCSD, and started working in tech right after I graduated. I spent about 12 years in big tech, most recently as an engineering manager at Meta. Before that, I was a software engineer at Amazon. During the beginning of 2024, AI tools started gaining traction. At that point, I hadn't written a single line of code in over 4 years, and I wanted to see if I could build an app with AI assistance. I built my first app, which was a simple card game called Big Too Wild in about

4:09six weeks. I made this game because this was a really popular card game that my friends and I had played back in high school. I also wanted to make sure that the scope was small enough for me to complete in a short amount of time to gain experience of actually shipping something. Building that game taught me a lot about AI assisted development, building a product end to end, handling app store approvals, and what it actually takes to launch a product to the world. I took those lessons and applied them to my next project, which became Harpia. I love everything that Ken is breaking down right now. He built

4:37and grew this game entirely [music] by himself. He was just a guy who quit his job in tech to build this tiny game by himself that's now making over $10,000 a month. We [music] really love stories like this at Starter Story because it shows that sometimes there's something more than having a big comfortable tech job. [music] Sometimes what really matters is going out on your own and building your own thing. So, that's exactly why we work with [music] the team at HubSpot, put together a free database of over a thousand solo developers who are making over $10,000 a

5:05month from their [music] projects. Inside that database, we have real revenue numbers, real strategies, all from stuff who are building projects [music] by themselves, just like Ken. So, if you're looking for a proven idea and are ready to build, just head to [music] the first link in the description and grab this database 100% for free. All right, let's get back to Ken. Okay, that's awesome. Uh we often say here at Starter Story is one of the best ways to come up with any business idea is to build [music] something you know you would want to use. But I want to go back just a little click. You

5:32mentioned that you worked at these [music] big tech companies Meta and Amazon assuming you were making decent money and yet you still decided that you didn't want to maybe continue pursuing that traditional path and you wanted to [music] build this game. Tell us a little bit of the story around quitting tech to build this little mobile game. Yeah, so working at Meta was really stressful but rewarding. During the first half of my career there, I learned an incredible amount. I had great mentors and the company was also really supportive of its employees. However, things shifted over time. Once the layoff started happening in 2022, my

6:04perception of job stability had changed. I realized that job security is never guaranteed no matter how hard you work. I wanted to take control of my own future. I started experimenting with AI tools and chose to build a game because gaming was something I felt that I knew very well. After I launched, a small group of players found the game and gave me feedback. I made my first sale a few days into launch, which was incredibly validating. It proved to me that even though my game was in an incredibly early alpha version, someone enjoyed it enough to spend $10 for something that I had built. By the end of my first month,

6:34I made about $150 in sales. By the end of my second month, I made about 1,500 in total sales. It was at this point that I started to see that this could potentially be more than just a small hobby project. I decided that if my game could reach 10,000 a month organically, I'd leave my job and go all in. The game continued to grow slowly and six months after launch, I made my first Reddit post about the game. The response was actually overwhelmingly critical, but the post gained significant traction and put Harpia in front of thousands of players. My revenue jumped from roughly 1,000 a month to 10,000 a month almost

7:06overnight from that one single post and I hit my goal. I left Meta that same month. the salary at Meta is way above that. But once again, I just really wanted to do something for myself for the first time ever. That's why I thought that if the financial aspect wasn't enough to cover my expenses, I'm just going to do it because if I'm not going to do it now, when am I going to

7:24do it? Yeah, I like that mindset of like if I'm not going to do it now, when am I going to do it? You know, I think if you want to do this, like you can sort of set parameters to make it happen and once you make those parameters work, you can actually go [music] for it. And it kind of sounds like a little bit of what you did. That's cool. Okay, let's get into the growth. I'm really excited to talk a little bit more about this. So, you mentioned in your first year you spent $0 on marketing [music] and you also mentioned something about how Reddit has

7:48been a useful marketing tool for you. So, let's get into it. What were some of the like main marketing distribution strategies you use to help you go from zero to $10,000 a month? Yeah. So, my main marketing strategy after the first year was posting on Reddit. Almost every single time that I posted on there, I'd receive a significant jump in new players. While the results weren't consistent, Reddit

8:09has been my number one marketing tactic. I think one challenge though for Reddit is that many subreddits don't allow developers to promote their product more than once a month. Because of that, I generally only shared major updates once every few months. One thing that I found interesting was that the posts generating the most discussion often performed the best, especially the ones that received the most criticism. The very first post that I made just showed some screenshots of the game and kind of just explaining a little bit about what the game is and a few metrics about, you know, how to free to play it is because

8:38a lot of people, especially in the gaming community, want to try out a game before they want to pay for the game. At the time, it was really rough around the edges when I first advertised the game, but that honestly didn't matter because it brought in so much conversation and criticism from the Reddit users that it

8:54actually helped boost my game so much. And every single one of those posts, I get a huge jump in new users. Again, over time, revenue grew from around 10,000 a month to a peak of roughly 18,000 a month just posting on Reddit. Yeah, I think Reddit is something we've seen over and over again on Starter Story as a place where people start to get that initial traction. And obviously for you, it took you a lot of these posts helped you get from that 0 to $10,000 a month. The main lesson I'm getting from this brief section is like all publicity is good publicity and it gave you users, it gave you traction and

9:22probably I'm assuming it gave you [music] some feedback that you ended up taking and applying to the game. So, let's switch gears a little bit. Like I was mentioning earlier, talking about games is not something we always uh feature on starter story, but I was really curious to bring you on because you know like your background of working in big tech and dropping that to build this kind of tiny game. Let's talk about the opportunity in games. Can you just give us or educate us on a little bit of

9:47like how big this gaming opportunity is? Is there room for people watching who, you know, maybe do a little bit of gaming on the side to start building their own games? The gaming industry is a hundred billion dollar industry. And I think one misconception is that you need to have hundreds of thousands or millions of

10:03players to have a sustainable business. What I learned over the past couple years is that you can make a meaningful amount of money with a small audience if you're building something people genuinely enjoy. When I first started building Harpagasia, I never would have believed that only a few hundred active users could generate over 100,000 in revenue each year. That completely changed how I think about niche businesses and small audiences. The opportunity isn't necessarily building the next big hit like Flappy Bird or Clash of Clans. The opportunity is being able to build something that you generally care about and find other

10:34people who care about it, too. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I like what you said about kind of building as a way to kind of express your creative vision or kind of bring something thinking about to life in a game. Okay, let's switch gears and maybe just show us a little demo of your game, how it works. I would

10:50love to see it. So, at its core, there are 16 different skills in Arpasia. Some skills are pretty simple. You simply hit the start mining and then you can get tons of resources which you can use to upgrade your items. There are other more interactive skills like archaeology where you tap on various tiles and upgrade things to get various different bonuses in the game. You can also upgrade your items to get stronger weapons uh which you can then use to go battle enemies. Here is what the combat

11:16looks like. This is what an idol RPG is. Basically, you don't need to do anything and the game just automatically fights the enemies for you. There's tons of different gears and abilities that you can equip. So there's a lot of different variety and a lot of builds that you can do which makes the game have quite a bit

11:31of variety. Cool. That's awesome. And you built all this just with AI too. I can see why people might like it, right? They're kind of collecting things. They're growing things. Let's switch topics here. Let's talk about how you built this. What's the tech? What are the tools you use to build this game and

11:45build your business? Our pages tech stack is very lightweight. You don't need a vast amount of tools to build a profitable product. For my code editor, I use cursor. I use chat GPT for brainstorming and doing various icon touch-ups. I use React Native for my front end. I use Firebase for my backend O and analytics. I use Discord Nitro for community management. I use Versell for web hosting. And the following are not necessarily tools but are very useful in the gaming niche. For purchasing assets, I use the Unity asset store or gamedev market which have a lot of prepackaged assets that you can purchase and save a

12:18lot of time on making art. I also use Fiverr and Upwork to hire freelancers to create screenshots, icons, videos, so I can just focus on building. All right, let's wrap up here and just talk about a question we always ask to everyone that comes on the channel. If you [music] were standing on your shoulders 2 years ago, 5 years ago, what

12:35advice would you give to yourself? [music] Build something that you understand well and get real feedback as early as possible. Not from friends and family, but from your potential customers. One of the best decisions I made was forcing myself to launch the game after 6 months, no matter what. At the time, I had a much bigger vision for the game. But looking back, there's no way the game would have improved the way it did without getting it into the hands of real players. If you're not embarrassed by your V1, V2, or maybe even your V5, you're probably not shipping early enough. Your early users or play testers

13:04will give you incredible feedback and help shape your game. I also didn't worry much about monetization in the beginning. My focus was retention first and building a game that people wanted to keep playing. Awesome. That's great advice, Ken. Thank you for coming on to the channel. Excited to see where this game goes and maybe we'll have you back on when you're making 50K a month or

13:22100K a month. Thanks for having me, Gus. Appreciate it. I just wrapped up with Ken. That was a really fun interview. One of the first that I've done by myself on this channel. So, thank you. Leave me some feedback in the comments. Let me know what I could do better next time or what questions I maybe should have asked. My takeaway from this is I liked what he said about building stuff that you know

13:40that you're genuinely interested in. It's kind of generic advice to some degree, but I think it's important advice to reiterate because when you know the niche or know the industry, you're going to be one more excited to do it, two be more of the target user and kind of understand the mind of your potential customers, uh, and three just I think that passion or that interest will carry you through more than like building some random generator or some random app just because it's popular or making money. The most important thing is that you go out and [music] actually start building. And if you're interested and looking for ideas that you can build

14:13by yourself, we've put a free resource [music] in the description. Over a thousand solar developers who have built their own $10,000 per month projects all by [music] themselves. Just click the link in the description and download that for free. All right, hope you enjoyed this one. Thank you for watching. We'll see you in the [music]

14:28next one. Peace.