How DaGame grows

Spot a meme early (DaBaby's head as a car, seen the day it came out), pull an all-nighter building a simple game around it in a no-code builder (Buildbox), and put it on the App Store; then hire Unity developers once money comes in. A game makes a 2D meme interactive (you can be DaBaby), which is funnier and gets shared. Rafael ran this playbook on many meme games (e.g. a vegan teacher game).

On his personal TikTok (a couple hundred thousand followers), Rafael posted 'Day X of making a DaBaby mobile game' devlogs showing new characters, and added features commenters asked for. He A/B tested hooks, words and frames in early videos to find what worked; the main driver was that the topic was trending, as long as the video wasn't boring. The game was built to look good in a TikTok video. About nine videos, 100K-1M views each.

Google AdMob only, no in-app purchases: an ad pops up every second time you die, and players who want to revive and keep going watch a 30-second ad. Ads earn even at a few hundred to a few thousand daily players. Games were gimmicky with very low retention.