Starter Story · 2026-09-27
I built this website in 8 hours with Claude. Now it makes $40K/month
Frank Michael Smith, a sports creator with 4M+ followers and no coding background, built GeoSports, a daily 5-question sports geography web game, over a weekend with Claude after seeing Maptap. A reply to his own tweet went viral (150,000 players in a day at 5 days old), and 1M+ unique players came in under a month. Three months in, GeoGames (GeoSports plus spin-offs) has ~700K MAU and makes ~$40K/month, mostly programmatic ads plus ~1,800 Pro subs. Growth is ~98% word-of-mouth, driven by a 53% score-share rate and guest hosts from sports media.
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Numbers mentioned
| Who | Metric | Value | Context | When |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GeoSports | revenue | USD 40K/month approximate | GeoGames total (ads + Pro subscriptions) | 1:30 |
| GeoSports | revenue | a couple thousand dollars approximate | Revenue when the host and founder first talked, weeks before recording | 1:08 |
| GeoSports | time to milestone | 3 months approximate | From building the game to about $40K/month | 0:52 |
| GeoSports | users | 700K users/month approximate | Monthly active users across GeoGames | 1:30 |
| GeoSports | paying users | 1,800 subscribers approximate | Pro subscriptions (Stripe); the smaller share of revenue | 1:30 |
| GeoSports | revenue | USD 30K–35K/month approximate | Programmatic ad revenue only | 1:30 |
| GeoSports | revenue | USD 1,200/day approximate | Programmatic ad revenue per day; ads live for under 30 days | 2:00 |
| GeoSports | conversion rate | 53% approximate | Organic share rate: share of players who finish a round and share their score | 2:00 |
| GeoSports | users | 100K players/day approximate | Players in a single day (has happened more than once) | 2:00 |
| GeoSports | count | 2,000 clicks/day approximate | Clicks from the founder's two daily posts (X post + Instagram story) | 6:33 |
| GeoSports | share | 2%/day approximate | Share of daily traffic coming from the founder's own posts | 6:33 |
| GeoSports | share | 98% approximate | Share of traffic from word-of-mouth (also said 99% once) | 9:37 |
| GeoSports | users | 1M unique players approximate | Over 1 million unique players in less than 1 month, with no email campaign | 9:37 |
| GeoSports | users | 40K players approximate | Players from the viral X reply on launch | 11:39 |
| GeoSports | users | 150K players/day approximate | Players in one day, the day after the viral reply, when the game was 5 days old | 11:39 |
| GeoSports | time to milestone | 8 hours approximate | Hours of work on the first Sunday of building; he continued the next day before sending it out | 8:18 |
| personFrank Michael Smith, sports creator | followers | 4M followers approximate | Across social media | 4:47 |
| Five Card Draw | users | 110K players estimate | 5:10 |