Turn a trending meme into a simple game overnight and release it

Joseph ChoiRafael developed a rare skill, a viral trend sense. His playbook was to find a meme before it peaked, build a simple interactive game around it, and launch it to get millions of downloads.

Rafael KramerSo, that was like my whole strategy. I would find something that pops off, find it early, make a game, put on the App Store, and then make videos about it and hope they go viral.

Joseph ChoiAnd the way he monetized was really simple, no complex in-app purchases, just ads.

Joseph ChoiI vaguely remember this meme where it was like DaBaby as a car. Why was your first thought to like make a game about this?

Rafael KramerYeah. So, I mean, if you look at the history of my profile, you'll actually see that I was making a bunch of games about these memes. So, that was like my whole strategy. I would find something that pops off, find it early, make a game, put on the App Store, and then make videos about it and hope they go viral. So, the kind of reason behind that was, you know, I kind of believed that a game is much more interactive than a meme, and it can kind of like expand upon the meme or expand upon the trend. And, you know, a trend is kind of like 2D, right? You kind of see it, you laugh at it, you scroll. But if you can actually interact with it, you can actually be DaBaby in a game, you can actually, you know, do whatever the meme is doing in an interactive way. That's just much more funny, and people will kind of automatically share that itself.

Joseph ChoiThat's interesting. And did you just learn game development on your own? How did you actually learn like how to make these games?

Rafael KramerYeah. So, back then it was the Corona pandemic, so I was just kind of bored, and I just kind of searched up on YouTube, "How to make money." And then I just came across a video that was talking about the mobile game business, and I was like, "Okay, you know, why not? I like games. I'll try it myself." And then I use like no-code tools in the beginning, which made them like a lot easier as a 13-year-old kid who had like zero coding experience. So, most of the games, even DaGame was just built with like a no-code mobile game builder. Um, and then like once I started making money, I just hired Unity developers like pretty much immediately. I wouldn't like say that I'm too technical.

Joseph ChoiI see. What no-code builder were you using?