Post screenshots of your rough game on Reddit and stress it's free to play

Gus… business idea is to build something, you know, you would want to use. But I want to go back just a little click. You mentioned that you worked at these 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 build this game. Tell us a little bit of the story around quitting tech to build this little mobile game.

Ken… 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, I 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 6 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 Harpagia in front of thousands of players. My revenue jumped from roughly 1,000 a month to 10,000 a month almost overnight 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 was 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 do it?

Gus… 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. And you also mentioned something about how Reddit has been a useful marketing tool for you. So let's get into it. What were some of the like main marketing distribution strategies you used to help you go from 0 to $10,000 a month?

KenYeah, so my main marketing strategy after the first year was posting on Reddit. Almost every single time that I've posted on there, I'd receive a significant jump in new players. While the results weren't consistent, Reddit has 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 the free-to-play it is, because a 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 actually 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.

GusYeah, 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 probably, I'm assuming, it gave you some feedback that you ended …