Consumer social games

Alex Finn demos vibe-coding a space-shooter — plan with Grok, build with Claude 3.7 Sonnet + Cursor, ship via GitHub Pages, capture emails into Supabase at the 'you died' screen; AI games beat traditional funnels.

A developer revived an old side-project solitaire card game as a polished app that now earns roughly $10,000 per month, mostly via ads and in-app purchases, after a prior startup failed.

Sam and Shaan analyse Hunt Brothers Pizza — $540M ARR gas-station-pizza business — and a silly game making $22M a year; also white-collar side hustle, edge-based models, dating experiments, resilience and weight.

Collin Waldoch grew Water Cooler Trivia, a remote-friendly web trivia game with a live host and gamification, from $10K to $250K ARR in two years.

Dan Porter (OMGPop / Draw Something / Overtime) on selling Draw Something to Zynga for ~$200M only six weeks after launch, hitting 25M daily users and 1M drawings every 5 seconds; contrasts with Overtime, a media brand he built for sports highlights.

Ken left a long big-tech career to build a mobile game, hitting his $10K/month goal in year one and growing to $155K in revenue with zero paid marketing; tech stack, growth mechanics and founder lessons.

Sam and Shaan on expanding a forecasting/trends business, why pickleball is exploding (Tom Dundon's investor role) and the virtual-gaming-world thesis — mostly a 'how to monetise trend-spotting' riff.

Dan Porter recounts building Draw Something from a side project to #1 in 60 countries with ~25M daily players and ~250M downloads, selling it for $200M, then founding Overtime and scaling it to hundreds of millions of weekly sports-highlight views.

Vicky Hsu rose from HabitRPG community volunteer to CEO of Habitica, a gamified habit-tracking app that generates real revenue through community-driven development.

Mark Pincus (FarmVille founder) on going from $0 to $38M in 7 months, choosing the right market, spotting patterns, picking macro trends and deciding what to chase; the episode mixes startup judgment, the FarmVille story, a case for gold and life philosophy.

Chris tests a 'hole in one' / disc-golf challenge business in the real world — small entry fee, big prize, run in a public park; gets kicked out, adjusts the rules and walks through probability math, pricing and how a low-cost game-of-skill plays.

HoldCo Bros update on their perfume vending machine business (strong August sales, scaling challenges), then three car-related ideas — an auto fair renting parking lots, electronics-fair variants and a car-aggregator play.

Greg with Jonathan Courtney (AJ&Smart) on nostalgia hacking — Palmer Luckey's Modretro Gameboy, Jonathan's own LAN-party business, a millennial retro-content creator play and a high-end nostalgic art business.

Matthew Ball (Epyllion, Ball Metaverse Research) on his book 'The Metaverse' — the 'map of reality' framing, why the smartest people are building in gaming/metaverse, virtual-world economics and the multi-trillion-dollar thesis.

Jason Calacanis with Sahil Bloom and Greg on becoming a 'sophisticated' investor for angel access, the upside/downside of crypto, where Web 3.0 sits in five years, default-centralized-in-a-crisis and the All-In podcast arc.

An indie mobile game developer pitched an ambitious title to Apple, was rejected pre-launch, and the project died before shipping. The Failure Friday episode is a cautionary tale about scope and App Store approval.

A mobile game developer recounts a Failure Friday story in which Apple rejected an over-ambitious game concept before launch, underscoring the danger of pitching a single massive idea to App Store review.