DaBaby car game

Build a simple game around a meme the day it starts trending. At 14, Rafael Kramer saw the meme of DaBaby's head as a car and built a racing game in one all-nighter in Buildbox, a no-code builder. It got about 2 million downloads and over $100k in a month.

His reasoning: a trend is 2D, so you see it, laugh and scroll, but in a game you can be the DaBaby car yourself, and that makes people pass it on. Players were mostly middle and high schoolers on lunch breaks. He later hired Unity developers once money came in. "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."

Superwall▶ 7:54

Dev-log TikToks on a trending topic drove the first downloads. About nine day-by-day build videos, at 100k to a million views each, brought the first 300k to 400k downloads. The first TikTok, with about 4 million views, kickstarted it.

He A/B tested hooks and paid attention to which words and frames to use; beyond riding the trend, the only rule was not to be boring. Viewers suggested features in the comments and he added them, for example two new characters on day four of the dev log.

Superwall▶ 11:41

Chart rankings and friend challenges took over after the first wave. Once TikTok delivered the first few hundred thousand downloads, the game reached number two overall on the App Store and number one in racing. Strangers clicked out of curiosity at seeing DaBaby's face on the charts.

Friends showed each other the game and competed on high scores. "The K factor you know had much more of a role than the actual Tik Toks."

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Interstitial and rewarded ads alone produced the $100k month. Monetization ran on Google AdMob: an ad after every second death, plus a 30-second rewarded ad to revive and keep playing. There were no in-app purchases.

He says ad income starts to pay off at a few hundred to a few thousand players a day, and that better monetization could have earned much more. The $100k figure covers a single month, with no ongoing profit numbers given.

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Distribution got the downloads, but poor retention capped the value. The game earned roughly 10 cents per user, against 80 cents to $1 for well-monetized mobile games. It was gimmicky, built to look good in a TikTok video rather than to keep players.

"We never really cracked retention." Kramer now describes himself as a marketer rather than a product person and says he has never had a product he is proud of long term.

Superwall▶ 13:58