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How a college student built and sold a $15K/month gaming site
Executive overview
A simple unblocked games website sat largely ignored for two years before its creator went all-in on TikTok. Within four months, daily active users jumped from 5,000 to 150,000 and monthly revenue from $1K to $15K. The site was then sold for $120K.
Pure volume on short-form video — not product quality — drove the entire growth spike.
Building the site
- Started on Google Sites with embedded games; later rebuilt in React
- Used AI (vibe coding) to handle development, freeing time for marketing
- Stack: Cloudflare (hosting, free), Supabase ($20/month for auth and data), PostHog (A/B testing via startup credits), Google AdSense (ad revenue)
- Revenue model: ~1 cent per user per visit via AdSense; more page views = more ad impressions
- A/B tested layouts to maximise session depth and pages per visit
TikTok growth strategy
- Posted 3 videos/day, 5 days/week across 3 TikTok accounts
- Cross-posted automatically to Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat via repurpose.io
- Snapchat consistently hit 20K+ views — do not overlook it
- Researched competitors' top-performing videos; copied format, doubled the volume
- Reviewed previous day's content before filming new videos; iterated on every hook
- Delegated video creation to a mentee once the format was proven, paying ~$200/week
- Best single video: 2.1M TikTok views + 3.2M Instagram views from the same upload — estimated $1K from one video
Selling the business
- Identified a strategic buyer (a company that had acquired a similar site)
- Received a lowball offer of $100K; countered and agreed on $120K
- Used escrow as the transfer middleman
- Slight seller's remorse, but rationally still views the sale as the right move
Playbook for 2026
- Pick a niche you already know how to market in
- Build an MVP in 2–3 days using AI tools
- Research 10–20 competitors' best-performing videos; identify what made them work
- Start posting daily on TikTok; iterate constantly
- Go all-in when early signals appear
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