How Pieter Levels Hit $67k MRR in 3 Weeks

What's up, everyone? This is Alex, the host of Founders Journal. As you may know, I built Morning Brew from my senior year of college until we sold the business in 2020. And now I'm building a variety of businesses in different spaces and different stages. I'm basically averaging 1 to 2 new businesses per year. And because of that, I have had the opportunity to test a ton of different products and services, ultimately landing on a core software stack that serves as my business operating system whenever I start a new company. I have my go-to banking service. I have my go-to formation service. I have my go-to domain hosting service. But probably the most important of them all is my HR service, Gusto. If you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you know how much I think about people in the context of business. A business is nothing without its people, which means a platform that helps me manage and take care of my people is invaluable. And that means I've tried every HR platform under the sun, always with the same exact goals in mind. First, I want a product that's intuitive and delightful to use. As a non-HR person, I find the intricacies of payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, and expenses to be painful. So I just want something that makes my life easier. Second, I want it to be affordable. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. I started Morning Brew with $0 and I started StoryArc with $0 as well, which means I don't have infinite dollars to drop on SaaS products. And third, I want a platform that acts as my one-stop shop for all things people. I want it to handle payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, and taxes, all while integrating with all of the other tools in my business stack, whether it be QuickBooks, Slack, or Google Workspace? Well, Gusto hit the trifecta, which is why I am a customer and use it for every single one of my businesses. Yes, this is a paid sponsorship by the amazing team at Gusto, but I would sing their praises even if I wasn't being paid to do so. So if you're looking for a platform that takes the pain out of payroll benefits and HR, I highly recommend you check out Gusto. And if you sign up at gusto.com/alex, you will get your first 3 Now onto the episode.

What's up everyone? This is Alex and Founders Journal is back. For those who are longtime Founders Journal listeners, welcome back. For those who are new to the show, here's the deal. Founders Journal is my audio diary made public for the world. My goal is to increase your odds of success as an entrepreneur by sharing the stories, lessons, and tactics that I experience as I build my businesses. You can expect the podcast Monday and Wednesday with episodes that are under 20 minutes in length. And if you want to get notified when a new episode comes out, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Now let's get into it. Peter Levels, a well-known internet entrepreneur on Twitter, launched an AI-coded flying game that has gotten to $67,000 in monthly revenue in just 3 weeks. I have been watching closely as Levels has been building this new business, and I think it is worth further examination for any entrepreneur. I'm gonna take you through what's happened over the last few weeks, why Levels has gotten a mix of reactions from the internet ranging from praise to rage, and what you as a builder can steal and apply to your own business. Let's start with what happened. On February 22nd, Peter Levels built and launched a 3D flying game. For context, this isn't the first business that Levels has publicly launched since 2014, when he built 12 businesses in 12 months. Levels has been building and launching multiple software products per year and then sharing these products with his audience. As of 2021, Levels has launched 70 software products, many of which went nowhere, but 5% of which have had varying levels of success. He's now doing roughly $184,000 in monthly revenue across his businesses, with his flying game being his highest revenue project at the moment. So let's talk about the game. Levels went from idea to MVP in 30 minutes simply by prompting Cursor, which is an AI coding assistant that got to $100 million in annual revenue in less than a year and just raised at a $10 billion valuation. Side note, if you don't know about Cursor or you haven't tested the product, you need to if you want to actually take what's happening in AI seriously. Peter's game started as a very crude single-player flight simulator where the user could just fly a cartoon plane around a map that had a runway, land, a cliff, and a beach. Today, the game is still very analog, but it is multiplayer, it involves shooting missiles at other planes, and it is monetized with ads and power-ups. Now, despite how simple the game is, the numbers in just 3 weeks are staggering. Since launch, it has had 243,000 page views and 214,000 unique visitors. 20 to 50 people are playing the game at all times, with 15,000 unique flyers playing per day. The game is now doing $67,000 in monthly revenue, with the vast majority coming from advertising and a very small sliver coming from in-game purchases. Companies like Bolt, SynthFlow, CodeRabbit, and other AI startups are paying up to $10,000 a month to sponsor things like the runway, blimps, and Jupiter in the game. And then a small group of users have paid $29.99 for faster, more powerful planes. Elon Musk retweeted the game. Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, played the game and shared ideas and feedback. The game made it onto Reddit and was written up about by 404 Media. And the conversation around the game is not only intense, but it ranges from praise to absolute rage. I believe when anything grows this fast and owns attention on the internet this much, It is worth studying and learning from, so that's what we're going to do. Let's start by talking about how something that would have been impossible for a non-technical person to build 5 years ago is completely possible now. If I wanted to build a game a few years ago, I would have had to know some combination of coding languages like C, C++, Python, JavaScript, Rust, and others. And I would have needed to be proficient in using a gaming engine like Unity or Unreal Engine. Right before writing this script, I literally went to Claude and built a Michigan-themed version of Pac-Man where the ghosts are Ohio State Buckeyes. And this is literally level 1 of what you can do with AI now. But now with AI, non-technical people can all of a sudden build technical things, and talented technical people can have the output of a full team. This has implications for both gaming and non-gaming. In gaming, as Greg Isenberg pointed out, traditional game economics are brutal. AAA games cost $100 million to build, indie games $100,000, mobile games take $250K plus 10 developers to build and require $100,000 in monthly marketing. Now, the suggestion isn't that you can just use AI tools to create Fortnite, but it is to suggest that great game developers leveraging AI will likely be able to create high-quality games at a fraction of the cost because AI tools will offer junior employee caliber support, Similar to what's happening with software engineering teams right now. So this is all just further validation that tools like Cursor are bringing down the skill level required to create simple software or games to zero. And for higher quality, more complex products, these tools simply give high-skilled builders effectively a junior team of employees that follow directions and work 24/7. The next most obvious takeaway from this whole story is the insane value of trusted distribution. Levels has 628,000 X followers that he has accumulated over 10 years that he was able to share this game and his other projects with. At a time when the cost of building products drops significantly, while the cost of marketing continues to rise, having trusted distribution becomes more and more of an advantage. I wanted to understand just how significant that advantage has been for Levels with this game, so I added up all of his posts about the project since February 22nd, and here is what I found. He has posted about the game 104 times in the last 3 weeks. These 104 posts generated 74 million impressions, which is insane. And if you had no audience and wanted to spend money on paid marketing to get that many impressions, here's what it would cost you on the different social platforms. On X, it would cost $479,000. On Meta, $605,000. On TikTok, $220,000. YouTube, $160,000. Snap, $477,000. And Pinterest, $447,000. But that cost also doesn't account for trust. You spend that much money on paid social, most of the eyeballs that are seeing your ad either don't know what your company or game is, or if they do, they don't have established trust. With Levels, you have to assume the conversion rate of those impressions actually going and trying his game is way higher because people seeing his posts likely know and trust him. Everything I just described is the most obvious part of having an audience that trusts you deeply. It is a huge advantage, lowers your user acquisition cost, increases your business's odds of success, and speeds up your timeline to get to meaningful scale. But then there are so many other less obvious benefits created by having an audience that are far more interesting. Having an audience creates surface area for all opportunities, and people tend to just focus on the marketing side. I'll share just a few examples from Levels Flying Game. The first is access to second-order distribution. When you have an audience, you increase the odds that someone else with a large audience will see your stuff and expand your reach to their audience. When Levels announced an update that his game supported multiplayer, Elon Musk quote retweeted the post, which drove 9 million impressions to Levels' post, or roughly 38% of the impressions he has gotten so far. Or Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, seeing Levels announce the game and responding that he loved it, would fly again, and he offered a number of feature requests. All of that opened Patrick's own audience to see Levels' content, which they may not have otherwise seen. The second is access to customer insights. With a traditional business, the process of understanding your customers' needs is quite manual and slow. You get feedback during a quarterly business review, you get ideas when you decide to do customer research, and you send cold emails asking potential customers to hop on a 30-minute call with you. An audience streamlines the customer discovery and feedback process and offers you an always-on focus group. It's hard to overstate how much of an advantage that is, and it's one of the reasons that Levels has evolved this game so quickly because he has received ideas and feedback so quickly. He couldn't figure out how to get the game to multiplayer, so he asked his audience and got a response from an engineer at X that gave him the answer, which he implemented in less than 24 hours. That same engineer shared the idea of selling faster or better planes as a way of monetizing the game, and it was up and running in the game within hours. Also, Levels wanted to know how he should set up flight controls for users, so he ran a poll on X, got 3,655 responses, and built the app according to the results. The third is non-customer opportunities that accelerate your business. This can be hiring, meaning your ability to recruit more candidates faster. This can be channel partners, meaning marketing channels you wouldn't have had access to without your audience. And this can also be no-cost collaborators, meaning people who will contribute to your business or offer you things for free because of the value your audience provides to them. The example with Levels is an engineer from Cursor, which again is the coding software he used to build the game, built a radar for free that allows you to see all of the other players playing the game. You may be wondering, why did this engineer build it for free? Very possibly because he feels invested in the story and it was fun, but also it was a very low-lift way to be able to get get Cursor as a company to latch onto the insane momentum and impressions that the game is getting right now. So those are all of the ways in which an audience stacks the deck in Level's favor. Now, you may be thinking, damn, what do I do if I don't have an audience like this? 3 things. First, it is still possible to build a great business without distribution at the start. It is just harder, and it likely extends the timeline of getting to scale. Second, this should just reinforce for you how important building an audience is, and if you're open to it, the best time to start building one was yesterday. And third, if you don't want to build an audience but you offer something else to a business, partnering with a distributor or someone that does have a trusted audience is something that I think we'll see way more over the next few years. So that's distribution. Now let's talk about vibe marketing. Something that any builder can and should be doing. Everyone right now is talking about this idea of vibe coding, which was coined by Andrej Karpathy, who founded OpenAI, and he ran AI at Tesla. And it basically just means building software through prompting AI tools with natural language versus actually having to type code. So basically, vibe coding is building stuff through conversation rather than actual coding. Also, as a quick side note, if you want to understand how AI and large language models work more deeply, you should 100% check out Andrej's YouTube channel. It is incredible, and I'm going to link to it in the show notes. Now, I think an equally important concept for people to think about and consider leveraging in their business is vibe marketing. Vibe marketing follows a very simple sequence. Step 1, constantly read the vibes of your audience or your customers. Ask for their feedback on your product, collect their ideas for new features, keep an eye on what's most important to them. Then step 2, build your company and your product in a way that prioritizes your audience's vibes. When people have issues with the product, reply to them on social. You should think about focusing on features or improvements that are most requested from your customers or your audience. And then step 3, after you've gotten a sense of the vibes and then you've built according to the vibes, is sharing all updates, whether it's new features, product improvements or bug fixes with your customers or prospective customers. Publicly sharing updates on your business is a multi-purpose step. It shows that you're constantly listening to your customer. It creates this feeling of constant momentum that you ship and iterate your business quickly, and it educates your audience and customers on new ways to use the product, which can either drive retention for existing customers but also get prospective customers across the finish line to finally convert. Levels is exceptional at vibe marketing, and when I think about the best founder marketers today, they are also all great vibe marketers. Elon vibe markets SpaceX launches and product improvements. Harley from Shopify vibe markets Shopify's product roadmap, and Tyler Dank does the same thing with Beehive. To put a bow on vibe marketing, I think it only gets more important as time goes on, given customers expect speed and immediacy more than ever before. And as AI gives businesses the ability to shorten the distance between customer idea and idea being implemented as close to zero as it's ever been. Now, I just wanna finish by talking about some of the internet rage towards the game and what that can teach us about business and also how people think. I have read and followed everything related to this business and Peter's flying game project, and I've identified 3 major critiques that people have. So let's go through each of them. Number 1, it is a horrible game. My guess is if you asked Levels, he would say this is a simple amateur game built by someone who just had an idea, and it's not a killer game developer who was trying to build a AAA game. So there's no delusion that the game isn't unbelievably designed or built, which to me begs a far more interesting question, which is, in spite of the game being very simple, Why is it doing so well? Now, the obvious answer is Levels' distribution, but I think the less obvious answer is the way in which he is building the game. The way that Levels is building his flying game is as if it is an open-source game built by thousands of people on the internet, and he is simply the lead product manager taking in all requests, prioritizing them by importance and effort, and then implementing them into the game. All of this to say, the story here isn't about it being a horrible game. It's about the way in which Levels is building the game with his audience and what it means for gaming moving forward, especially for talented game designers. The second critique, Levels only succeeded with this because he has an audience. I find it hilarious when people say this as if it's a bad thing. Let's just say this is true, that Levels only succeeded because he has an audience. To me, that is just further validation that you should feel motivated to build an audience versus critique someone that has put in the work to build one for themselves. I also think Levels is acutely aware of the power of his audience and what it means for building a business. An audience is your best first marketing channel, but for a business to have staying power, you need a great product that solves a painful problem in a fundamentally different way, and you need to find effective marketing channels outside of your own eventually. Kevin Espiritu from Epic Gardening always had the best analogy for this, which is that Launching a business with an audience is like launching a rocket ship. When a rocket launches, it has boosters that accelerate its ascent into outer space. This is your built-in audience. Once the rocket reaches a certain trajectory, your boosters break off and are no longer needed or valuable. The rest of the rocket's journey is dependent on its own stability and its internal boosters. This is exactly how a business that has initial distribution should work. The third and final critique: selling in-game planes is scammy. This one is just ridiculous. In-game purchases are literally how the biggest games in the world make the vast majority of their money, which I think speaks to a bigger point about everyone's critique of Levels and his current project, which Greg Isenberg described very well. Greg said, so many people are feeling bad that someone else is winning. This victim mentality is everywhere in tech now. Instead of being inspired by someone else's success, people immediately look for a reason to dismiss it. He had advantages I don't have, or yeah, if I was on Lex Fridman, my game would go viral too, or the timing was perfect, or he's already famous. Deep down, I think it's because in an AI world, when you see someone succeed with tools everyone has access to, you're forced to ask yourself, why wasn't that me? The truth, it could have been. And it still can be. The tools are only getting better. The barriers are falling daily. The opportunity is there. But hey, I get it. It's easier to explain why someone else's success doesn't count than to ship something yourself. And I couldn't agree more with Greg. We live in an age where the cost of building and executing gets closer to zero with each passing day, which means that there are fewer excuses than ever before for why you or I didn't build that thing that we have been thinking about starting for a long period of time. More than ever before, the internet will reward people who have great ideas, who bias to action, who triple down on experiments that work, who kick failed experiments to the side, and who build a trusted audience that acts as their first best marketing channel. That is it for today's Founders Journal. As always, thank you for listening to the pod and make sure to subscribe to the show if you haven't already done so. Finally, shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com to introduce yourself and let me know what you'd like to see from Founders Journal moving forward. I love getting to know my listeners, so I will 100% reply to you if you send me a note. Again, that is alex@storyarb.com. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next episode.