A Swedish engineer built GeoGuessr, a game where players guess locations from random Google Street View images, into a $21M revenue business by 2023. Starting with a Reddit post in 2013, it grew to 50 million users and spawned a creator economy around it, hitting $11M EBITDA last year.
In 2013, this 29-year-old Swedish software engineer posted on Reddit, and you click on the link, it's this thing called GeoGuessr. You basically see a random Street View of Google Maps. I've seen this. You have to guess where you are. It could be easy, so it could be like Times Square, but then it gets more complicated where you'll get dropped in someplace in Ghana and you have to look at the license plate and you're like, the license plates are yellow, I know that's a thing in Ghana. And so 2019, the company did $467,000 in revenue and $61,000 in profit. The pandemic hits, this thing explodes. 2020, $2 million. 2021, $10 million. 2022, $18 million. 2023, $21 million in revenue and $11 million in EBITDA. And the owner took out $9 million in dividends and it has 50 million registered users. There are all these YouTubers and TikTokers who are famous now because of it. It's just amazing that something so small and so silly has become such a serious business.
