Today marks the 31st day of Speedtracer, my daily casual mobile game for people who are too dumb for Wordle. Speedtracer challenges users to trace a racetrack as quick as they can, without crashing. Tracks start off as algorithmically generated shapes, but they are also NFTs that grant the owner customization rights, so we’ve seen a lot of branded tracks in our first month.

I’m particularly proud that I built a project that sits squarely in two of the scammiest and scummiest tech verticals and yet am generating revenue without being scammy or scummy in the slightest. The page isn’t littered with ads from dubious advertisers. You can play for free, we’re not selling you a $2,000 NFT to play a game that should cost $20 to buy. There’s no promise of profit for players, no play to earn, there are no points or tokens or any suggestions of an airdrop. Players are playing because it’s fun, and the players who want to compete can pay a tiny amount to validate their score and get it on the leaderboard.

Money Talks

Depending on your background, the revenue Speedtracer is generating is either incredibly meaningless or wildly impressive, the truth lying somewhere in the middle. If our comparison is crypto then Speedtracer is a rounding error compared to the millions of dollars in fees generated by speculative consumer crypto apps like Friendtech.

But if we’re comparing Speedtracer to indie games, we’re off to a great start. The median indie game released on Steam makes less than $2,000. Pretty bleak! While indie game developers have largely shunned crypto, they might do well to reconsider. Speedtracer shows that you can build with crypto without turning your whole game into a casino or play to earn farm. Crypto enthusiasts are very enthusiastic and can be a source of players who spend money on and in your game in a way that let’s you actually keep making games.

Speedtracer makes money two ways. First, we sell tracks as NFTs. Each track cost 0.08 ETH, about $200. Every track is track of the day once, meaning every visitor sees and plays that track at the homepage. If we count just the first 31 days of tracks (of the 120 I sold), thats 2.48 ETH, or ~$6,000. I sold tracks to brands, art collectors, venture capitalists, friends of mine who want to support me, and some pure speculators who want to profit from their track.

Speedtracer also makes money when competitive players want to immortalize their score on the leaderboard (and the blockchain). Players can mint Race Result NFTs for 0.0008 ETH, ~$2. Speedtracer gets half of this revenue and the rest is split with the owner of the track the result is minted from. That means if 200 players mint results from your track, you as the track owner are in profit on your track purchase. Players have minted over 7,000 Race Results, earning both Speedtracer and track owners about 2.85 ETH, or ~$7,000.

After 30 days, that gives Speedtracer repeating revenue of $13,000, an annual run rate of $156,000. I’ve already sold 3 more months of daily tracks, but not counting that here, and am working hard to grow the user base to increase revenue from Race Results.

I also received a 1 ETH grant from Coinbase’s Base Builders grant program and am hopeful that I will be one of the 47 winners in Optimism’s We ❤️ The Art contest, where the track algorithm is submitted in the generative art category. This wouldn’t be repeatable revenue, but maybe convinces some other indie game devs on the fence that they can find support from crypto companies who want to encourage more consumer apps and games being built on crypto rails.

Track owners are, on average, profitable, having spent 2.48 ETH and earned collective yield of 2.85 ETH, though a handful of tracks owned by larger brands account for the lion’s share of track owner income.

Analytics

Speedtracer product analytics are open. You can see our analytics dashboard at stats.speedtracer.xyz. This helps potential track buyers understand, transparently, their likelihood of getting a return on their investment. This isn’t important to all track owners, many just want to own and customize a track for fun, oftentimes customizing with colors and images from their favorite web3 communities and sharing it amongst those friends.

There are some good numbers!! Race attempts per user feels strong, suggesting that players find the game fun and challenging enough to keep trying if the crash. In some ways its most impressive how much revenue we bring in with so few daily active players. I don’t know if this is a good number, but I find it remarkable how consistent that completion percentage is despite wildly varying track difficulties.

But there are some bad omens in the data. Retention is not looking great. Daily attempts is very dependent on the track owner’s reach. And annoyingly when I was offline moving out of my apt we had our two worst days, so it feels like I need to be on social every day sharing tracks and engaging the community to keep it going. Which I’m happy to do, but I need to get some flywheels pumping to grow meaningfully. In the spirit of building in public, here’s some bad numbers and what I’m working on to try and get them looking better.

Daily Players - Top of Funnel

It’s really clear that Speedtracer largely depends on track owner partners to help drive traffic to the game. This was in many ways planned - I don’t have a huge audience and have traditionally not excelled at growth or community building. So leveraging brands for activations was part of the go to market strategy, and reminds me a lot of my time at VaynerMedia. Some brands simply want to be on the forefront and insert themselves in whatever hot or new tech property is in the zeitgeist. I’ve been fortunate to connect with some great brands, and started getting inbound interest as marketers saw the earlier activations.

Surely there are enough brands to do daily tracks for a few years. It’s not game dev but it’s honest work, and the daily cadence isn’t too much for me to manage all of these activations myself. But the part that seems to not be working very well is sustained partner interest once their track is track of the day. You can always link to your track and share it for people to play, but we’ve mostly seen partners move on once their track is “over.”

I’m planning two potential changes to try to address this issue - Speedtracer Leagues and updates to how Race Result revenue is shared.

Speedtracer Leagues

Speedtracer Leagues are still in the design stage, but the idea is to give communities or influencer personalities a way to share Speedtracer with their audience in an ongoing, daily way. An NFT community might start a League for their holders - these players would see a leaderboard for their specific league, every day. League managers would earn some Race Result revenue from their league members, particularly if that user initially started playing through a league link. An influencer might invite their followers into a league and offer special prizes like stream shoutouts or merch. Leagues might also reduce cheating and make the experience more communal. Instead of random anons on your leaderboard, the league leaderboard consists of your friends. Start a league for your groupchat and shit talk every day with your Speedtracer scores.

Revenue Share

I think of Speedtracer track owners sort of like a cartel, or a professional sports league group of owners. Every track owner has a shared interest in growing the game such that when their track is track of the day, a larger user base is consistently showing up to play and increasing the revenue earned by a track owner. I had hoped that this would be more obvious to track buyers, but I may have missed the mark on incentive design or generally failed to make this clear.

The change I’m planning for Season 2 of Speedtracer is to transition to a revenue share where every track owner earns some yield from every track. It’s like sports franchises earning a share of a league’s TV deals for instance. I’m still designing the incentive structure, but I think the track owner should get the largest share, while some portion would be contributed to the entire track owner pool every day. That would better incentivize a track owner to share Speedtracer and contribute to the growth efforts continually, rather than exclusively on the day their track is track of the day.

These two changes, combined with general growth efforts like this post and some paid ad spend should help get the daily numbers up and provide some more data to understand retention, which is also feeling somewhat problematic.

Retention & Reengagement

Simply put I’m not doing a good job retaining users. There are certainly some power users, and mobile games generally tend to follow that sort of big spender distribution where a small number whales account for most of the revenue. I don’t love that ethically, but I do of course appreciate the support from our most engaged players.

The week over week retention numbers are pretty ugly I think. Hard to say I really don’t have good benchmarks here. I’ve also never built something that tens of thousands of people have played so I’m not going to panic too much.

Speedtracer Leagues should also help with retention. Our partner communities have been thrilled with their tracks, often telling me they don’t care about making money back they just want to give their community something fun to do. With Leagues, they can do that every day, not just on a single day when their track is up. Daily contests, ongoing bragging rights, even as a team building exercise for remote teams to compete, Leagues make speedtracer more social by showing you top scores for the people you care about.

I also recently launched push notifications - Speedtracer is a PWA, and if you install it on your phone you can get granular alerts for new tracks, new features, and any time your leaderboard spot gets beat.

I implemented Farcaster Frames on Speedtracer tracks - when you share a link to Speedtracer, the embed will allow readers to see the track, leaderboard and your best time. Part of trying to grow Speedtracer is trying to get plugged in to the current meta or zeitgeist, but the interactive aspect of the Speedtracer frame likely gets better click throughs than a static marketing open graph image.

Some other product updates I’m considering are things like streaks. I’ve been somewhat surprised how competitive people are. There is absolutely zero benefit to being on the leaderboard other than bragging rights. Showing an indicator on the leaderboard that the player has been there for 5 straight days would probably keep that player coming back every day just to maintain the streak. Ask Snapchat about that.

🏁 Marathon, Not a Sprint 🏆

I’m not getting the checkered flag and ascending the podium here by any means. I’m just getting started, and there is absolutely no guarantee I’ll hit that $150k mark in year 1. But I do like to build in public, and for the first time in my career have a project with an iota of traction. So it’s exciting for me to share this all.

My biggest hope with Speedtracer is that we can show both consumers and game devs that crypto apps don’t have to be purely speculative. You can use speculation and financial incentives to align interests of various parties without sacrificing building a fun game. I’m not getting rich off of Speedtracer, but that’s not the goal. If I can make a decent living from the game and continue to work on what I find most exciting, the generative art algorithm, that’s a life I’m pretty happy with. And it feels uniquely enabled by building with crypto.

You can find me on Farcaster @sammy or Twitter @sammybauch if you want to talk Speedtracer! And try the game if you haven’t, it’s frustratingly fun - speedtracer.xyz.

We’ve got tracks coming from partners like Dot.fan and 1kx Ventures so be sure to check those out. Feel free to DM me about a track for your brand or project, there are some tracks available to purchase and current holders might be interested in selling you sponsorship rights.