I built this website in 8 hours with Claude. Now it makes $40K/month

Starter Story · Sep 27, 2026 · 16 min · Watch on YouTube

Starter Story talks with sports creator Frank Smith, who built the Geosports web game in a weekend using Claude without knowing how to code. It now makes about $40,000 a month, mostly from word of mouth.

PW Pat Walls co-host FS Frank Smith guest · 1 pick

Watch the episode 16 min · YouTube

The gist

Frank, who is not technical, wrote a detailed spec with Claude and built the game in about 8 hours, asking Claude whenever he got stuck.

Claude
The games have about 700,000 monthly active users, around 1,800 pro subscribers, and roughly $35,000 a month from programmatic ads.
Frank says his 4 million followers drive only about 2% of daily traffic, while a 53% share rate fuels word-of-mouth growth.
His advice: build for the web first to remove friction, make the product sharable, and send your AI tool screenshots when stuck.
A guest host role, where sports personalities write the five daily questions and retweet them, keeps reaching new audiences, and Frank stresses staying patient.

What they recommend · 1 pick

Claude Main topic · strong yes

AI assistant created by Anthropic for text analysis, writing, and data interpretation.

"I went to regular Claude first and I just gave it a bunch of detail. Here's all this information I have for a game. Do some research on MapTap and I had to build a spec. I'm not technical. I don't know how to code. Every step of the way when I would get stu..."

Frank Smith ▶ Play at 7:36

What Frank uses it for: Building a web game from scratch with no coding experience — writing specs, debugging, recommending tools, and answering questions via screenshots

253 creators recommend Claude, including Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, Chris Williamson.

Also mentioned

6:53 MapTap · "My brother showed me this game called MapTap and I loved it. I was always someone who loved maps and globes..."

8:26 Google Sheets · "Google Sheets for the questions and Stripe for the pro subscriptions."

8:28 Stripe · "Stripe for the pro subscriptions. Here is our Stripe. This is last 4 weeks, but we've had Stripe on here..."

14:50 Codex · "Tools like Claude and ChatGPT, Codex have really changed the game on who can be a builder."

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