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A first-time solo dev's brick-breaker with a Diablo-style loot twist cleared roughly £11K in its first 30 days — almost entirely from one Reddit post and organic installs.
"This is actually my first ever project, I've never had any experience doing dev work or even designing games." No ads that worked, no audience — just one honest Reddit post and a familiar mechanic with a loot loop bolted on.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
The developer behind Whim Bear Studios released Bricks Breaker RPG on the Google Play Store on 27 July — a date he picked essentially at random ('no real reason behind it, I just decided this is the day'). It's his first project ever. He'd never done development work or designed a game before. The launch surprised him. Day one brought around 500 downloads, most of them, he believes, from a single Reddit post — a promo video plus a short description of the game, asking for basic feedback. 'The feedback was amazing. Lots of people jumped on. They wanted to play it. They started giving really good reviews right off the bat.' Installs tapered after day one until 2 August, when something he can't explain caused a spike, then settled into a gradual organic decline. He's refreshingly honest about what didn't work: he tried Reddit ads, spent about £250, found the cost-per-click-to-install ratio not worth it, and stopped advertising entirely. Essentially all the installs he reports are organic. Our read: this is a small, honest, first-attempt case — and its value is precisely that. It shows what a genuine cold start looks like for a first-time solo developer: one well-placed community post, a mechanic people already understand, and enough of a twist to earn word of mouth. No growth machine, no ad budget that worked, no prior audience.
One free Reddit post did almost all of it. He uploaded a promo video with a short description and asked for basic feedback rather than pitching a launch, and day one brought around 500 downloads on a release date he had picked with "no real reason behind it."
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Data credibility: First-person founder video (Whim Bear Studios) with revenue dashboards shown on screen. The clearly stated figure is ~£11,155 total revenue (ads + in-app purchases) in the first 30 days, gross of Google's 15% cut and UK tax; ~500 day-one downloads, mostly organic. The individual ad-revenue and IAP sub-figures are garbled by the auto-captioning ('$2,6428', '£6,71144 or $9,90.77') and are NOT reliably readable, so only the aggregate and the qualitative finding (IAP out-earned ads) are reported here. All figures are founder-reported, unaudited, and cover a single month. The ~£250 Reddit-ad spend that underperformed is also self-reported.
The game is free, so the first money arrived on launch day without anyone deciding to buy anything: rewarded ad impressions from the roughly 500 day-one installs.
The turn here is a review loop, not an acquisition channel. The Reddit post produced roughly 500 installs and, more usefully, a burst of genuine reviews on a listing that had none, which is the input Play Store discovery reads.
The no-feedback stretch here was the build itself. A first-ever project, no development or game-design experience, no audience, and a release date chosen with no reasoning behind it — nothing in the months before 27 July could tell him whether any of it would sell.
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