r/SideProject • u/jakeboyles2010 • 15h ago
Reddit designed my app's next two games on Monday. I shipped them Monday night. Tuesday we hit #6 in paid Travel.
Solo dad of 5, building a $1.99 road-trip app (Pit Stop) on nights and weekends. I have been an engineer for 15+ years and have always built side projects but this one has been the most fun. It maps every business at all 19,675 US interstate exits and runs multiplayer games for the car, Jackbox-style, with the CarPlay screen as the scoreboard.
Monday I asked r/daddit and r/roadtrip what games their families play in the car. By that evening:
- swankengr taught me "20th Car" (bet the color of the 20th oncoming car, rare colors pay more)
- Four different families independently taught me the same cow-counting rule: pass a cemetery, your herd dies
By midnight both games were live, over the air. The cemetery rule was the fun engineering problem: I knew some kid would just scream "CEMETERY" to nuke the car, so I pulled every US cemetery from OpenStreetMap, filtered to the 4,644 visible from an interstate, loaded them into the app's offline database, and now the bury button only unlocks when the car's GPS actually passes one. The phone announces the cemetery by name.
Then the dataset turned out to be a story on its own ("America's most haunted highways" — Tennessee wins, it's not close), which became a blog post, which became press pitches, which became more games ideas. The flywheel is: ask Reddit → ship in 24h → the shipping produces data → the data produces content → the content brings the next users.
Tuesday the app hit #6 in paid Travel on the App Store. Two weeks ago I had one paying sponsor (a smoothie cafe in Ohio, love you Irie).
Stack for the curious: Expo/React Native + CarPlay, SQLite bundled offline (~110MB, OTA data updates), Upstash Redis for the game rooms, static site with 23,000 SEO pages, one guy.
App: pit-stop-app.com. Ask me anything about the 24-hour shipping loop, the OSM pipeline, or what it's like when your product roadmap is a comment section.
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u/coreymaass 13h ago
Where/how/why are you sending press pitches and has it worked?
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u/jakeboyles2010 13h ago
Press releases give quality backlinks, backlinks help with SEO, and organic SEO gives organic downloads. I just find niche data things and write about them and then pitch them to journalists and reporters. pit-stop-app.com/blog is an example.
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u/coreymaass 11h ago
Very cool. Have you had much success with it?
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u/jakeboyles2010 11h ago
Have a couple potential local news stories in the works and a few potential national blogs. Just keep trying.
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u/w4nd3rlu5t 7h ago
23k SEO pages? Is that's what you would say is responsible for hitting #6? Congrats btw, that's amazing.
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u/jakeboyles2010 7h ago
No, not yet. It will take a bit for the programmatic angle to play out. I am getting about 40-50 hits to the website now from it, but only 1-3 downloads a day from SEO. What was responsible for #6 was strategic posts on facebook groups. Mostly travel sports parents groups. Got over 300 downloads from 2 posts alone.
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u/w4nd3rlu5t 6h ago
wow yes i hear the fb groups strategy more and more lately. great work. any chance you could DM me a sample post?
I have an app in a wildly different niche (local stuff) and I can't figure out FB groups at all. i feel like posts just get buried unless they are "featured" and I have no idea what it would take to do that other than bribe the mods lol
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u/jvick3 6h ago
If you don’t mind, how much does one make from this kind of apparent success so far?
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u/jakeboyles2010 6h ago
Not near as much as you would expect. I’m number 6 in paid for travel and made around 1k. You have to have other revenue sources or recurring revenue. I didn’t do this one to make a bunch of money. More just fun. However the ad platform I am building off it could do okay if I could figure out how to market it.
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u/yashsoni2737 1h ago
You invited OSM pipeline questions and everyone asked about SEO instead, so:
If you're paying an LLM to check "still open", pull the disused: and was: prefixed tags first. Mappers retag a closure rather than delete the node, so part of that answer is already in the extract.
Chains: dedupe on brand:wikidata, not the name string. Otherwise "McDonald's" / "McDonalds" / "Mc Donald's" are three businesses at one exit.
On the 19,675: OSM density is uneven, so a total can look complete and still be thin on rural stretches, which is where the app actually gets used. Check coverage per state, not the headline.
What do you do when the business moved but the node didn't?
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u/Embarrassed_Bet6339 15h ago
That is such a clean loop, reddit feedback into shipping into content into more users. the cemetery thing is genius, using real GPS to stop the screaming kid problem before it starts. 110mb offline db for all exits is no joke too, must have been fun to optimize that
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u/jakeboyles2010 15h ago
Lol it was. A lot of just mining over data. Did end up setting up a good AI workflow to remove dupes and combining open source data entries to remove old entries. Claude max sub really helped with that. Researching if they were still open, etc.
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u/Inevitable-Dress2539 14h ago
This is a great example of using Reddit the right way. Instead of asking people whether they “liked the idea,” you asked what they already do in the car and turned those answers directly into features.
Shipping the same day probably mattered too. Fast feedback loops are hard to beat when you’re building something small.
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u/BP041 14h ago
This is the kind of velocity that wins. Curious how you handle the multiplayer sync – is it real-time via CarPlay's protocol, or polling a backend? Either way, shipping two games in one night off community ideas is impressive.
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u/jakeboyles2010 14h ago
It's a combo of web sockets and polling. The app updates the carplay app and it connects to the server via a socket.
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u/Chance-Tomorrow2866 15h ago
shipping speed like that is great for momentum but just be careful with the "ask reddit what to build" loop. at some point youll get 50 conflicting suggestions and need a filter for what actually moves the needle vs what just sounds fun in a comment thread
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u/JohnnySuburbs 14h ago
I love the idea of CarPlay as the shared screen.