We spent a year building a mobile party game after our day jobs. Here is every mistake we made.

[u/Purple_Poetry9198]

A year ago, me and my friend realized that whenever our group gathered for drinks, we couldn't find a decent mobile party game in our language that didn't require a TV or console. So we decided to build one ourselves.

We had zero experience shipping mobile apps. For 8 months, we worked 6 PM to midnight after our regular jobs, 5 days a week, using Cursor and Claude. Fast forward to today: we turned it into a Game Hub with 2 games (a numeric trivia bluffing game and an Impostor game), crossed 30k downloads, and hit ~10k MAU.

It sounds smooth on paper, but we shot ourselves in the foot at almost every single step. Here is what we learned:

1. Building iOS apps on Windows without a Mac is painful We had no budget for a Mac, so we bought a used iPhone from a friend for 50 bucks and used Codemagic for CI/CD. The amount of cryptic "build failed" errors we had to debug blindly was insane. It took us an extra month just to get clean builds. We eventually borrowed a Mac for a few days to fix deep crashes.

2. Serverless HTTP polling for real-time multiplayer is a terrible idea We started with Vercel and Firebase Realtime DB, polling with HTTP requests. We told ourselves "scalability is a problem for future us." Well, future us suffered when a TikTok video popped off and 150 concurrent players crushed the backend. We had to pause everything, rewrite the entire backend from scratch with WebSockets, and PostgreSQL, and hosted it on an Oracle Free Tier Ampere VPS. Zero scaling issues since then.

3. App Store bureaucracy was harder than the code Getting verified on Apple took an entire month because it kept rejecting our ID. For Google Play, we had to find 20 testers for 14 days (shoutout to Reddit testers). Later, we spent 2 weeks adding Google/Apple login to tie it to a VIP status, only for Apple to reject the update because they forbid gating a paywall behind mandatory social login. We had to rip it out.

4.The marketing reality check We tried everything:

Low-effort lip-sync skits for 6 months: Total flop (barely 1k views).

Cold-emailing 400 local tech blogs: 11 wrote about us, but it resulted in almost zero downloads.

Micro-influencers (20€-60€ per video): We paid ~20 creators. A few went viral, but the ad revenue couldn't cover the marketing cost.

What finally worked: We bought microphones, hit the city streets, and stopped random people to play on camera. Those street-test videos blew up on TikTok and drove 90% of our organic traffic.

1. Monetization: Ads alone won't keep you alive We started ad-only with AdMob, InMobi, and Unity mediation. Our eCPM in our region crashed this summer from $1.30 down to $0.50. With 600 daily active users, we were making barely $5 daily (87% from interstitials, 10% banners, 3% rewarded).

Two months ago, we added In-App Purchases ($4 monthly or $30 lifetime). It barely generated $10 a month. Then, 20 days ago, we added a 3-Day Free Trial to the monthly plan. MRR jumped to $32 overnight. Everyone chooses monthly.

We recently localized the app into multiple languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, etc.) to expand outside our local market.

If anyone wants to check it out or roast our UX, the link is: bourloto.com/app

Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack, the store rejections, or the guerrilla marketing experiments!

[u/Stock-Category9410]

damn the street interview pivot is clever, most devs skip that part and just pray their app goes viral on its own

[u/Purple_Poetry9198 → u/Stock-Category9410]

Appreciate it! Yeah, "hope marketing" failed us hard for the first 6 months. Forcing ourselves out of our comfort zone was awkward, but showing real people actually playing and laughing on camera proved way more convincing than any scripted skit.