Ken spent 12 years in big tech. Software engineer at Amazon, then engineering manager at Meta.
He hadn't written a single line of code in over 4 years. Managers don't code, they sit in meetings.
Then he quit to build a text-based idle RPG by himself, with no publisher and no audience.
That game, Harpagia, did over $150,000 in the past year. Around $13K a month on average, with about $500 a month in costs and $0 spent on ads.
Most of that growth came from a handful of Reddit posts. One of them took him from $1,000 a month to $10,000 a month almost overnight.
I keep seeing people ask if a solo game developer can still make real money in 2026. Ken is the cleanest answer I've found. Gus from Starter Story interviewed him, and the numbers are all on camera. Watch it, then read the breakdown.
The Numbers Behind Harpagia
Harpagia is a free-to-play idle RPG on iOS and Android. Think RuneScape energy, but text-based: your character levels 16 skills, fights monsters, and collects loot while you're away. You check in, collect rewards, decide what to upgrade next, and close the app.
The business behind it, from Ken's own dashboards:
- Over $150,000 in revenue in the past year, averaging around $13K/month with a peak of roughly $18K/month
- Over 50,000 downloads across iOS and Android
- 3,500 to 4,000 monthly active users, 500 to 600 daily actives
- Around 6% of players convert to paying (typical for games is 2 to 5%)
- Over $3 in revenue per active user
- About $500/month in expenses: art assets, freelancers, subscriptions
- $0 on ads. Ever.
Sit with that user count for a second. Not millions of players. Not even tens of thousands of actives. A few hundred people a day, and it clears six figures a year.
Monetization is optional in-app purchases that unlock premium features or speed up progression, mostly priced between $2 and $10. Ken tested a lot of price points and found players convert fine from $4.99 to $9.99. Above $9.99, conversion drops off hard.
Why He Left Meta (It Wasn't the Money)
Ken took the path every parent dreams about. Computer science at UCSD, straight into Amazon, then up the ladder to engineering manager at Meta.
He says the first half of his time at Meta was genuinely great. Good mentors, real growth, a company that took care of people.
Then the 2022 layoffs started.
Watching colleagues get cut changed how he saw the whole deal. His words: job security is never guaranteed, no matter how hard you work. He wanted to own his future instead of renting it from a company that could take it back any quarter.
To be clear, the game still pays him less than Meta did. He walked away from way more than $13K a month in salary.
His reasoning was simpler than any spreadsheet: "If I'm not going to do it now, when am I going to do it?"
I've watched a lot of founders wrestle with that exact question. It's the same one Joschua faced when he quit his job to build a startup. Replacing the salary turned out to be the easy half. Giving himself permission took two years and a layoff wave.
The Warm-Up App Nobody Talks About
Ken didn't start with Harpagia. That detail matters more than anything else in this story.
In early 2024, when AI coding tools started getting good, he wanted to test whether a manager who hadn't coded in 4 years could ship something. So he built Big Two Wild, a simple card game based on something he played with friends in high school.
Six weeks, start to finish.
The game itself didn't matter. What mattered was everything around it: AI-assisted development, building a product end to end, surviving App Store review, actually launching a thing into the world.
Then he took all of it and started Harpagia.
Most people skip this step. They pour a year into their dream idea as project number one, hit a wall they've never seen before, and quit. Ken made his rookie mistakes on a throwaway card game in six weeks, so Harpagia never had to absorb them.
The $10K Rule That Made Quitting Easy
Ken launched Harpagia while still employed at Meta. First sale came a few days in: $10, for a game that was still a rough alpha.
He calls that sale incredibly validating, and I get it. A stranger paying you $10 beats a hundred friends saying "cool idea".
The early curve looked like this:
- Month 1: about $150 in sales
- Month 2: about $1,500 total
- Month 6: around $1,000/month, growing slowly with zero marketing
Somewhere in there he set a rule: if the game reaches $10,000 a month organically, I quit and go all in.
Not "when it feels right". A number he could see in a dashboard.
Six months after launch, he made his first Reddit post about the game. Revenue jumped from roughly $1,000 a month to $10,000 a month, almost overnight, from that single post.
He left Meta the same month.
That's the part I want you to steal. The quit decision was made months before the quit happened. When the number hit, there was nothing left to agonize over.
One Reddit Post, 10x Revenue
Now the marketing playbook, because it's almost stupidly simple.
Ken's entire growth channel is Reddit. No content calendar, no TikTok clips. A post every few months when he ships a major update.
His first post was screenshots of the game, a short explanation of what it is, and honest numbers on how free-to-play friendly it was (gamers want to try before they pay).
The response was overwhelmingly critical. The game was rough and Redditors said so, loudly.
And it didn't matter. The post got traction, thousands of players saw it, and revenue 10x'd. Ken noticed a pattern across every post since: the posts generating the most discussion perform best, especially the ones catching the most criticism.
A comment section arguing about your product pushes the post up the feed, and everyone scrolling past sees your game either way.
Two constraints keep this honest:
- Most subreddits only let developers self-promote about once a month, so Ken saves posts for major updates every few months
- Results are inconsistent. Some posts spike, some don't. He posts anyway.
Every single post still brings a jump in new players, and Reddit alone carried the game from $10K to its $18K/month peak.
The Stack: One Guy, $500 a Month
Here's everything Ken uses to run a six-figure game business alone:
- Cursor for AI-assisted coding
- ChatGPT for brainstorming and icon touch-ups
- React Native for the app, Firebase for backend, auth, and analytics
- Vercel for web hosting
- Discord for community
- Unity Asset Store and GameDev Market for pre-made art
- Fiverr and Upwork freelancers for screenshots, icons, and videos
Notice what he buys versus what he builds. Art, store screenshots, promo videos: bought. Game systems, the thing players actually pay for: built.
His hours go to the one thing nobody else can do, and everything repeatable gets bought or automated. It's the same logic behind the business automations agencies set up for lean teams: every task you take off your own plate is margin you keep.
$500 a month in costs against $13K a month in revenue. Find me a VC-backed studio with those unit economics.
The Opportunity Almost Nobody Is Talking About
Gaming is a $100 billion industry, and everyone building in it is chasing the same lottery ticket: the next Flappy Bird, the next Clash of Clans.
Ken's take is the opposite, and his bank account backs it up. You don't need hundreds of thousands of players. You need a small group of people who genuinely love a specific thing, and a game built exactly for them.
A few hundred daily players generating over $100K a year. Idle RPG fans are a niche, but they're a niche that pays for the thing they love.
This maps to everything I've seen outside gaming too. The specific, underserved corner beats the crowded gold rush more often than anyone admits. I covered a bunch of similar cases in simple apps that make money: tiny products, tiny audiences, very real revenue.
Pick the audience you actually understand. Ken knew idle games because he played them. That's why his instincts on pricing, progression, and what players tolerate were right more often than wrong.
Ken's Advice After Two Years Solo
Gus asked what he'd tell himself starting over. Three things stood out to me.
First: build something you understand well. Not the trending idea, the one where you're the target user.
Second, get feedback from real customers, not friends and family. Ken forced himself to launch 6 months in, no matter what, while his vision for the game was still 10x bigger than the build. The game only got good because real players shaped it. His line: if you're not embarrassed by your V1, V2, or maybe even your V5, you're not shipping early enough.
And retention before monetization. Early on he barely touched pricing. He focused on making a game people kept opening, and the $150K year came after the retention, not before.
None of this is exotic. It's the same boring advice every profitable founder I interview eventually repeats, and Ken followed it with a Meta paycheck on the line.
FAQ
How much money does Harpagia make?
Harpagia generated over $150,000 in the past year, averaging around $13,000/month with a peak near $18,000/month. It runs on roughly $500/month in expenses with zero ad spend, monetized through optional in-app purchases mostly priced between $2 and $10.
Can a solo game developer actually make a living?
Yes, and Ken is proof you don't need a hit. His game holds 3,500 to 4,000 monthly active users, about a 6% paying conversion rate, and over $3 in revenue per active user. A small audience that loves a niche genre can support a full-time income if retention is strong.
What tools did Ken use to build his game?
Cursor for AI-assisted coding, ChatGPT for brainstorming and art touch-ups, React Native for the app, Firebase for backend and analytics, Vercel for hosting, and Discord for community. He buys art from the Unity Asset Store and GameDev Market and hires Fiverr and Upwork freelancers for store assets.
How did he market a game with no budget?
Reddit, almost exclusively. He posts major updates once every few months (most subreddits cap developer self-promotion), and his first post took revenue from about $1,000/month to $10,000/month. The posts drawing the most discussion and criticism consistently perform best.
Steal the Playbook, Not the Game
You probably don't want to build an idle RPG. Doesn't matter.
Ken's playbook transfers to any product: a cheap warm-up project to learn shipping, a hard revenue number that makes the quit decision for you, one distribution channel worked patiently, and a niche you personally understand.
Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast I sit down with bootstrapped founders like this, doing $100K to $10M a year, and pull out the exact numbers and decisions behind their growth.
