Any sports fan worth their weight in trivia can likely name what city hosts the annual running of the bulls, which MLB team opened a ballpark in 2012 with a 450-gallon fish tank or where Ivan Drago, the antagonist in Rocky IV, trained for his climactic boxing match against the movie’s titular character. But pointing out any of those locations on a map may not be as easy.
That was the challenge at hand on Wednesday for players of GeoSports, an online game blending sports trivia and geography. Each day, the web app presents five questions that put its users’ ball knowledge to the test and has them select their answers by picking spots on a globe.
And sports fans can’t stop playing. With less than a month of activity under its belt, GeoSports has already reached 1 million unique users and averages around 95,000 players on weekdays. The game’s results, which are automatically formatted to share with friends, have become a ubiquitous presence on social media platforms. Even retired NFL head coach Jon Gruden posted a video about playing, despite the revelation that he couldn’t locate Mississippi on a map.
“I love sports, I love games, I love competition, I love daily versions of all these things, and I love maps,” Frank Michael Smith, the game’s creator, said. “I just wanted to make a game that I like, and it turned out more people are like me than I thought.”
Smith is a sports content creator with more than 3.5 million followers across social platforms, but for the past five years, he’s been wading into game development. In 2024, Smith founded Rhino Studios to house his game operations which, he said, raised $500,000 at a $4 million valuation a year later to fund the business. The company has developed two games thus far: 5 Card Draw and Solo Survivor, neither of which had garnered mainstream success, albeit for different reasons.
Ironically, Rhino Studios’ first hit came from a vibe-coding experiment. Smith was driving home from a friend’s wedding earlier this month and, with nothing else to do that day, he started to mess around with an idea he had based on a daily geography game called MapTap. “I was like, ‘This would be really cool if there was a sports version of this, and maybe I could play around with Claude, and we’ll see how it goes,’” Smith said.
After two days, he had a prototype worth sharing with a few friends, which later became around 100 people. Then, Smith felt confident putting it on his Instagram story. A plug from Yahoo Sports’ Kendall Baker’s newsletter followed, and then “it exploded on Twitter,” he said. By the end of GeoSport’s first week, it exploded to a peak of 150,000 daily players. Since then, Smith has shifted development of the game from Claude to his four-person team at Rhino Studios. He’s also maintained question-writing duties, since AI doesn’t “understand the pulse of the sports fan.”
As the game has scaled up, Smith said fans have eagerly requested the ability to play more than the once-per-day offering, so he quickly launched a pro version that costs $5 each month or $40 for the year. Just about two weeks into monetizing, the subscription service has around 1,000 members, an annual recurring revenue of roughly $47,000 and $0 in marketing spend. “That’s a pretty good start,” Smith said.
He’s in no rush to monetize further, though. Smith said he’s turned down offers, mostly from betting and fantasy companies, to sponsor the game. He’d prefer to keep GeoSports “pure” for now, especially since he thinks sports fans “have a lot of fatigue” from gaming industry advertisements.
In the longer term, Smith sees creating content around the game as an opportunity to expand—he has been in the creator business since 2017 and founded his own production company, Juice Productions, in 2020. NBC, for example, is producing a primetime television game show based on the popular word game Wordle.
He’s not ruling out an acquisition, either. The New York Times bought Wordle in 2022 for an undisclosed sum reportedly in the seven figures. Other viral hits, like Heardle and Immaculate Grid, were purchased by Spotify and Sports Reference, respectively. Smith said he wouldn’t sell for anything less than $4 million—the value the company raised at nine months ago.
In the meantime, Smith has some bug fixes and some minor improvements planned, as well as combat sports- and soccer-specific versions of GeoSports. And even if the game hasn’t slowed down yet, given how often apps likes these come and go, he said he’s doing everything he can to avoid being just another fad.
Smith does hope GeoSports keeps growing. But it’s no easy task for him, even with a massive audience that includes 1.8 million followers on TikTok and 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube.
“I wish it worked like that,” Smith said. “I wish because then I could just make so much, blast it out. It doesn’t work like that. … The product is so much more important than the person promoting the product.”
