Last month, my best friend bet me that I couldn’t make something go viral.
So I spent three hours ideating and building Escape the Rat Race, a satirical FAANG career simulator, and posted it to Hacker News.
It hit #2 on Hacker News and has now been played more than 100,000 times.
Escape the Rat Raceplayable, right here
The most fun part was watching it spread during the day. Old friends I had not heard from in years sent it to me without realizing I had made it. Random leaders in tech reached out about it. Every time I checked my phone, someone new had found the game.
I had forgotten how exciting it was to build something outside my job and release it directly to people. There was no existing audience waiting for it and no company account pushing it. It was just a small thing I had made because I thought a certain group of people would find it funny.
Three hours earlier, it had only existed in my head. By the end of the day, people I did not know were sending it to one another.
That felt different from building something used by billions at Instagram. It was much smaller, obviously. But it was mine.
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