How a Cloudflare Worker challenge turned into a product in one conversation.
Brian Ball deploys a Cloudflare Worker for StartupRoom Challenge 1. Returns JSON with his name and a timestamp. Lands #2 on the leaderboard.
Builds a fullstack markdown vault — Hono, React, D1, AI bindings. Obsidian-style, with drag-and-drop .md import and AI summarization. Deploys it.
The real question: "Why haven't I made any money with AI in the last 10 months?"
The answer wasn't about speed or skill. Brian had just proven he could build and deploy a fullstack app in under an hour. What was missing was a customer and a price.
The reveal: Brian has 50,000+ paying Mac customers from AppZapper — "the uninstaller Apple forgot." He'd been looking forward for customers when they were behind him the whole time.
The product pivots through several ideas — Cortex (second brain tool), MagicalMac (utility brand), InstallThisFirst (Mac snapshots). Built a full Tauri desktop app with Rust.
The breakthrough: Brian doesn't want to replicate AppZapper. Different vector. Not cleaning — knowing. Not a tool — a teacher.
Sessions. Bite-sized learning. 5 minutes. One thing about your Mac. Try it right now. Feel smarter. Share it.
The business model appears: $1 promotion slots at the end of every completed session. The attention of someone who just learned something is the most valuable attention on the internet.
Name selection via a custom asteroid game. 40 names floating on screen. Click to destroy the bad ones. Survivors grow. Rookie wins but domains are taken.
Brian says "I like Peekaboo." Peekaboo is taken. PeekyBoo isn't.
A cute ghost with blushing cheeks appears on screen. Brian says "awwww" and buys peekyboo.app and peeky.boo.
PeekyBoo is a learning companion for Mac users. Each "Peek" is a 5-minute session that teaches you one thing about your Mac. You read it, try it on your actual Mac, understand why it matters, and share it if you want.
"This spot is yours." After every completed Peek, one promotion slot. Someone paid $1 to be there. They can promote themselves, their channel, their app, their course — anything. The person seeing it just proved they're curious and engaged.
At 50K users doing 2 sessions/week = 100K slots. Even at 1% sell-through = $1,000/week. The $1 price is the "just try it" price. Data informs premium pricing later.
Cloudflare Workers. One JavaScript file. No framework. No build step. 16 KB gzipped. Deployed to 300+ data centers worldwide. Zero infrastructure to manage.
Because the content is the product, not the technology.