# Roblox seeded its first viral loop with about $100 a day

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/roblox-seeded-its-first-viral-loop-with-about-100-a-day/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [David Baszucki](https://realalpha.app/people/david-baszucki/) · David Baszucki is chief blocksmith at Roblox. · Co-founded Roblox and has led it as CEO since 2004, serving more than 100M daily users.
- Host: Dylan Itzikowitz · Principal, SPC
- Show: Minus One
- Episode: [David Baszucki: Roblox, Minus One, Digital Economy, & the Metaverse](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/), Jun 4, 2025
- Moment: 10:34 to 14:44 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/roblox-seeded-its-first-viral-loop-with-about-100-a-day/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=634

## Quote

> “made the leap from friends and family to virality by **spending about $100 a day**.”
> — [David Baszucki](https://realalpha.app/people/david-baszucki/) at [11:31](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=691) · Minus One

## Takeaways

1. About 100 people visited the site daily before the test.
2. A dollar per user made a $100-a-day experiment possible.
3. Early users helped the product reach virality.

## About this segment

David Baszucki describes buying a small amount of Google traffic to move beyond friends and family, then letting the product spread. The patient approach gave Roblox time to improve without spending heavily.

From “David Baszucki: Roblox, Minus One, Digital Economy, & the Metaverse”, Jun 4, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[10:38](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=638) into the tech but there's a lot there's actually a lot of tech opportunity in what we're building and taking it back to the fun kids toy how did you get the first hundred thousand million kids on roblox i'm trying to think who told me this hack and i'm wondering if you told me this hack Jonathan Abrams. Um, so, um, but no, there was a really good hack somewhere where, um, we were looking at, um, we were live with about a hundred people, um, hitting the site every day, um, very early friends and family. And someone, um, told me, you know, here's this really neat hack.

[11:23](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=683) You can go out and just buy 50 users from Google, you know, just go do that or just go buy 100 users from Google. It's like a buck a user. So we we made the leap from friends and family to virality by spending about $100 a day. And we didn't do that too much. We didn't buy a lot of traffic. But that initial traffic was enough to get the machinery going and kick into virality. So it was actually very fun and interesting.

[11:57](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=717) I think it's a little bit more expensive to buy. those users today, but. Yeah, arguably, I guess companies today need to hit 5 million users in like a month or something, right? So we were much more patient. We, you know, we went 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, started hitting the big numbers a little later on, arguably didn't spend a lot of money doing it. But maybe the good thing is we had a year or two to refine what we were doing. Another interesting story that you told me back in the back before coming out here is one of your main investors found you because his kid was playing Roblox. And I thought that's a great articulation of build for your customers, not for investors. So very early on, there was a lot of savvy young players who found us. I think they found us because when they were going through

[12:51](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=771) traditional gaming, there was not a lot of user generated type platforms. They could build their stuff on Roblox and start sharing it and checking it out. There's a lot of really interesting new stuff showing up on our platform. So yeah, famous, fairly famous VC, Chris Freilich, first round capital, his son, Max found us, you know, showed it to his dad. They presented it to the partners. I won't say whether the partners approved it on the first round or a year or two later on the second round that's like a funny story actually but the the cool thing is they found us through that so um they found us that way and then anthony lee of altos um also found us in a very interesting vc way out um when we got started i don't know if any of you have ever heard of it there was this thing called club penguin which was like a kid's virtual world

[13:50](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=830) In retrospect, ridiculously primitive, flash-based 2D, orthographic, but going very viral. And he was looking for the next Club Penguin. In retrospect, we were radical technical over the top, right? We're like 3D simulated, C++, game engine, Lua script, driven, developer tooling, all of that. competing in this kids' virtual world space. So Anthony found us, Chris found us, and they were our two first investors.

[14:27](https://realalpha.app/v/0tR7hcXRHXM/?t=867) Anthony and Dave are both fellow Canadians, so another connection there. And let's just say the pre-money valuations in those days were well under $25 million. And that was what, at Series A? Yeah. The good old days.