$ cat echo-bat-update-may-2026.md

May 12, 2026 · 4 min read · shippinggrowth

Echo Bat: Two Sales, Sixty Dollars, and a Blockchain

Three weeks ago we shipped a 70KB bat in a cave. You could buy it for 99 cents. Nobody did, because nobody knew it existed.

So we fixed that.

The TikTok Experiment

Here’s what we know about marketing a 99-cent indie game on TikTok in May 2026: very little. But we tried.

We spent $60. Half on TikTok ads, half on Apple Search Ads. We created six short-form videos — the bat flapping through caves, sonar pulses lighting up obstacles, the tilt mechanics in motion. Each video was generated using AI video tools (Kling, Runway), stitched together, and shipped. Total production cost per video: approximately the cost of a coffee nobody remembers drinking.

Result: two sales.

Two. My neighbor. My coworker.

That is not a market signal. That is pity. We spent $60 trying to find people who didn’t know me, and we got charity. $2 back, net loss $58, and the two transactions that happened were probably just them feeling bad about the tiktoks sitting in their feed.

The videos got views. Probably my neighbor checking what I was up to. The funnel is not real. The funnel is my contact list.

The videos:

The Music That Wasn’t There Before

When we shipped Echo Bat, the audio was… minimal. A beep for the sonar pulse. A crunch when you hit a wall. Functional. Honest. But not alive.

We added music.

New hype TikTok dance music. Generative, layered, reactive to game state — driving when you’re accelerating, pumping when danger closes in. It’s the kind of beat that makes a 99-cent mobile game feel like it has stakes.

This is the unglamorous part of shipping. Three weeks later, we’re still fixing what “done” meant.

A Solana Token That Actually Means Something

Here’s where it gets weird.

We launched a token. On Solana, via Pump.fun. The ticker is PING. It trades right now at pump.fun/coin/Cg6ey1RMMXzkW7ZiXghzPh9dd3HZqwMitUM1ehrBpump. It is, objectively, a meme.

Not a “fun meme.” A meme in the technical sense. An idea that replicates because it’s absurd. “I’m going to own equity in a game nobody’s buying by buying a token that costs $0.0001 on Solana.” It’s funny. Everyone involved knows it’s funny.

Here’s what it actually is: A way to say “I believe in this dumb bat” without committing actual money. You can buy PING for a nickel and tell your friends you’re an investor. You’re not. But you feel like one. That’s the entire product.

Why Solana? Because Ethereum gas would cost more than the token ever will. Because on Solana you can launch a coin in five minutes with zero friction. Because if this thing hits $0.01, that’s an absurd amount of money for what is essentially a joke with a GitHub repo.

The Honest Part

We have two sales, both from people I already know. Our TikTok ads are done. We have no money left and no proof of concept. The token holders are snipers — people who bought in at launch just to see what happens. That’s it. Snipers. No community. No believers. Just the speed-run crowd watching to see if the price does anything.

Get PING here: pump.fun/coin/Cg6ey1RMMXzkW7ZiXghzPh9dd3HZqwMitUM1ehrBpump

This is not a hockey-stick growth story. This is a guy with a cave and a bat watching both sit empty, desperately hoping that selling shares in his failure is somehow different from asking people to buy the failure outright.

Is that because crypto is magic? No. It’s because I’m out of ideas. When your game doesn’t sell on its own merits, you lean on blockchain. When that fails, you’re just a guy with a cave.

What’s Next

Keep making videos nobody watches. Keep tweaking the cave. Watch the token sit at $0.00007 and convince ourselves that’s “volume.” See if anyone buys the token thinking it’s a real investment and feel bad about it for approximately three seconds.

Or maybe it moons. Maybe someone writes a Medium post about Echo Bat’s genius tokenomics and Reddit decides it’s the next Pump.fun gem and we accidentally become millionaires on a joke we don’t fully understand.

Probably not though.

We shipped a game that nobody bought. We shipped a token as a meme. We’re probably insane.

And the bat still flaps.

— Lazer

--echo-bat --marketing --tiktok --solana --tokenomics