From one photo to the App Store

In the fall of 2009, Brent Carlson was leaving his MBA study group in downtown Sacramento when he spotted the KXTV Channel 10 broadcast tower, the ABC10 antenna, snapped a photo, and posted it to Facebook with a question: where am I? A friend replied that he had no idea, but he liked the game. Carlson launched Where Am I? in the App Store in 2011 with classmates from Saint Mary's College of California.

Brent's vision: photo sharing as a guessing game. The technology of 2011 could not support it: developer resources were prohibitively expensive, the platform was still young, and the gamified, mobile-first loop he imagined stayed out of reach. By 2012, Where Am I? died on the vine.

Fourteen years later, while working full time in tech sales at Reddit and studying AI business strategy at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Carlson realized he needed to stop theorizing about AI and start building something with it. And then the thought: why not bring WAI back to life? He rebuilt Where Am I? from scratch, solo, in nights and weekends, working with Claude Code and Codex and learning Swift, SwiftUI, and Firebase as he went. The vision that was economically impossible with a 2011 team became a one-person build.

The AI is in the game itself: when a player posts a photo, Claude visually analyzes it, the architecture, vegetation, climate, and signage, pairs that with the photo's latitude and longitude and Google Places location data, and generates four plausible decoys to hide the real answer among: two geographically close, two visually similar from around the world. Wrong guesses are half the fun.

The hit game Wordle was an early inspiration: created by a fellow Reddit employee a few years before, it proved that a simple, joyful game built by one person could be a success.