Special Interest
VentureQuest
Players start and grow businesses from scratch -- beginning with a lemonade stand and progressing through food trucks, retail shops, tech startups, and enterprises. Make real business decisions about pricing, marketing, hiring, inventory, and competition. Different from MintQuest (personal finance): this teaches how businesses actually work. The only iOS-native business simulation for ages 9-14.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Ledger
#FFA726 VentureQuest is an entrepreneurship, business simulation, and personal finance education app for ages 9-14 where players ideate products, launch businesses, manage operations, and grow an enterprise while learning market dynamics, customer behavior, budgeting, saving, investing, compound interest, and taxes — aligned to Jump$tart financial literacy standards.
Characters who teach
Meet the cast
VentureQuest's characters each teach one part of starting a small business, at lemonade-stand to food-truck scale. Spot notices a real problem worth solving, Listen asks customers instead of guessing, Build tries rough versions and learns from what fails, Pitch explains the idea plainly without pressure, and Weigh thinks through what's fair to everyone. Kernel, Till, Barter, Loyal, Thrift, and Surplus cover focus, fair prices, good deals, reputation, saving, and profit. Ledger is the mentor, and the cast never promises that effort alone guarantees success.
Spot
Opportunity recognition — noticing problems worth solving for real people
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Listen
Customer discovery — asking + waiting + watching, never guessing
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Build
Lean experimentation — rough first drafts, fast iteration, failure-as-learning
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Kernel
Focus — the one essential thing
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Pitch
Pitch craft — plain-language story, inviting people in, never pressuring
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Till
Fair pricing
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Barter
Fair exchange — a deal both sides win
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Loyal
Reputation — customers who come back
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Thrift
Saving and reinvesting
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Surplus
Profit — the money left after paying every cost, so count all the costs before you count the win
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Weigh
Ethical decision-making — sitting with tradeoffs, holding stakeholder views
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Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Learning goal
Players start and grow businesses from scratch -- beginning with a lemonade stand and progressing through food trucks, retail shops, tech startups, and enterprises. Make real business decisions about pricing, marketing, hiring, inventory, and competition. Different from MintQuest (personal finance): this teaches how businesses actually work. The only iOS-native business simulation for ages 9-14.
Question kits
16 curriculum-aligned question kits, 400 questions in all, mapped to recognized standards.
On-device AI mentor
FoundationModels-powered hints, feedback, and adaptive difficulty — all running locally.
Mentored by Ledger — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How VentureQuest handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
VentureQuest runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
VentureQuest is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
