How I Built A $90,000/Month Side Hustle In 48 Hours | ft. Dharmesh Shah

Sam Parr

You built a thing called the wordplay is it wordplay.com it's wordplay.com right

Dharmesh Shah

yeah I found you

Sam Parr

By the way, you buy domain names. So, you bought TheHustle.com for us and you bought me CopyThat.com. Thank you for that! I forgot to say thank you in person. You buy a lot of amazing domains, but you have Wordplay.com. Did you tweet that it was getting 7,000,000 users a week or 3...? What was the number?

Dharmesh Shah

it was so the I just went and checked with the numbers okay so just to kind of place the timeline in in frame so november december of last year 2021 is when wordle took off and january is when it really kind of hit its I think close to its peak and that's roughly when the new york times acquired wordle and a couple of things kind of bob me in it was fine I think it was a great outcome for josh wordle but there were things that were kind of bothering me that were limitations in the game and I was an avid player of the game and now it's like okay well the new york times has bought it there's no way that anything's gonna happen for like years if ever so that was kind of thing number 1 thing number 2 like it was it had been a while since I had launched like some simple free thing publicly hadn't gone through the process and there were other things I wanted to learn it's like oh I wanna learn more about vercel and next js and typescript and things like that so I was like okay well this is a excuse and then that intersected with the third thing which was like the dominant variable in the equation is my son was taking a python programming class he's 11 right he's going through this process and for him it's it's still very abstract he's learning programming he enjoys everything involving technology and screens but it was abstract so on a saturday night I said okay well let me build something and python happens to be my language build something so he can see because he plays wrlrl he knows the game and so I started on a saturday night with a deadline for sunday that I'm gonna launch something with him tomorrow we're gonna have Google analytics on it so we're gonna launch it I'm gonna launch it by tweeting it and so he know he knows what social media is right he's you know so I'm like oh we've got this thing that didn't exist yesterday I wrote the code over the course of last night in python the language that you're learning and we're gonna launch it and now you can see users coming in right you can see the and so now what I want him to have in his head is that when he as through the course of his life as he encounters problems that are solvable with software which is a lot like it's actually tactile for him it's like oh I don't know I don't have the skills right now to do what you know dad just did but I know it's possible I know it's possible because he did it in the span of 24 hours right so if I wanna go off and build a video game I wanna go off and build some tool for my school I wanna build some social network for my whatever it is it feels like now it's it's more approachable for him he's got years to go before he'll get to that level but anyway so those three things sort of came together and so we launched it on that sunday this is I think in february or so give or take and since then it's had like 45,000,000 games have been played 9a half 1000000 people have come through it any given moment in time right now if I were to look at the Google analytics there'd be 2 3,000 people playing like right now which

Shaan Puri

how did it get so much traffic where did the traffic come from

Dharmesh Shah

Well, it helps that I have a social media following. I've got **1,000,000** followers on LinkedIn and **300,000** on Twitter. So, there's that. There are some follow-up links.

Sam Parr

that that's that's a lot but that's not I I wouldn't have thought

Shaan Puri

that yeah

Sam Parr

yeah it's not enough for that is it how many users do you think got from that

Dharmesh Shah

in the early days all of

Shaan Puri

Was it big right off the bat? Like, the first week, was it big? I know the first day probably had a bunch of people checking it out, but I'm sure you posted it and that was the big surge. So, what was the first week like? Do you remember?

Dharmesh Shah

The first week was probably maybe $50,000 to $100,000, so it wasn't a lot, but it was something. Once you kind of get into it, this is the power of iteration. One of the things that I found missing in the original Wordle was that it was a single-player game. You played once a day, and that was it. So, two big changes that we made in Wordplay: 1. It was unlimited play; you didn't have to play just once a day. 2. It allowed you to challenge your friends. You could say, "Oh, I just played this word. I solved it in 4 turns. Here's my score," and send literally a simple link to anyone or a group. This happens tens of thousands of times, right? Someone will take a link that they just played, they're really proud of their score, and then their family can post it to their WhatsApp group or wherever they want and say, "I invite you to beat my score," kind of thing. That's the viral element. As more people play, you can track that as you might have a Google Analytics event and see how many times people are clicking that share button and issuing challenges to others. Once you get into something where there's a compounding effect on the user base, as the user base grows, the thing I'm fighting now is that while that's happening and going well, the interest in Wordle and related games is waning. Everything has its peak and its ebb. It's been an interesting exercise. On the learning path, one of the things I hadn't done in a while was to consider, "Okay, what's traffic actually worth?" Let's say I had to make a living on this thing or make the company, quote unquote, their project profitable. So, I put Google AdSense on it, which is the easiest thing to do, and discovered that if I weren't bothered by the fact that there would be two ads on the main game board page, if I were solving for monetization, it was like $90,000 a month in Google AdSense.

Shaan Puri

adwords wow

Dharmesh Shah

facing the traffic yep wow

Shaan Puri

I thought you were gonna say way less

Sam Parr

Yeah, I thought he was going to say like $5 a month, but $90 a month? And your only costs are hosting, right?

Dharmesh Shah

yeah and my time right and

Sam Parr

First of all, Sean, go to Wordplay.com and then go to the About page. His About page is incredibly well written; it's wonderful copywriting. You've got a wonderful voice. It says, "Why would you do this? Or better yet, why would I do this?" That's a really good question. My wife asked me the same question. Then you go on to explain what it is. You're quite a good writer for also being this amazing engineer. Typically, those...

Dharmesh Shah

would have a car writing course that sean put on we know that right it was like I'm not

Shaan Puri

that's right

Dharmesh Shah

I'm getting around here with my

Shaan Puri

**Calendar.** Nice! I like to say I taught Dharmesh everything he knows. Even before he met me, I somehow taught him all that good stuff before he built HubSpot.

Sam Parr

what what do you so this is making $90 a month maybe or about what do you

Shaan Puri

is this it could it's not right there's no add on to it

Dharmesh Shah

I turned ads off because that's sort of not the point. People were asking me, "It's like, Dharmesh, why do you have ads on this thing?" I'm like, "To learn." It's like I've learned what I needed to learn so I can...

Sam Parr

Was tweeting and posting this on LinkedIn. The only way you got users... What do you think this could sell for right now? And is this the biggest side project you've ever created?

Shaan Puri

our buddy tried to buy it from sooe tried to buy it off you

Sam Parr

did he really

Shaan Puri

He tweeted out, "I'd like to buy this off you. I've built mobile games before." You know, he was like semi-serious at least. I don't know.

Sam Parr

I don't know if

Shaan Puri

you talked to him or not but

Sam Parr

I did not

Dharmesh Shah

no I'm fine

Sam Parr

what do

Dharmesh Shah

you think you could sell what

Sam Parr

do you think like if you cared what do you think you could sell it for $2 or $3,000,000 maybe

Dharmesh Shah

Feel right now that let's say the ad revenue would go down to like $50,000 or something like that because I haven't turned Google AdSense in a while. That's $600,000 a year. Apply a 5x multiple, so somewhere between $2 million to $10 million would be my guess if that's what I'm solving for. So it's...

Sam Parr

And is this the only way that you got users? Was posting it on LinkedIn and Twitter, or did you do some other weird hacks?

Dharmesh Shah

I had my blog. I'm a big believer in what folks call the **flywheel**. There are all these little things that are attached to the flywheel, right? It's like, "Oh, well, LinkedIn helps a little bit," puts a little energy in. Twitter does a little bit, and then there's my blog, and the email goes out. There are things that I sort of do. So, it helps, but the hardest part is that **cold start problem**. How do you get your first 100,000 people or even 100 to 1,000 people? Then it's a matter of tracking the retention rate on those users until they come back. The other thing that's been interesting about Wordplay, as far as lessons learned, is that when it started, the average time a user spent, according to Google, was roughly **4 minutes** on the game in the early weeks. Now that number is at **14 minutes** as the average time a user spends, you know, across however many thousands of users come in a given day.

Sam Parr

so right and is this the biggest side project you ever created

Dharmesh Shah

Depends on how you measure it. So technically, no, not in terms of just raw traffic. I've built graders and things like that before that have done better, but...

Sam Parr

What have you built? What side project have you created outside of HubSpot that gets more traffic—2 or 3 million people a month?

Dharmesh Shah

Really, I did side projects. This is my first one that was clearly a game. Had it been anything other than a game, I would have rationalized some way to bring it into the HubSpot umbrella because I like to have all my eggs in that basket. But just given the circumstances here, it didn't really make sense. Even now, I'm thinking about doing a kind of marketing and sales-related edition of Wordplay. It's like, "Oh, the entire list of words," or do it based on MarTech companies. Like, "Okay, do you know the players in the space?" kind of thing. Then you can get sponsorships or whatever. Anyway, Website Grader was this kind of project where it was like a free... I'm really into low-friction things that people can come to the website. This is why Sun and I were chatting yesterday because we're looking at Flutter, this new development environment and language. Well, that's the language, but Flutter is the app framework for building mobile apps across iOS and Android. It's what the cool new kids are learning. He's like, "No, why would I ever want to build a mobile app? That's like something people have to download. I have to get approval from, you know, Apple to post my app." He's right; I want to just do it immediately. Anyway, that's the Wordplay story. It's been a lot of fun. It's hard to know with these things where the road leads. Wordplay itself may or may not connect back to other things, but the things I've learned through it, I think will. It's like, "Okay, well, here's what it takes to build this kind of thing." It's like, "Okay, well then I'm using it to play around with community." It's like, "Okay, can I take the Wordplay user base? What are the things they care about?" and build a community around Wordplay using one of the existing community platforms and see if that's a thing, right? It's like, "Okay, if you could aggregate people with like interests, that in and of itself has value." I want it to be something that kind of self-runs, but we'll see.