Wordle Clone's $10M Mistake

A story about how a developer's decision to publicly brag about cloning Wordle led to his downfall.

Ben Levy shares: "One of my friends, a mobile app developer, saw Wordle going viral and noticed there was no mobile app version. He built an app over the weekend called 'Wordle The App' and got 30,000 organic downloads, reaching the top of the app store.

The original Wordle creator contacted him and said he didn't want to partner, just wanted to keep it as a fun project. Twenty minutes later, a tech reporter aggressively criticized my friend, calling out his lack of ethics.

The situation got worse when people discovered his old tweets where he had previously called app cloners 'scum of the earth' and complained about people copying his own apps. He'd also tweeted his 2022 goals were to 'be more vulgar and make $10 million.'

People started attacking him, buying his domain names, threatening to dispute all his apps, and eventually Apple pulled down every Wordle app. He called me for advice during this, saying this could be a $10-100 million mobile app opportunity.

The ironic part is if he had just stayed as an anonymous developer and not bragged about it on Twitter, he likely would have gotten away with it. The app store is full of clones. It wasn't the clone that was the story - it was him bragging about ripping it off that got him in trouble. He ended up having to shut down the app and learned a hard lesson about building in public."