Side Projects Enable Learning

Dharmesh Shah shares his experience building Wordplay.com, demonstrating how side projects can serve as both learning opportunities and potentially profitable ventures. He emphasizes the importance of practical application in learning technology and how simple projects can lead to unexpected success.

Key Points:

• Project Origins and Motivations:

  • Built Wordplay.com as a response to Wordle's limitations after NYT acquisition
  • Used project to learn new technologies (Vercel, Next.js, TypeScript)
  • Created to show his 11-year-old son the practical application of programming

• Teaching Through Example:

  • Built the project in 24 hours using Python
  • Demonstrated to his son how programming can solve real problems
  • Showed the tangible results of coding through live analytics and user engagement

• Growth and Distribution:

  • Initial promotion through social media (1M LinkedIn followers, 300k Twitter followers)
  • First week reached 50-100k users
  • Grew through viral sharing mechanics and challenge features
  • Currently sees 2-3k concurrent users
  • Has served 45M games to 9.5M users

• Business Potential:

  • Generated $90k/month through Google AdSense (when active)
  • Estimated value between $2-3M (based on 5x multiple of yearly revenue)
  • Minimal operating costs (mainly hosting)

• Key Learnings:

  • Cold start problem is the hardest - getting first 100-1,000 users
  • User engagement grew from 4 minutes to 14 minutes average session time
  • Importance of tracking metrics like retention and engagement
  • Value of building low-friction web experiences over mobile apps
  • Potential for community building around simple products