Viral Mechanics Drive Growth

A story about how Dharmesh Shah grew his Wordle-like game WordPlay through viral mechanics.

"In the first week we probably had maybe 50 to 100,000 users. It wasn't a lot, but it was something. Then we made two big changes to WordPlay that the original Wordle was missing:

First, we made it unlimited play - you didn't have to play just once a day. Second, we allowed you to challenge your friends. You could say 'I just played this word, solved it in 4 turns, here's my score' and send a simple link to anyone or a group.

This happens tens of thousands of times - someone will take a link after they play, when they're really proud of their score, and post it to their WhatsApp group or wherever they want and say 'I invite you to beat my score.' That's the viral element.

As more people play, you can track it as a Google Analytics event - how many people are clicking that share button and issuing challenges. You get into this compounding effect on the user base. Since launch, we've had 45 million games played and 9.5 million people come through it. At any given moment, there are 2-3,000 people playing right now."