Wordplay Games Viral Growth

Dharmesh Shah shares how he created Wordplay.com, a Wordle-like game, as a weekend project to teach his son about programming that unexpectedly grew to massive scale.

"On a Saturday night, I decided to build something because my son was taking a Python programming class. He's 11, and for him it was still very abstract. He enjoys everything involving technology and screens, but it was abstract.

I started on Saturday night with a deadline for Sunday. We were going to launch something with Google Analytics so he could see because he plays Wordle. I wanted him to see that something that didn't exist yesterday, I wrote the code over the course of last night in Python - the language he's learning - and we're going to launch it. Now you can see users coming in.

I wanted him to have in his head that when he encounters problems that are solvable with software, it's actually tactile for him. He may not have the skills right now to do what I did, but he knows it's possible because I did it in the span of 24 hours.

We launched it that Sunday in February, and since then it's had about 45 million games played, 9.5 million people have come through it. At any given moment, if I were to look at Google Analytics, there'd be 2-3,000 people playing right now.

When I put Google Adsense on it just to learn about monetization, it was generating $90,000 a month. I turned the ads off because people were asking why I had ads on this thing, and I said 'to learn' - I've learned what I needed to learn."