Draw Something's Last-Minute Success

Dan Porter tells the story of how his gaming company created Draw Something, which became a massive hit when they were nearly out of money.

"We had 4-5 months of runway left. Our company had millions of users playing our games, but Farmville came out and suddenly they had 100 million users. The board was asking why they should invest in something good but not great. We calculated that cutting all office snacks would only extend runway by one day.

I decided to make one final game even though I wasn't a game designer. We had this drawing and guessing game called 'Draw My Thing.' Every Friday we'd make a version of it, and I'd play it on the subway home to see how it could be simpler.

We renamed it Draw Something and released it. Initially 30-40,000 people downloaded it because we gave them free coins on our website. Then it crashed down. But one of our backend developers said something was broken - people couldn't actually play it once downloaded. They rewrote the entire backend over a weekend.

I called a famous investor who helped fast-track our App Store approval. Once fixed, the game exploded. In the first 9 days we got to 1 million downloads. In the first 50 days, we hit 50 million downloads. We were the #2 app behind Flashlight. We ultimately reached 250 million downloads and had 25 million daily active users.

Celebrities started tweeting about it organically. We didn't ask them to. Ryan Seacrest told me all his studio staff were playing it and laughing, so he got interested. The whole deal happened incredibly fast - we sold to Zynga for $200 million, and the entire acquisition was done in just 9 days. They had two law firms working 12-hour shifts to get it done quickly."