How I Built A $90,000/Month Side Hustle In 48 Hours | ft. Dharmesh Shah

You built a thing called Wordplay. Is it wordplay.com? It's wordplay.com, right?

Wordplay.com, yeah.

By the way, you buy domain names, so you bought thehustle.com for us. You bought me copythat.com. Thank you for that. I forgot to say thank you in person, but, uh, uh, so you buy like a lot of amazing domains, but you have wordplay.com. And did you tweet that it was getting 7 million users a week or 3 million? What was the number?

Well, so the, I just went and checked with the numbers. Okay. So just to kind of place the timeline in frame. So November and December of last year, 2021 is when Wordle took off. And January is when it really kind of hit its, I think close to its peak. And that's roughly when the New York Times acquired Wordle. And Couple things kind of bothered me. I mean, it was fine. I think it was a great outcome for Josh Wordle, but there were things that were kind of bothering me that were limitations in the game. And I was an avid player of the game. And now it's like, okay, well, the New York Times has bought it. There's no way that anything's going to happen for like years, if ever. So that was kind of thing number one. Thing number two, like it was, it had been a while since I had launched like some simple free thing publicly. I hadn't gone through the process and there were other things I wanted to learn. It's like, oh, I wanna learn more about Vercel and Next.js and TypeScript and things like that. So I was like, okay, well this is an excuse. And then that intersected with the third thing, which was like the dominant variable in the equation is my son was taking a Python programming class. He's 11, right? He's going through this process and for him it's still very abstract. He's learning programming, he enjoys everything involving technology and screens, but it was abstract. So on a Saturday night I said, okay, well, Let me build something. Python happens to be my language. Build something so he can see because he plays Wordle, he knows the game. And so I started on Saturday night with a deadline for Sunday that I'm going to launch something with him tomorrow. We're going to have Google Analytics on it. So we're going to launch it. I'm going to launch it by tweeting it. And so he knows what social media is, right? He's, you know, so I'm like, oh, we've got this thing that didn't exist yesterday. I wrote the code over the course of last night in Python, the language that you're learning, and we're gonna launch it. And now you can see users coming in, right? You can see the— and so now what I want him to have in his head is that when he, as it through the course of his life, as he encounters problems that are solvable with software, which is a lot, like it's actually tactile for him. It's like, oh, I don't know, I don't have the skills right now to do what, you know, dad just did, but I know it's possible. I know it's possible because he did it in the span of 24 hours, right? So if I wanna go off and build a video game, I wanna go off and build some tool for my school, I wanna build some I want to be the social network for my friends, whatever it is. It feels like now it's more approachable for him. He's got years to go before he'll get to that level. But anyway, so those 3 things sort of came together. And so we launched it on that Sunday. This is, I think, in February or so, give or take. And since then, it's had like 45 million games have been played. 9.5 million people have come through it. Any given moment in time right now, if I were to look at the Google Analytics, it'd be 2,000, 3,000 people playing. Like right now. Um, which—

how did it get so much traffic? Where did the traffic come from?

Well, it helps that I have a social media following, right? I've got a million followers on LinkedIn. I've got 300,000 on Twitter. So there's that. Uh, there's some viral elements.

That, that's, that's a lot, but that's not— I wouldn't have thought that.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's not enough for that, is it? How many users do you think got from that?

Um, in the early days, all of them.

Was it big? Was it big right off the bat? Like the first week, was it big? I know the first day, probably a bunch of people checked it out, but like, I'm sure you posted it. And that was the big surge. So what was like the first week roughly? Do you remember?

The first week was probably maybe 50,000 to 100,000. So it wasn't a lot, but it was something. But then once you kind of get into it, this is the kind of power of iteration is that, oh, well, one of the things that I found missing in the original Wordle was that it was a single-player game. Like you played and you played once a day and that was it. So two big changes that we made in Wordplay. One was it was unlimited play. You didn't have to play just once a day. And two, it allowed you to challenge your friends. So you could say, oh, I just played this word. I solved it in 4 turns. Here's my score. And send literally a simple link to anyone or a group on— and this happens tens of thousands of times, right? Like, someone will take a link that they just played. They were really proud of their score. And then their family, they can post it to their WhatsApp group. They can post it there, you know, wherever they want and say, I invite you to, like, beat my score kind of thing. And so that's the viral element. And so then as more people play, you can track that as you might have as a Google Analytics event. And say how many people, how many times are people clicking that share button and issuing challenges to other people? And so that once you can kind of get into something where there's a compounding effect on the user base. So as a user base grows, and so now the thing I'm fighting though, right, is that, so that's happening, that's going well, but then the interest in Wordle and related games is waning because everything has its kind of peak and its, and its ebb. And so, but it's been an interesting exercise. And so we, on the kind of learning path, one of the things I hadn't done in a while is like, okay, well what's traffic actually worth? Let's say I had to make a living on this thing or make the company, quote unquote, or project profitable. So I put Google AdSense on it, which is the easiest thing to do, and discovered that like, if I weren't bothered by the fact that there would be 2 ads on the main game board page, if I were solving for monetization, it was like $90,000 a month, uh, in Google AdSense based on the traffic. Yeah. Wow.

I thought you were gonna say way less. Yeah.

I thought he was gonna say like 5 grand a month, but 90 grand a month. And you're, you only have, your only costs are hosting, right?

Yeah. And my time. Right.

And first of all, Sean, go to wordplay.com and then go to like the about page. His about page is incredibly well-written. It's wonderful copywriting. It's wonderful. Uh, you've got a wonderful voice. It says, uh, I'll just read the first sentence, but it says, why would you do this? Or better yet, why would I do this? That's a really good question. My wife asked me the same question. And then you like go on to explain why it just, you, you're, you're, you're quite a good writer for also being like this amazing engineer. Typically those, those are the—

I wonder if the car writing course that Sean put on, you know that, right? It's like, I'm not, I'm not kidding around here with my content. The alumni.

I like to say I taught Dharmesh everything he knows. Even before he met me, I somehow taught him all that good stuff before he built HubSpot.

What, uh, what do you, so this was making $90 grand a month maybe, or about, what do you, is this—

it could, it's not, right? There's no ads here.

I turned, I turned ads off because that's sort of not the point. Uh, and people were asking me, it was like, Dharmesh, why do you have ads on this thing? I'm like, to learn. Like, it's like I've learned what I needed to learn so I can—

was, was tweeting and LinkedIn, posting this on LinkedIn the only way you got users? What do you think this could sell for right now? And is the, is this the biggest side project you've ever created?

Our buddy tried to buy it from— Suli tried to buy it off you.

Did he really?

He tweeted out, he's like, I'd like to buy this off you. I've, you know, I've built mobile games before, you know, he was like semi-serious at least. I don't know. I don't know if you talked to him or not, but I did not.

What do you think you could sell? What do you think, like, if you cared, what do you think you could sell it for? $2 or $3 million maybe?

I feel right now that, um, let's say the ad revenue would go down to like $50,000 or something like that. Cause I haven't turned Google AdSense in a while. That's $600,000 a year. Apply a 5x multiple. Um, so somewhere between $2 and $10 million would be my guess. If I like, if that's what I was going for. So it's—

and, um, is this the bit— it was, was posting it on LinkedIn and Twitter the only way that you got users or did you do some other weird hacks?

I had my blog, had my— it's like I'm a big believer in like, you know, what folks call like the flywheel. There's all these little things that are attached to the flywheel, right? It's like, oh, well, LinkedIn helps a little bit, puts a little energy, Twitter does a little bit. And then I have my blog and the email goes out and there's like things that I sort of do. Yeah, so it helps, but it's like the hardest part is that cold start problem. Like how do you get your first 100,000 people, 100 to 1,000 people And then it's a matter of like tracking the retention rate on those users. Do they come back? The other thing that's been interesting about Wordplay as far as a lesson learned is that, you know, when it started, the average time a user spent according to Google was roughly 4 minutes on the game. Okay. In the early weeks. And now that number is at 14 minutes is the average time a user spends, you know, across however many thousand users come in a given day. So. Right.

What—

and is this the biggest side project you've ever created?

Depends on how you measure it. So technically, no, not in terms of just like raw traffic. I've built graders and things like that before that have done better.

But what have you built that did— what side project have you built outside of HubSpot that gets more traffic than 2 or 3 million people a month?

I haven't really did side projects. This is my first one that was like clearly because it was a game. Had it been anything other than a game, I would have rationalized some way to bring it into the HubSpot umbrella because I like to have like all my eggs in that basket, but just given the circumstances here, didn't really make sense. And even now, like I'm thinking about doing a kind of a marketing and sales related edition of Wordplay, right? It's like, oh, the entire list of words or do it based on MarTech companies. Like, okay, do you know the players in the space kind of thing? And then you can get sponsorships or whatever. Anyway, but yeah, Website Grader was the, this kind of a project where it was like a free, I'm I really like low-friction things that people can come to the website. And this is why my son and I were chatting yesterday, is where I'm looking at Flutter, this new development environment and language. Well, Dart's the language, but Flutter is the app framework for building mobile apps across iOS and Android and things. It's what the cool new kids are learning. And he's like, no, why would I ever want to build a mobile app? That's like something people have to download. I have to get approval from, you know, Apple to kind of post my— like, I want to like just do it like immediately. He's got that, and he's right. It's like, okay, anyway. So that's the Wordplay story. It's been a lot of fun. I've— it's hard to know with these things, like, where the road leads. Like, Wordplay itself may or may not kind of connect back to other things, whatever. But the things I've learned through it, I think will. It's like, okay, well, here's what it takes to build this kind of thing. It's like, okay, well, then I'm using it to play around with community. It's like, okay, can I take the Wordplay user base? What are the things they care about and build a community around Wordplay using one of the existing kind of community platforms? And see if that's a thing, right? It's like, okay, if you can aggregate people with like interests, that in and of itself has value. And I want it to be something that kind of self-runs, but we'll see.