Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

Two additional lessons I took away from the game:

• Experiment: when prototyping, the author experimented with different word lengths and different numbers of guesses until he found the combination that was challenging, but where a player won most of the time. Takeaway: Take the time to get the details right.

• Observe Usage: The emoji viral sharing mechanism wasn't added until mid-December when he noticed people were typing out their guesses in emojis. He didn't invent the concept—he merely made it easier for players to do what they were already doing. Takeaway: Pay attention to your users and figure out a way to amplify them.

Wordle is strangely addictive - but I think the marketing stroke of genius was the graphical sharing capability.

There's a great opportunity to ride the wave for Indie Hackers here too.

You can grab an open source version of the game created by Chase Wackerfuss and brand it to your market.

Taylor Swift's marketing team has done it with Taylordle.

And I've created Dronedle a drone-themed version which appeals to the target audience of my main SaaS project Dronedesk.

Played it today, and I'm already hooked. Would love something like this in IH.

My Wordle score from today:

Wordle 249 4/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

If you haven't played Wordle yet, I recommend it!

It's ingenious as a viral product as the author describes, especially the emoji-based sharing of your score, and the fact that everyone gets the same word every day, so it's fun to discuss with your friends.

and it makes complete sense to me why the NYT bought it for $millions. Newspapers have always prized crosswords, comics, and other gimmicks to give people one more reason to come back on a daily basis. I admit I find myself itching to build a simple Wordle-inspired game to live on Indie Hackers.

P.S. My Wordle score from today:

Wordle 248 4/6

⬛🟨⬛🟩⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I just can't understand people's obsession with playing a game and sharing its results in Twitter everyday...

I love wordle (https://www.taylordle.com/) but I think this is over-analysis on something the founder intended as fun that then became an outlier story.

Yes he worked on it to make it more viral, yes, but the design and constraints were really just that he wanted to make a fun game.

This story should be less about "learn how to make a business from wordle" and should be more "make fun small projects"

I really liked the idea of sharing results to drive growth.

I built wordleboard.com as a fun experiment to see if people would share to wordleboard to keep track of their scores. Also saves me from having to deal with sign up

My first time today, thanks for sharing.

Wordle 250 6/6

⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛
🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛
🟩🟨🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I think another reason why it took off is that the format is so simple, which makes it easy to fork and build on. The dev world's just jumping in to create spinoffs, like:

• nerdle (equations) https://mathslinks.net/links/nerdle
• worldle (countries of the world) https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/
• not to mention just the spin-offs with just themed wordpacks (A Greener Wordle for environment-related words, BTS Wordle etc.)

And that creates even more buzz, concreting the original as the founder as a whole new category of games.

I love Wordle! I’m curious to see what the New York Times does with it and if they’ll ruin it.