How did I create a game with $4,000 monthly revenue in 3 days?

My background

My name is Laszlo, and I'm the creator of actorle.com and its spin-offs. I would like to share my story with you.

I am a full-stack developer from Hungary, and I've always had the habit of working on various side projects in my free time, but I was never really intentional about it. I created web-based versions of various board games just to play with my wife and friends and also experimented with a few other things. My biggest project was a travel adviser website that I worked on for months, but I eventually abandoned the project due to technical difficulties and losing motivation. It is still online but doesn't really work anymore: https://functively.com/

The idea and the rough start

With this moderately successful background, I noticed the Wordle trend in March 2022 and started thinking about possible alternatives. My idea was not to copy the letter-based guessing process but rather to create a game that has a similar gradual progress element with guesses like Wordle. I thought this could work with actors and movies because if your guess played in the same movie as the solution, you could see some progress (revealing the full movie title in this case).
I knew about some free movie databases, so I pretty quickly created the first version in React. I tried playing the game with high expectations and was immediately disappointed because I didn't find it particularly enjoyable. Anyway, I thought it might be worth a try, so I posted it on Reddit to get some feedback. The first comments were not very promising:

I think it looks good and functions well. In my opinion, it's insanely hard to win, but perhaps someone else feels differently about that.

Doesn't even have John Hurt. Literally unplayable!

At this point, I kind of decided to abandon the game and declare it an interesting but failed experiment. I still checked the analytics regularly but saw a gradual decline after the first surge of Reddit users, as I expected.

Then I got lucky

After a week, I started seeing a sudden surge in the numbers. At first, I didn't know the traffic source, but after some digging, I found that an archaic-looking British website, b3ta.com, had featured the game in its newsletter. At that point, the game had about 500 daily users, which seemed like a huge number to me, considering my previous projects. I still didn't have high expectations, but I fixed some minor bugs according to user feedback and saw a constantly growing number of users. The virality of Twitter shares mainly drove this growth. It matters a lot for these types of games when someone with 150k followers shares their link. Besides the viral growth on Twitter, I was lucky that the game also got featured in some major news sites like Mashable: https://mashable.com/article/framed-actorle-movie-wordle

OK, but how to monetize it?

When the game reached 10k daily users, I knew I had to take it seriously from then on, but I had no idea how to proceed. I considered these options:
Leave the game as is - a completely free simple game.
Add a donation button to accept some support from my users.
Create a mobile game with similar gameplay and monetize it with in-app purchases.
Monetize the website with ads.
I have always wanted to be financially independent and saw this game as an opportunity, so I selfishly rejected the first idea.
I had no experience with ads and didn't want to annoy my users right away, so I chose to add a donation button using a service called Buy Me a Coffee. I didn't have high expectations, so I was pleasantly surprised when I brought in about $1000 within just three months.

My adventure in the mobile gaming world

My next idea was to create a mobile game based on this gameplay. I thought monetization would be easier with in-app purchases and ads. So I started building the game, but I quickly realized that making a mobile game (even such a simple one) is more difficult than I expected. Anyway, in two months, I managed to finish the game and uploaded it to the App Store. I started promoting the game on the website and right away got a handful of downloads, but the initial responses were not super positive. This was mainly due to my inexperience in mobile development, so the game had a few pretty serious bugs. I quickly realized that fixing them in iOS is not as simple as on the web, where I can release a new version in seconds. The gameplay was also not very well balanced. I wanted to give some hints to the new users, but it made the game's first few levels too easy. Finally, after fixing the bugs and polishing the gameplay, I started getting nice ratings and reviews. (The game now has a 4.7 rating in the App Store.) However, revenue wasn't too strong. In-app purchases weren't very successful due to the poorly balanced gameplay, and ad income was also pretty low because the mobile game's user base wasn't even close to the web version.

Going full-time

In the meantime, I was contacted by some ad providers about the website, and they had pretty decent offers. So I decided to give it a try. I finally went with a provider called Ezoic, and after fixing some integration issues, I started seeing very nice numbers. I did some calculations and realized that the revenue was close to the salary of my full-time job. I waited a few weeks to see if it would maintain this level, and since it seemed to be working, I filed my resignation and became a full-time solo entrepreneur.
After resigning, I first enjoyed my newfound free time, spending a lot of time with my one-year-old kid and my wife, and also started thinking about the next steps. I created a few spin-offs for the game, the most obvious was a TV actor guessing version (actorle.tv), which became quite successful, but unfortunately the number of well-known TV stars is low compared to that of movie stars. In addition, I created a soccer-themed version (footballdle.com) with similar gameplay, but it has yet to gain popularity. The latest is moviedle.xyz which looks very promising based on the first few days but we will see how it unfolds.

I also added some features to the original version, such as the highly requested dark mode and a Halloween challenge in October, to make it a little more interesting for my loyal users.
Besides my adventures in the daily game industry, I started working on a SaaS project called ReactiveSocial (reactivesocial.com), which will be a service for indie developers like me to generate social media images without using overly complicated and sometimes buggy visual editors.

What did I learn during the process?

• It's really worth giving your ideas a shot because you never know which one will succeed.
• Feedback matters more than numbers. Seeing the growing number of users is a nice feeling, but hearing that my game brought people some happiness is way more motivating.

Please let me know if you found my story helpful for your journey or if you have any questions. You can contact me at [email protected], on Twitter twitter.com/LaszloKiss__ or on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laszlo-kiss/