$3K/Month From a 3-Day Wordle Clone (4 Years Later)

📝 KLaci, a Budapest-based dev and movie nerd, writes about a side project he almost killed in its first weekend.

In March 2022, riding the Wordle hype, he built actorle.com – a guess-the-actor daily puzzle – in 3 days.

Launch went badly…

I posted on Reddit and a few forums. Two of the top comments were “insanely hard to win” and “literally unplayable”, the second one because I’d forgotten to add John Hurt to the database.

I almost killed the project that weekend.

A tiny British humor newsletter (b3ta.com) featured it next. Then he added the feature that changed everything: a “share your score on Twitter” button.

Virality has to be designed in.

The Wordle-style shareable score grid is what carried Actorle. Without that one feature it would’ve died in week 2.

Mashable picked it up. Accounts with 10K+ followers started posting their grids 📈

Four years later 👇

• ~10K daily active users
• ~$3K/month from display ads via Publisher Collective
• A small portfolio of spinoffs under metime.games
• Very low maintenance

His pitch to other indie devs…

‘Build a B2B SaaS’ isn’t the only indie path.

A low-maintenance daily consumer game is a real business too.

You could vibe-code a Wordle-for-X this weekend – sports, music, anime – using a free public API for the data.

Just don’t ship without that shareable score grid 😎

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