How 3 Co-Founders Built A $7K/Year Online Game Web App [Side-Hustle]
Ahoy! My name is Collin Waldoch and I’m one of three founders of Twofer Goofer, a daily online word game partially inspired by Wordle. I split my time between Brooklyn and Wisconsin and I’ve been an “amateur gamemaker” for the past few years while simultaneously working a day job as a product manager at a venture-backed edtech company.
Twofer Goofer is a daily word game that challenges players to come up with each day’s pair of rhyming words that is described by a roundabout phrase (e.g. “A semi-molten morning pick-me-upper is …. Lava Java!”). Players can access a series of clues, play past puzzles, and celebrate the answer with a beautiful piece of AI-generated art.
Twofer Goofer players can plan on twofergoofer.com or access the game through a variety of partner websites through which we have a distribution deal including USAToday.com and Washingtonpost.com. Through those partner sites, Twofer Goofer earns a share of ad revenue and as of September 2023, we have an annualized revenue of $7,000.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
My backstory has to start with the fact that I’m a “middle middle child” as the third oldest in a family of six hyper-competitive Chicagoland kids. I spent most of my childhood making up competitions and games for anything. After studying finance and economics in college, I eventually maneuvered my way into the tech industry as a product manager while working on New York City’s bike share system.
In 2017, I started a side project named Water Cooler Trivia, a simple B2B Saas company for sending customized trivia quizzes to companies over email or Slack. After hustling in this company for a few years with two close friends, I dove into full-time in early 2020. Ultimately I ended up selling the business in 2022 after reaching mid-six-figure profitable revenue. At the time, I’d re-entered the “traditional” workforce as a product manager at a Series C SaaS company.
While I was selling Water Cooler Trivia, I saw firsthand the explosion of Wordle. Wordle was inspiring. Though lots of media hype around its innovation and brilliance, I thought Wordle to be a well-executed iteration of a childhood game (Jotto). The beauty of Wordle wasn't the novelty but the quality of design and execution. It’s fun. It’s good-viral, and it has an “aha" moment.
Immediately my brain went to Twofer Goofer, a name my wife coined years ago: came up with a roundabout description for a rhyming two-word nonsensical phrase. We didn’t invent the idea of rhyming phrases. Newspapers had Wordy Gurdy, Jeopardy had Rhyme Time, and board games had Think-it Link-it.
The core construct would be simple: a starting phrase that describes a pair of rhyming words. We knew we’d give on-demand hints. But the biggest “add some spice! add some flavor! add some sense of self!” idea was to give a daily illustration of that day’s Twofer. We playtested last summer by emailing daily Google Forms to a few dozen friends and family members and then released them in late August.
Here are a few more examples without the answers. I spy a Beef Leaf and Spider Cider… can you solve the others?
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
Given that Twofer Goofer is a relatively simple daily word game, the process of “building” was relatively straightforward. We first focused on the game mechanics themselves, such as the types of clues, number of clues, difficulty of prompts, difficulty of rhymes, and the types of AI images that resonated with users.
While we were testing these game mechanics via Google Forms and daily emails to our friends and family, the three co-founders (product/cluemaster, engineer, designer) were designing and prototyping the basic version of the webapp itself. We didn’t have login/auth nor a mobile app, just a responsive web app that would allow for easy access to each day’s puzzle.
We iterated on the designs a few times and ultimately made a few key product changes in the first few weeks, such as adding a daily timer and giving players the ability to play past puzzles.
Here are a few screenshots showing the evolution of Twofer Goofer’s design.
Describe the process of launching the business.
If I’m being completely honest, it was a fairly uneventful launch! Launch for us meant that we were ready to transition from Google Forms and daily emails to an actual real-life website/web app. The first day that Twofer Goofer was on a real website, the clue was “A teeny ornamental case showing off a combustible flyer.”
The answer…? Rocket Locket.
I posted on my Linkedin, shared with an email group of ~100 friends and family members, and posted on Hacker News. We had a ProductHunt launch that largely flopped with only 29 Upvotes.
We reached 100-200 daily players from this initial burst of traction and stayed at this level of usage until a few tactics were detailed in the below section.
Given the very low costs of maintaining the website, the three co-founders were able to each put $500 into the business bank account as a way to seed our funding. We all have day jobs with salaries so were not expecting an immediate (or ever) return on that capital.
Momentum and motivation are everything. They can come from a deep-seated desire to learn, from one or more motivating partners, or from a deep interest in what you’re building.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
We have tried a handful of things with very half-hearted efforts, but ultimately our growth channels have come from a few things.
Half-hearted attempts at growth that did not pay off:
- ~$100 in Google Ads investments that accidentally were all spent on Indian YouTube users (I’m not a Google Ads expert but this revealed my skills were well below that bar).
- DM’ing all of the New York Times journalists that write their “Wordle review” each week. They never responded.
- Attempting to get included on “Alternatives to Wordle” listicles.
Growth efforts that have paid off:
1) Partnering with Arkadium and getting Twofer Goofer distributed (via iFrame) on some of their large games properties such as AARP, Washington Post, and USA Today.
2) A news article via my university’s online magazine.
3) Writing a very-topical Bard analysis (https://twofergoofer.com/blog/bard) (Google’s ChatGPT competitor) centered on Twofer Goofer on the day Bard was released, resulting in a front-page Hacker News appearance and decent backlink and SEO exposure.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We are profitable. Our costs for running the business are in the low-three figures (~$120 across Supabase, ChatGPT, Midjourney, Vercel, and Sendgrid), and our monthly revenue is in the mid-three figures (~$600 from our share of ads on partner platforms). At this point, the product \mostly\ runs itself.
The biggest regular cost is the time spent writing the daily puzzle and creating the associated art for each day. This takes ~30 minutes per night or ~4 hours per week, 16 hours per month.
This is a fun process for now, and there are increasing aids such as ChatGPT and improvements to Midjourney that make for a simpler process in writing the clues. Aside from the puzzle writing, there is now regular work that goes into the business, it’s fully automated.
We are considering more distribution on additional game platforms as well as possibly partnering with other daily word games as a way to increase our distribution. In addition, we have tested an extremely small amount of Google Ads as a way to attract more players and assess our retention.
Here’s a graph of our puzzles solved per month:
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
We’ve made a few key learnings while developing the Twofer Goofer. I’ll group them into product learning and business learning.
On the product learning front, we’re very glad with our early decision to give users the ability to opt-in to daily reminders of new puzzles. We have more than 500 clicks every single day of our email giving us a regular baseline of daily traffic that is very valuable. Another key learning was the value of having a timer.
It adds a competitive element to the game that resonates with users and can be disabled in settings for those who want more peace and quiet during their Twofer-solving moments. Lastly, we’re very glad to have enabled the ability to play past puzzles. It lends itself to the completionists who discover Twofer Goofer and want to solve dozens or even hundreds of past puzzles.
On the business front, it’s been very clear that PR (including an article from my university’s online magazine found here) has been a driver in traffic for our business.
However, that new traffic is not monetized by us at all. Instead, the decision to reach out to distribution platforms for web games like Arkadium and Kongregate was the key unlock in getting Twofer Goofer in front of more people and starting to earn our first revenue.
Lastly, the reality is we were “too late” for the initial wave of Wordle enthusiasm. Hurdle, Quordle, Waffle, Nerdle, and other similar games quickly launched and built an audience and massive six-figure user base. Twofer Goofer launched a full nine months after Wordle (I was busy selling Water Cooler Trivia at that time!) and this has led to slower and steadier growth rather than an immediate explosion of growth seen by some other games.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
In general, we’re very pleased with the tools we use to run Twofer Goofer.
On the technical side, we use
For product and design, we use
- ChatGPT for helping write the puzzles
- Midjourney for making the daily images
- Figma for all design work
Not much more beyond that! Of course the classics of Google Sheets and we’ve dabbled with StickerMule for making stickers (pictured below). We use Mercury for our bank account and used Stripe Atlas to incorporate.
We do have a Twitter but we don’t use it. Ditto with Instagram and Tiktok.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I’m generally a huge fan of the Stratechery newsletter and the Acquired podcast. For the specifics of Twofer Goofer, I was inspired by the Podcast with the New York Times Games section about Wordle found.
As well as an article about James Robinson, the maker of the Worlde-inspired indie game Waffle found here.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
So cliche, but so true that you should only work on something that inherently interests you. The reason why is what I call the Tuesday 10 pm problem. If your company or project is something that you would never choose to work on over heading to sleep at 10 pm on a Tuesday, your odds of “success” will be vanishingly slim.
Momentum and motivation are everything. They can come from a deep-seated desire to learn, from one or more motivating partners, or from a deep interest in what you’re building. It’s okay to try things and move on. Search for that project that will keep your motor running!
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We aren’t hiring right now! But if you want to take a stab at writing a puzzle or two, we’re always open to them! Just send a note to [email protected].
Where can we go to learn more?
Quite simply head on over to our website to give the game a whirl! And be sure to drop your email in the results modal to ensure you get each day’s daily puzzle.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
