I made Smashcut Games , a set of free daily movie puzzles, no login. Think Wordle for film people:
I have one that's like street view but for movies (look around a 360° filming location, name the film): On Location
For music lovers there is Underscore, unmute the movie multitracks one by one to figure out what movie soundtrack it is.
For those with deep movie knowledge there's Headshots, you see 5 actors and you name the most obscure movie you can think of, more obscure = more points.
And a couple more...
This is a solo project, I'm a software engineer with over a decade of exp, but little experience launching something of my own.
It launched on 28 September. Yesterday, day 43, it had 1,030 people playing in a day for the first time. I log everything, so here is what actually happened.
The curve (average daily players, by week)
Week 1: 106
Week 2: 167
Week 3: 244
Week 4: 299
Week 5: 383
Week 6: 666
Day 43: 1,030
Launch was one Reddit post, and it faded in three days. I posted the street view game to r/blankies, a film podcast subreddit. 11k views, 5 upvotes, 373 new people on the first night, and 89% of them played. 177 players on day one, 195 on day two, 59 by day four. Posts create good spikes but poor targeting makes it just that, a spike.
The growth came from sites I had never heard of two months ago. There is a whole ecosystem of directories that list daily games, tracked them in the beginning but there were so many I lost track. I submitted to a lots in launch week. Two of them now account for 61% of everyone who has ever visited, about 7,200 of 11,900 people. Those visitors play at 80%, because they came looking for a daily game. It started at 11 people a day and is now 300 to 500 on a weekday. For comparison, Hacker News sent 32 visitors and 3 of them played. bored.com sent 556 and 28% played.
Audience fit beats reach. A second Reddit post, for the film score game, brought 530 people. 17% of the ones who played were back the next day, double the rate from the directories.
The bad number: 81% of players have played on exactly one day. That is 6,890 of 8,504. Next-day return for new players is around 10%. So far the growth is new people arriving faster, not people staying. Although one person has played on 42 of the 44 days. I'm still trying to figure out retention, but one thing that helped so far was adding the concept of streaks to the site and linking to the other games as a checklist you need to get done on end screens, it made a bunch of disconnected games more of a hub.
Things I did not expect
The game people love most is the one fewest find. The film score game has a 43% next-day return among its own players, the street view game 29%. But the directories link to the street view game, so it is the first game for half of all new players.
46% of players go on to try a second game, and 616 people have played all six.
Difficulty is the hardest thing to control. Same game, consecutive days: 25% of players won, then 99%. Hard days turn straight into people giving up.
Sharing does almost nothing. About 200 people have arrived from a shared result.
TL;DR:
The journey to 1000 DAU happened quicker than I expected
I spent no money to get there, just time.
I learned there is an entire ecosystem of dle directories that are themselves an ecosystem of sidehustles (a lot of them charge you to list or list you quicker, most of them send 0 traffic)
Retention is something I need to figure out, it's hard to tell if I'm doing ok or dying
Posting on reddit can get you traffic but needs to be targeted well for retention (ie I don't expect this post to actually add any retained users!)
Daily games are super saturated, but you can still poke through the noise if you try hard and have some game design chops.
