Thread by @StevenCravotta

Here’s how a mobile game I built 5 years ago suddenly got blown up by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Jimmy Fallon.

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

I built an app called Wordle when I was 18 mostly for fun, to sharpen my coding skillz, and maybe make a quick buck. It didn’t quite take off like my previous app, Grid, did. So after a few months and ~100k total downloads, I stopped updating and promoting the app.

It’s user growth slowly declined to 1-2 downloads a day for the past 4 years…. Until 1 week ago when I logged into my dashboard and was SHOOK at what I saw

I figured someone ran a bot script and artificially sent downloads to the wrong app or something. But after a quick google search I realized I was very wrong. As it turns out the very talented developer @powerlanguish created an amazing in browser game called Wordle.

It caught traction and soon major publications started running articles about his Wordle game, but none of them clearly specified that this was an ‘internet browser’ only game, so naturally people went to the AppStore to search Wordle. Low and behold, those people

came across my app, also conveniently named Wordle. My Wordle app has gotten 200,000 downloads in the past 7 days and its not even slowing down yet. I reached out to @powerlanguish to see if we could donate the proceeds I have gotten.

I figured we could turn this very strange, once in a lifetime scenario and make it something amazing! Any suggestions on where this money should go would be much appreciated! Preferably a literacy focused non profit / organization.

If you enjoyed this thread please consider giving me a follow and checking out my latest mobile app: PuffCount.com

Can confirm that @powerlanguish and I have decided to donate the proceeds to @BoostOakland! Very excited to support such an amazing program that focuses on literacy for youth! We feel the money will make a real impact here!

Will keep you all updated throughout this process!