Sup br0s? When Wordle was HOT I created www.word500.com, which is a very tough variant of Wordle. It is not for the average player, who has an attention span of 5 minutes or less.

It is the first (and only) website I ever built, helped by YouTube tutorials. Never did any HTML, CSS or JavaScript before. Learning while doing So I'm pretty sure it is crappily coded.

Anyway, it has grown to about 8k players per day. I never invested into marketing or did much about it, other than point some puzzle solving YouTubers to my site. However the occasional tiktoker creating a video has boosted the traffic significantly.

Now I got offered 2k, 5k then 10k for the site.

Should I grab and run or should I exploit it better? Ik have no clue about exploiting websites. There are no ads on the site, just a donate button that has literally caught one 5€ donation in the 9 months the site is online

Any advice? Thanks!

It's hard to pinpoint any value at all without knowing what the intended use of the site would be along with your analytics. But to give you a little help in terms of what it could make advertising right now: IF your 8K daily users translates into something like 30K 'Unique Monthly Visitors' and you were to run google ads on your site, figure your site would earn somewhere around $50/mo. from google ads. From there 40X monthly profit is a multiple that gets used in valuation.

But again, that's based on assumptions about your current users, the lowest tier of advertising and very little in terms of maximum monetization. Factor in continuing growth and some marketing/advertising talent and someone could probably buy it, optimize it and then flip it in the in the $100K range. Not that it's realistic for you to think you could do the same with a little study and work. But you could certainly learn how to make some improvements monetization wise, so I guess the question is do you really want to get into all that? If not, you're pinning your hopes for an increased valuation on continued growth, which may or may not happen.

Going on from John21's great points, the best way to maximise a sale price is to first monetise the site more, then prospective buyers will see its true value and pay a much higher valuation.

If you sell your web site as is, you will just get shrewdies who can see its full potential once optimised, bidding you low for it.

If your goal is to get a big/good price for it, (and why not, that is what I would do), then it is worth putting in the work to optimise it / monetise it first, even if you have to spend some money doing so, and/or outsource some or most of that work.

If you do this then I can see buyers actually getting over excited and paying too much for it! I would go as far as saying that you might get 5 to 10 times the valuation that people are likely offering you now, so I agree with John21's possible valuation of $100K.

My other observation is that the site looks quite home made, so if you can make the look and feel of it more professional / high tech, then that will give you more chance of achieving a high valuation.

Other thoughts: someone, or a team of more than one people, may be prepared to do the extra work for you, for a small fee plus a share of the sale price. This would incentivise them to do an amazing job as well as keep your up front costs down. N.B. If you enter into any kind of arrangement like this, or even if you do a straightforward pay someone to do the work for you, make sure that you have a strong contract in place that protects your intellectual property from being stolen from you or copied, or near copied, that covers both now and in the future, and I would make the future 5 years. It needs to be a really strong contract to act as a powerful deterrent.

In terms of paying developers, I have had a lot of experience of this, both good and bad, and my advice is never to pay too much up front, it will usually end badly doing it that way.

Instead, agree a payment schedule in advance of something like five payments, the first one of 10%, and then four payments of 22.5% each based on milestones reached. Something like 10% up front for the developer coming back to you with a detailed plan of how he/she is going to execute your brief, then you pay the 4 x 22.5% instalments: the first 22.5% when the initial first build is achieved, 22.5% when the second draft with your amendments is completed, 22.5% after testing has been completed, and the last 22.5% after any final fixes and final testing is completed.

There are also developers that you can pay as "work checkers" who will independently check the developer's work for you periodically throughout the project. It is an extra cost to hire someone to do this (it is usually/should be) a higher level of skill and knowledge developer than the one that is doing the project, but I think the extra cost is worth it for a project that could result in a 6 figure gain for you.

It is also a good idea also to agree within the total price to the developer, ongoing technical support for say 1 year after the completion of the build, and to include in the contract that the technical support package is transferable by you to a new owner, should you within the year sell the site.

The above is a general framework of how to avoid being screwed over by a developer and/or to protect yourself from losing too much if the developer turns out to be not very good.

Contracts with other people who may help you build the strength and monetization of the site will vary accordingly, so may or may not be on the same basis.

Also, always insist that the developer develops on a clone (copy) of your site, so that your current site can keep operating during the development period and doesn't get messed up.
This is probably an obvious thing, but mentioning it just in case it doesn't cross your mind.

You may find if you do go the route of improving and monetizing the site that you are then making significant revenue and would rather keep ownership, so in the case of a fee plus percentage of sale price contract (as payment to a developer) you need to define time scales and have an agreed fixed amount of payment as an alternative to the percentage of the sale price, should you not sell the site within the agreed time limit.

You built the site, so it may be that you can do a lot of the development yourself. Even if this is the case, my feeling is that the site would still benefit from some other specialists in the fields of design, marketing and social media etc, plus maybe a general innovative ideas person who can come up with some cool features to add to the site. Think about ad revenue features and scope too, as John mentioned.

I think it's a great site and has a great deal of potential.

I wish you good luck with it all and hope you do very well out of it.

(Obv DYOR on everything I have suggested/mentioned, it is just friendly advice from me, based on my own experiences, so shouldn't be taken as professional advice.)

I would only do what the previous posters suggested you are interested in this type of business and technology, and plan to use the skills you will acquire during the process in the future. Otherwise my best advise is don't bother.

Don't know if the offer has expired, but if you need 10k then sell, if not hold on. If you sell, then try and negotiate a future revenue percentage, (ads, traffic, sponsors, whatever their model is) it'll be small, but it'll be residual. If they say no (they likely will estimating their perceived value) then use that no to receive a higher asking. Expect about 2% residuals or near 20% asking. Research the buyers.


If you hold on, know your chips are in play and can be lost at any time, or they can increase by a lot, and fast. If this 10k offer is legit and you choose to hold, then do as I mentioned long ago, and reach out to influencers. Influencers tilt me quite a bit, but they can help a lot for free


tl;dr
Sell if you need 10k. Negotiate a small residual or about 20% above current ask if selling

Keep it if you don't mind losing its value. If you keep then do things like reaching out to tilting influencers. Unfortunately they're like reality TV people which is garbage

Cannot agree more.

Thanks for all the replies.

The fact is that I have no idea if I can monetize this site better than take the immediate cashout. So I have negotiated and accepted 12,000USD.
For something that was done in a span over 2 months and done for fun, I think it is excellent ROI on my efforts.

Sick win my friend.

Based on all you described, really can't go wrong with that payout.

What website did you use to list it if you did?

I was buying a laptop when you started this venture. So I dropped in on the computer forum and asked some fish questions. I followed it and saw how much the programming pissed you off, and the fact you're able to sell a passion project with this turn around time is just great stuff. And it might even be placing you in the 90th of percentile of profit points x time for a single first timer

Now that it's sold, maybe keep in mind, checking up on word500 in the future might be like looking up lottery numbers you didn't play but would've won

I sold a domain name for $1k…and that’s all it was. Nothing special either. $12k seems low

It probably is a bit low but I think by selling it largely unmonetized it is the equivalent of selling a dilapidated house for $120K that with a lot of work,
some investment and a lot of knowhow, a shrewd investor can spend another $60K on and exit at $300K, or rent out at a 10% to 15% yield per year.

As I said in a previous post, I think if Gabethebabe had done the "renovations" himself (monetized the site a lot more) that someone may have overpaid for it.

But if he is not that way inclined, then selling at $12K still can't be bad, and there is nothing of course to stop him from building other projects,
and perhaps making the build include good monetization from the start.

Yeah, i don't care what happens with it now. But considering the difficulty of the game, I think it will be very hard to attract the greater public, because the greater public is stupid, lazy and has an attention span of 5 minutes max. Neither if these attributes are compatible with word500.

This is exactly how I see it. Either I must invest a lot of time, money and effort and MAYBE it will become more valuable, or you take the quick win.


Not sure what you are asking. it was hosted on Amazon's Route 53.

Another argument I considered was that my game is NOT original. There are other sites where you can play this exact same variant of wordle. They might even have existed before mine, I'm not sure.

https://playhurdle.vercel.app/
https://wordzmania.com/Wordzy/Master
https://i.selic.re/hardmordle/#

What the developers all didn't do was create an original, recognizable, searchable name and claim the related .com domain.
And my graphics are probably more appealing.

if I had tried to charge more, maybe the buyer could have gone for another of these variants.

How did the buyer find your site for sale? Did you advertise it on an auction site? Thanks

My site wasn't actually for sale. I think he just looked up the domain on WHOIS and sent an e-mail to the contact e-mail over there, which belonged to Route 53 and forwarded by them to my personal e-mail account.

Amazing!

cool thread. interested to see how the site develops under the new owner

Wordle clones are selling like hotcakes:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/22/2...e-wordle-clone

And me. For the moment it is still my files that are being hosted.

Quordle appears to get 500k visitors per day. That should have been a six-figure deal I reckon.

yeah, as mentioned, what gabe could teach himself to build in 2 months with zero prior experience could obviously also be built by a group of professionals

he had a great idea and was first mover but did not own exclusivity

if they were willing to pay 12k for the site, then they are obviously prepared to spend 12k building the same thing themselves

more importantly, if they are willing to pay 12k to acquire the site, then they clearly have big plans to invest heavily in marketing and advertising it, something which is very risky and expensive - gabe didn't want to quit his career and work full time and spend thousands in advertising to really try to get the game to really grow so it's unlikely the site would ever magically be worth more than that it is currently worth so long as he held it

in no world was gabe ever getting 100k for this site, wordle, which was an international phenomenon played by millions and talked about incessantly only sold for low 7 figures

this was a fantastic result - sure it could grow a bit more and provide steady income to the new owners and but there's no beating this ROI

the value of word500 was the convenience of having an existing product with an existing userbase and nothing more

12k for two months of hobby project time vs 100k for 6 months of full time labor and 10k in advertising it's the 12k ainec

great score, super awesome to see gabe's success, now we just need to get him to launch a stratego clone

https://wordle-unlimited.io/word500



https://wordlegame.org/wordle-games/word500



https://dordle.io/word500

lol yup, 3 different copycats already, even used the same name

great timing of the sale

games are particularly cyclical, I've worked with game developers and they were always chasing the next trend and then 6 months later the audience was gone and they'd need to find another new thing

These sites, that are hosting all wordle variants they can get their hands on, have existed for months.

Those aren't copycat sites.
And for some reason I left off "you don't have to spend much on advertising...." preface with the above post.

uhh, dude... this is like stating that napster was legally fine because it was the real song you were downloading and not cover songs by a napster house band