Hi all, I'm contemplating the building of a word game website, very similar to Wordle.
For simplicity, assume Wordle does not exist and I am about to create it.

How should I go about it.

It needs a name. It should probably be original. I have that.
It needs a website that doesn't exist and nobody owns currently.
The website needs to be lean and the game playable on any device
The website needs to be in several languages, requiring me to have an equal amount of wordlists.
It will allow for 1 game/day. There should be no way people can find out the future words
It needs tools that allow sharing on social media or it will never go boom
There will be a hint button that people can use if they get stuck, that will generate a random word that fits previous hints.

Any idea what kind of investment this will require and who should I contact to build it? Anyone local would be the best?

Thanks

When you say several languages, does it need to be available globally? This can present significant challenges. Another Q, how many users are you hoping to support?

my expertise is mostly in cloud infrastructure and automation, so I can't speak to what exactly you need on the application side, but I would guess supporting any device is gonna require at least like 3-4 developers. You'd need an ios guy and an android guy, I don't know if people typically know both, but I'm really just guessing here.

You'd definitely need a senior-ish full stack developer which isn't cheap. You'd also probably want a devops-ish guy to handle the infrastructure side, and at some point you'll probably need more than 1, because there are tons of components as to what constitutes a website other than the actual application itself.

In other words from what you've described this does not sound like a 1 man project. You could probably get away with 2 guys.

If that's too much maybe limit your scope a bit - focus on 1 environment at a time, like start out on ios, then move to other environments as it grows, etc.

Thank you for your time to write all that.

A website ought to work with any browser, right? Why do I need so many guys? I'm not building an Android or iOS app

ah sorry, I misread this then:

I see what you mean now. Yea, one full stack guy for sure is required. Good luck.

I went to a website building company that is literally 50m from my home and he estimated 3k and 10 days to do this

That's out of my range. Seems so simple, any geek can build it. Apparently not

could try sites like fiverr , toptal
I'm guessing you're planning to profit from this?

Yes. For the mannies. I have a family to support

I would take the time and teach myself how to do it
and have more control over future problems, save some money
unless it's a speed to market sort of thing where time is of the essence or someone else beats you to it, tho don't think it applies here
worst thing that can happen is you waste a few months
try skillshare I guess, they have a month free, got tons of courses

tho if I think about it, this sounds like the sort of game that I'd want to play on my phone
and bulk of revenue comes from in game shop purchases rather than ads on a website
I think app traffic would waaaaay exceed website traffic and anyway, you wouldn't believe how stupidly profitable mobile games are rn
but an app costs a lot to develop and then you need to advertise so ye, this would be a very costly project

guess teach yourself how to do the website, see if there's interest, then decide

I ended up hiring a freelancer. For 1250€ all inclusive I should have a website

I just registered the .com. No idea if I should claim any others too. Like the country specific or the .net, .biz etc

This game is not a game that you will play a lot during the day. it will burn your brain. Not sure how good an app would do and it would take a lot of investment.
Now for a reasonable price I will have an idea whether this will be profitable.

Claim anything that can be easily misspelled, don't worry about the .biz stuff. Nobody can start a similar name and design, end it with .biz, and expect you not to sue

I would spend a bit on social media ads. For about the price of your site you can create an ad with a sample version of your game and measure interest that way. You'll have no problem investing more on a site with some metrics on your side. You can gain some very accurate readings with sample ads instead of just developing the whole site and hoping for the best

Not sure what you are saying here. If my website is called mygame.com, should I also claim mygmae.com and my-game.com and whatnot? Is that what you are saying? That's going to get costly real quick.

I intend to do some manual advertising. Find groups where they discuss Wordle, throw my website in there. If the game hooks people, it will grow by natural causes. If the game sucks, it will die out no matter how much you advertise. At least, that's how I think it works?

Honestly you don't need to claim misspelled words. People only do it to redirect misspelled searches. And certainly not any combination, I meant more turn Facebook into facebooks or facesbook. But totally unnecessary

Regarding promos, if this is a passion project then you can't go wrong for 1,500. Just a few hard core players could be satisfaction enough. If you are looking to make money then certainly have a detailed promo plan in place.
Dumping 1k into a seo company when a competitor is burning through 19k a month for the same thing can just light your money on fire

Take for example this website:

http://quordle.com/

It gets 500k visitors per day to play one game/day and it hasn't used any advertizing to get there.

How would you monetize such a site? 500k visitors/day should be convertible into $$.

They get donations which are probably pretty decent. The donation route is an odd one and you have to be able to pull it off with some back story and cute pics

Pay per click won't cover groceries with 500k. First thing is growth metrics. If you're not growing but you have a hard core gang of users then affiliate links and niche offerings are the way to go.

fyp

I think the genius innovation of Wordle (and, subsequently, others) is the way to easily share your results with others. The easy text/emoticon layouts that have become literally iconic are outstanding and revolutionary and the key innovation, I think. The game design is trivial compared to the social media sharing, I think.

I had a freelance developer on this, but after he went 50% over agreed schedule and the graphics still made me cringe, I cancelled the entire thing and got the escrowed money back.

So I'm back to square 1 and lost a lot of my original WIM

All other offers I have are from India & Pakistan located developers that speak terrible English. Maybe my budget is just too low, but I don't want to dump 2k into something that may never provide any ROI. I have a family of 5 to maintain and can't afford such luxuries

Since I'm a decent programmer, but in the wrong languages (VB, VBA), I consider just self developing this.
I have no ****ing clue whatsoever about web development though. I wouldn't know what kind of technologies to use at all

Wordle is all front-end: HTML for page structure; CSS for styling; and JavaScript for interactivity. That's it, there's no back-end.

DIY option:

Thanks a lot