How I Built A $90,000/Month Side Hustle In 48 Hours | ft. Dharmesh Shah

TL;DR

Dharmesh Shah built Wordplay.com, a Wordle-like unlimited-play word game with friend challenges, in a weekend to teach his 11-year-old son Python. Launched via tweet, it reached 45 million games played and 9.5 million users, with peak traffic of 2–3 thousand concurrent players. Google AdSense would generate ~$90,000/month, but he turned ads off after learning.

Key insights

• The project was motivated by three factors: frustration with Wordle’s limitations (single-player, once-daily) after NYT acquisition; a personal desire to learn Vercel, Next.js, and TypeScript; and a p
• Wordplay’s viral growth came from two changes vs. original Wordle: unlimited play (not once per day) and the ability to challenge friends via a shareable link, creating a compounding user base.
• First-week traffic was ~50–100k users, driven by Dharmesh’s social media following (~1M LinkedIn, ~300k Twitter), but viral sharing became the dominant growth channel.