Getting My First Users From Building Something Unexpected
How Building a Simple React Based Web Game Led to My First User Base
Table of contents
This one has to start with the story. I’ll try to keep it short.
A Random Memory
When I was younger, say in my teens, I would do this thing in my head where I would double numbers. Sometimes random numbers, but most of the time from the number 2. So for example, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. And I put a mental timer on it, so my goal was to see how fast I could do it without thinking much and see how far I could take it.
Side-note: I don’t know why I did that. I was never big on math. It was like a mental fidget during random in-between moments.
I had absolutely forgotten that I did that. Three months ago, I suddenly remembered while I was having lunch with my wife. I asked if she’d ever done anything like that, and yup, you guessed it—she hadn’t. Now, I’ve never been interested in building a web game, but one of the next thoughts I had was “I have to build this thing”.
Okay stop. Story over. There you have it, that’s the unexpected thing. I built a web game. BUT, please don’t leave just yet. I also want to tell you about what happened after I built the game.
Building and Sharing
Building the game took me about a couple days, it was done in a weekend (this post isn’t about the code, so I won’t get into that). I didn’t focus on making it look fancy or anything like that. I made it for myself, as an ode to the memory of an old mental fidget. I did however, know I would take a chance on sharing it. After all, if people like it, they’ll like it for the experience, not a shiny UI. By the way, it’s called Doubles.
Enter Reddit. I went looking for the right subreddits and ended up posting in these:
r/math
r/gamedev
r/IndieDev
r/learnmath
r/WebGames
r/IndieGaming
Sharing on Reddit taught me that the right audience will amplify visibility.
Right away, and to my complete surprise, strangers on the internet loved it. I got responses like this:
🤯🤯🤯 As the title of this post suggests, these are my first-ever users. A.K.A. you’re watching me create my first public side project, learn how to get and interact with users, and iterate on a project based on those interactions.
I have to say, getting users on something you built, and having positive feedback has to be one of the best feelings ever. Not in an ego way, in a purely shocking way. It’s gotta be the “indie dev’s” version of a musician’s first time hearing themselves on the radio. Alright, chill—I’m dating myself 🤣.
The first few days my Cloudflare analytics showed somewhere around 200—300 users had visited the site. That was incredible already. Then, days after not having posted anything, I checked the analytics and there was a spike of 1K+ visitors overnight! Whaat?? Excuse mee?! I started investigating.
It turns out they were all referred by B3ta.com. A UK based newsletter. I’m not sure how long they’ve been around, but they claim it “currently has nearly 80,000 subscribers”. Someone on their team must have seen my game, liked it enough, and shared it to their subscriber base. They also share a version of their newsletter on their website, and guess what? I FOUND IT. Here’s what they shared:
Hahaha. Good by me.
Fast forwarding a bit, I saw traffic from them trickle in for a long time. Nothing as big as the first couple days after they shared, but it was amazing enough. I’ll never forget that.
Since then, I still haven’t shared anything new, but I saw Doubles get picked up by another couple sites. One was this guy’s website. Shoutout to him. I saw a small amount come from there, but he never had to do that in the first place. Another is a site called CloudHiker. I see a couple visitors from that site every day. I’m not sure how it ended up there.
Traction continued for a couple months every single day all on its own. I saw anywhere from 20-80 regular users a day. I know because they were navigating directly to the site, not from any referrer.
Monetization
Nothing to report here, lol!
I tried to figure out a way, but this kind of site is not easy to monetize. And as far as ads go, no worthwhile ad service wants to serve ads on my little game website. Oh well. This is something I will consider more deeply ahead of future projects, but not everything needs to make money.
How’s It Doing Today?
Truthfully, it’s died down hahaha. I never talked about it again, and obviously I think that was a mistake, but you can consider this the start of me talking about it again. You can still play it here Doubles.
Here’s what I learned:
Picking the right project matters.
As a solo creator, I can make decisions, build, iterate, fail, and learn fast.
Caring about user feedback was highly valuable. Talking to the users and responding to them as soon as I implemented a feature request or bug fix is major and made them feel closer to the project. For example, after working with one of my users requests, he replied like this: “Love to see a dev actively responding and excited for feedback :)”
You spent time and effort building something, you should do the same for communicating and marketing it.
Some users will give you the best ideas to make your project better. Build relationships with them.
There you have it. That’s my story of getting my very first users from a game.
Thanks for sticking around until the end.
If you enjoyed this content, stay tuned for more updates on the projects I build, along with more stories and lessons, by subscribing below (no spam). And if you haven't already, click on one of the emoji’s on this page!
Until next time!