Wordle Copycat Loses It All, Introducing Milk Road, and Guru Shaan on Finding Your Next Project

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. Talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Ben Levy** (1:09)
Yeah, so I got a crazy story for you guys. So you might have seen the app Wordle recently. Have you guys seen it?

**Sam Parr** (1:15)
Yeah, New York Times just bought it.

**Shaan Puri** (1:17)
You play?

**Ben Levy** (1:18)
Yeah, so New York Times just bought it. But about two weeks ago, one of my friends, he's a great mobile app developer, a bootstrapper. He basically was like, oh, Wordle is going viral, and there's no mobile app that everyone's using. So like the Wordle guy had put out this crazy story. He put out this story about how he was peer. He didn't want to monetize it. It was just a toy for his girlfriend.
It went viral out of nowhere, which I don't know if I believe because he works at Mischief and like I'm not sure I totally buy that story.
But that was his story to the media. So my friend was like, holy shit, there's a huge opportunity for someone to build the mobile app. This guy doesn't own the trademark of the name.
It's kind of like riffed off an old game show. So my friend built an app over the weekend, called it Wordle the app, went viral. So basically like over the weekend, got like 30,000 organic downloads, was top of the app store. And my friend's one of these guys who likes to build in public. So he tweets everything he always has. He used to like put his portfolio up so you could see everything he's doing. And what is it?

**Shaan Puri** (2:19)
Sam, by the way, this is gonna support your build in public thesis, by the way. This is like the perfect case study of how you feel about build in public, which is, I like it in theory. It's like the face tattoo thing, right? I like that other people do it. I don't wanna do it. And here's why, here's the cautionary tale.
Like when the DARE officer brings someone who's been in jail for drugs to the classroom to tell the story.

**Sam Parr** (2:40)
This is like a before and after of meth.
It's very wrecking. But, Shaan, explain what Wordle is. Because all I know, I don't play word games. I play real sports. And so, I'm not trying, I don't waste my time with that. So when people are, what is this game?

**Shaan Puri** (2:59)
It's a game, okay, so it's a simple game.
You literally, the way I get to it, you just Google Wordle, first link, you click it. And it's just five empty letters, like five squares, where you gotta guess a word.
There's no clues, it's not like a crossword. It's literally just like guess a word. So you type in a word, you might type in, like I always start with irate, because Dharmesh from HubSpot said the word irate has three vowels plus the letter T plus the letter R. So you're getting a lot of common letters there. So it's a great start word. So you type that word in and then it'll tell you either, it'll either show up gray, which means the letter is not in the word, yellow, which means it's in the word, but you got it in the wrong spot or green, which is this is the right letter in the right spot. And then you have, I think five or six guesses to be able to get the word in the end. And then the beauty of it is at the end, it's like, you got it, you feel the sense of accomplishment. The whole thing takes you like two minutes to play the game. So it's like really easy to play in that sense.