KLaci
- Indie game developer
- $3,000 monthly ad revenue
KLaci, a Budapest-based dev and movie nerd, writes about a side project he almost killed in its first weekend.
In March 2022, riding the Wordle hype, he built actorle.com – a guess-the-actor daily puzzle – in 3 days.
Launch went badly…
I posted on Reddit and a few forums. Two of the top comments were “insanely hard to win” and “literally unplayable”, the second one because I’d forgotten to add John Hurt to the database.
I almost killed the project that weekend.
A tiny British humor newsletter (b3ta.com) featured it next. Then he added the feature that changed everything: a “share your score on Twitter” button.
Virality has to be designed in.
The Wordle-style shareable score grid is what carried Actorle. Without that one feature it would’ve died in week 2.
Mashable picked it up. Accounts with 10K+ followers started posting their grids 
Four years later 
- ~10K daily active users
- ~$3K/month from display ads via Publisher Collective
- A small portfolio of spinoffs under metime.games
- Very low maintenance
His pitch to other indie devs…
‘Build a B2B SaaS’ isn’t the only indie path.
A low-maintenance daily consumer game is a real business too.
You could vibe-code a Wordle-for-X this weekend – sports, music, anime – using a free public API for the data.
Just don’t ship without that shareable score grid 