Building a daily movie wordle — launching Monday, feedback?
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm a solo dev and film obsessive, and for the last 3 months I've been building Movidle — a daily movie guessing game inspired by Wordle.
🎬 The idea
Every day, you get a new movie poster broken into 5 pieces, plus a trivia clue and a one-line synopsis.
Reveal the clues one at a time and try to identify the movie in 3 tries.
The fewer clues you use, the higher your score.
📈 What happened in the first 90 days
9,248 total visitors (Vercel Analytics)
1,223 tracked engaged users (GA4)
~50% of engaged users play regularly
85% of tracked traffic is organic
42% of new organic users come from Bing 🤯
Nolan Week: 196 visitors, with 76 completing all 11 films
Spider-Man Week: live now — 11 movies in a row, with a badge for solving 7+
And yes, I learned a few things the hard way.
🧠 Things I got wrong
1. People didn't realize events were multi-round.
34% of event visitors bounced after round 1 because they thought they'd finished the game.
I added an intro explaining the full event + a progress card between rounds. Completion is already improving.
2. Paid acquisition brought traffic, but not retention.
Google Ads: 1,560 clicks at ~$0.13/click for ~$200.
Instagram ads brought another ~3,000 visitors according to referrer data.
But 88% bounced. GA4 attributed only ~14 of those ~4,500 paid visitors as "engaged users" — the rest either bounced too quickly or blocked cookies.
I killed both campaigns in June.
Meanwhile, organic traffic — mostly Bing, followed by Google — has quietly compounded.
The real lesson wasn't "ads don't work."
It was: reach isn't the problem for a daily game. The hook is.
If people don't start playing within 2 seconds, they probably won't come back.
3. Anonymous-first onboarding matters more than I expected.
The strongest retention signal I've found is simply getting someone into their first game in under 2 seconds.
No signup wall. No friction. Just play.
🛠 The stack that made this possible as a solo dev
Claude Code for pairing
Vercel Edge Functions for per-date SSR
Firebase for anonymous auth, Firestore & Cloud Functions
🚀 I'm launching Movidle on Product Hunt this Monday, August 17.
If you're into movies and Wordle-style games, I'd genuinely love for you to try it.
And if you know someone who's way too into movies, send them this. 😄
I'd also love to hear from other indie makers:
What's the smallest feature you shipped that created the biggest engagement bump?
I'm always looking for those asymmetric little wins.
Thanks for checking out Movidle ❤️
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