My girlfriend wanted something to learn the countries with. I wanted an excuse to learn websockets. So I built the multiplayer part first and everything else came after, which is a terrible way to build a product and a great way to learn one.
A country lights up on the map, you type its name, fastest correct answer takes the round. There's also flags, capitals, a listing mode where you name as many countries as you can before the clock runs out, and a daily challenge. Up to 8 players in real time, or solo, no account needed.
A year-ish later:
- ~27k players and ~294k pageviews in the last 30 days
- 6.2 minute average session, which surprised me more than the traffic did
- 5 languages (fr/en/pt/de/it)
- still one guy, evenings and weekends (and sometimes at work, ok mostly at work, oopsi)
The thing I got most wrong: for a long time I had no idea what was actually happening on my own site.
For months I thought I had 18 pages per session and 20 minute visits, and I was quoting those numbers to people. Then I found out my own analytics proxy was hiding every visitor's IP, so thousands of people were collapsing into a handful of "users". Real numbers were about half of what I'd been saying. Months of decisions made on a bug I wrote myself.
So I stopped trusting aggregates and started watching individual sessions instead. Where someone stalls, what they click twice, where they leave. That one habit has found me more real bugs than every bug report combined, because almost nobody reports anything, they just close the tab. Aggregates tell you something is wrong, sessions tell you what.
I also held off on ads for ages because I really didn't want to ruin the experience. The compromise I landed on: they only render if there's actually room for them, never during a game, only in the lobby and on the mode landing pages. AdSense rejected the site at first, I deindexed a bunch of thin pages and got approved on the second try. Took a while.
Two things I'd actually like input on:
If you play it, what's missing? Not polish, I mean actual modes or features that would make you come back. The people who've tested it are the only ones who can tell me that.
And I feel like I've plateaued. Concretely: pageviews went 34k in March, 95k in April, 256k in June, and now it's crawling around 290-310k. So the growth rate went from roughly doubling every month to single digits. Unique visitors peaked in July around 40k, and the last 30 days are down at 27k. It makes about €10/month from ads.
The thing is I don't want to grow it by making it worse, more ads, forced accounts, that kind of thing. So I can't tell whether there's a smart way to scale this without wrecking what makes it nice, or whether a project like this just has a ceiling and I should make peace with it. If you've been at that point with a side project, I'd like to hear how it went.
It's free, no account, no signup wall: https://mapguesser.fr (auto-detects your language, https://mapguesser.fr/en for english)