Wordle has been the runaway success of January 2022. Maybe even December 2021. It’s February now, so I’d rather be quick in writing about it.

Fifteen Days of Fame, paraphrasing Warhol. It’s a word guessing game, playable in the browser, with game mechanics that remind me of Mastermind, a board game I remember from childhood. Once you have a winning score, you can post it to Social Media. That is where the backlash to non-sensical yellow and green dots is happening.

Let‘s do some product thinking on it.

What job does Wordle solve for the customers?

So it provides a couple of minutes of diversion each day for the customers. That’s similar to all the lunch break free-to-play browser games that still are quite popular with people above a certain age.

Newsletter author Charlie Warzel gets right to the heart of the matter:

You would be well within your right to assume that I’m an obsessive and that this is a big part of January 2022 Charlie. In reality, though, I wake up in the morning and I enjoy doing the puzzle over coffee. Then I talk to my partner about it for about 60 seconds to three minutes. And I move on.

The Internet is eating Wordle alive

How does Wordle work? What is behind the game’s success? It’s free; there are no power-ups only accessible via in-app purchases. It’s fun and challenging at the same time. I can share my success on social media, the social posts are intriguing and tell a success story of „How smart I am“. I posit that these things go hand in hand and form the flywheel of Wordle.

One of the more nuanced changes to marketing for digital products has been the change of attention from the classical funnel to the flywheel.

What is a flywheel?

The original flywheel is a mechanic device; but nowadays we talk about it as a metaphor for business. The term has been coined by Jim Collins in his business classic „Good to Great“, and it means there is no silver bullet to get traction for your business, but a set of interlocking initiatives actions that help propel your business forward.

It’s closely associated with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ thinking. The Amazon flywheel is probably the most prominent example. Let’s look at it and dissect it:

What does it signal? By giving customers a great selection, customers have a great customer experience. That translates into more traffic, from existing customers, but also from new customers. That attracts more sellers to the platform which leads to growth. More transactions mean, in the second loop, a lower cost structure for Amazon and also lower prices for customers. Which improves the customers’ experience.

Why is a product’s flywheel so important?

Let’s hear it from the founder of Zuora, one of the biggest subscription services companies, Tien Tzuo. The company has built a model called PADRE which visualizes eight subsystems of the organization and is loosely based on the flywheel concept.

Anything you do that doesn’t feed into the customer success flywheel is detrimental to the growth and value of your business.

Tzuo, Tien; Weisert, Gabe. Subscribed (p.206). Penguin Books Ltd.

The flywheel of Wordle looks like this to me:

Users are attracted by post of game scores (great viz!) on social media. The game itself then challenges them and excites them, day in and day out. Which makes them share their success and their fun with others on social media. The game primes for sharing with a small share link.

Dom @ Lead in Product

The intriguing post on social media is key to the success and to the backlash. You need to look at both; both signal the ingenuity.

Wordle has now been sold to the New York Times. Congrats, to both parties on this acquisition.