I spent three years building SaaS products nobody used. Dashboard apps, workflow tools, a project tracker that was basically Trello but worse. Each one took months, got maybe 40 signups, then flatlined. My last SaaS had 11 monthly active users after six months. Three of them were me testing from different browsers.
Then I built a word puzzle game in a weekend. It got more daily active users in a week than my SaaS ever had.
That messed with my head a bit.
The SaaS Hamster Wheel
Every indie dev forum I read had the same advice: find a pain point, build a B2B tool, charge $29/month. I believed it completely. I'd spend weeks on onboarding flows, worry about churn metrics, build admin panels for customers I didn't have yet.
The problem nobody talks about is discovery. With SaaS, you're competing for keywords like "project management tool" against companies burning $50K/month on ads. Your beautiful landing page sits at page 47 of Google results, right next to some abandoned PHP app from 2014.
Games are different. Not easier — different. When someone wants to play a word game, they search for that specific type of game. The intent is immediate. They're not comparison shopping between seven competitors. They want to play something right now, in their browser, preferably without signing up for anything.
What Actually Changed
My first word game was a hangman variant. Nothing revolutionary. I built it with Next.js because that's what I already knew, threw in some decent animations, and put together about 20 levels with curated word lists. Took maybe four days of actual coding, plus a weekend of content work picking words and writing clues.
The engagement numbers confused me at first. Session times averaging over four minutes. For context, my SaaS products averaged about 45 seconds before people bounced. Four minutes doesn't sound like much until you realize that most web content gets abandoned in under 15 seconds.
People were actually using the thing. Not because I'd nailed product-market fit or written compelling email sequences. They just... wanted to play word games.
The Uncomfortable Economics
Here's where I have to be honest: word games don't print money. My SaaS products, despite having no users, at least had a clear monetization path. Charge per seat, upsell features, enterprise tier, the whole playbook.
With browser games, your options are basically:
- Ads (which destroy the experience)
- Premium levels (which fragment your tiny user base)
- Donations (lol)
I'm running AdSense on some pages and making maybe a dollar a day on a good day. That's not quitting-my-job money. It's not even covering-my-hosting money, though hosting a static game on Cloudflare Pages is practically free so that bar is low.
The honest math: my word games generate about 10x more traffic than my SaaS products ever did, but roughly the same revenue, which is to say almost nothing. The difference is I actually enjoy maintaining them.
What Games Taught Me About Building Software
Building games forced me to care about things I'd been neglecting as a SaaS developer.
Performance matters when you can feel it. A 200ms delay in loading a dashboard? Nobody notices. A 200ms delay between typing a letter and seeing it appear in a word puzzle? It feels broken. I learned more about web performance optimization in two months of game dev than in three years of SaaS work.
Content is the moat, not code. My word game code is nothing special. Any decent developer could rebuild it in a week. But the curated level packs — hundreds of levels with themed word lists, difficulty curves that actually progress smoothly, hint systems calibrated to keep people engaged without making it too easy — that took months and it's the part nobody can copy quickly.
I have around 360 levels across different game modes now. Each one is hand-tuned. That sounds tedious, and it is, but it's the kind of tedious work that compounds.
SEO works differently for games. People search for "5-letter word starting with S" or "word puzzle level 14 answer" in a way they never search for SaaS features. Long-tail keywords with game content are genuinely useful. Someone stuck on a level wants help. You can provide that help and it doesn't feel like marketing because it isn't marketing.
The Loneliness Factor
I should mention the downsides that aren't financial.
Nobody in the indie dev community takes game dev seriously unless you're on Steam charging $15 for a pixel art roguelike. Building browser word games? You might as well tell people you make Geocities pages. The tech Twitter crowd is obsessed with ARR and MRR and B2B this and enterprise that. "I built a word search game" gets no engagement on any platform where developers congregate.
My friends who are developers think it's a cute hobby. They don't ask about my game projects the way they ask about my (dead) SaaS products.
There's also the content treadmill. Games need new levels constantly. Users finish your content faster than you can create it. I publish new level packs and within days people are asking for more. With SaaS, you build a feature once and it exists forever. With games, you're essentially running a content operation.
Some Numbers, Since People Always Ask
After about six months of building word games:
- Around 30 browser-based word games and puzzles in production
- Roughly 360 levels of curated content across all games
- Daily active users somewhere in the 40-60 range (small, but they actually come back)
- Average session duration around 4-5 minutes
- Bounce rate about half what my SaaS products had
- Monthly traffic growing at maybe 20-30%, mostly organic
For comparison, my best SaaS product at its peak:
- About 11 MAU (generous counting)
- Average session under a minute
- Zero organic traffic growth
- Monthly churn: yes (people literally forgot they'd signed up)
Would I Go Back to SaaS?
Probably not, at least not the way I was doing it before. If I built another SaaS, it'd be something with an audience I already had — maybe a tool for word game enthusiasts, or a level editor. Something where the users already exist and already trust me.
The games taught me that engagement beats features. A simple game people play every day is more valuable than a sophisticated dashboard nobody opens. I know this sounds obvious written down, but I had to build four failed SaaS products to actually internalize it.
Right now I'm focused on expanding the game catalog and building out more level content. The growth is slow but it's real. People bookmark the site and come back. That never happened with my SaaS projects.
I'm not going to pretend this is some carefully optimized strategy. I stumbled into game dev because I was burned out on SaaS, and it turned out that making things people enjoy is more sustainable than making things people need but don't want to pay for. At least for me. Your mileage will vary, and honestly, if you can make SaaS work, the economics are way better.
But if you're on your third failed B2B tool and wondering whether to try a fourth, maybe build something fun instead. The money might not be better, but you'll stop dreading Monday mornings.
Top comments (0)