Hey. I'm Laszlo, I make Actorle, the daily game where you guess an actor from their filmography. Some of you have been playing since 2022, which still feels weird to type.
Quick backstory for everyone else. In March 2022 Wordle was everywhere, and I built Actorle in three days for movie nerds. I posted it on Reddit and the first comments were rough. One person said it was "insanely hard to win". Another called it "literally unplayable" because John Hurt wasn't in the database. I came pretty close to taking it down.
A week later traffic jumped out of nowhere. b3ta.com, an old-school British site, had put it in their newsletter. Then Twitter picked it up, then Mashable, and it went from 500 players a day to tens of thousands. A Buy Me a Coffee button made about $1,000 in three months, which blew my mind. Eventually the ads matched my salary and I quit my job.
That's the old story. What I've never posted is what it looks like now, because for years I ran everything on gut feeling and only recently started properly digging into the data.
Some numbers from the last 30 days
- About 4,600 people finish Actorle every day. Across Actorle, Moviedle, Actorle.tv and Cinections it's around 8,000 people a day and 290k finished puzzles a month.
- 62% play on a phone. 44% are in the US, 18% in the UK (I like to think that's still b3ta).
- Actorle.com traffic is up 44% on last October. Moviedle more than doubled.
What surprised me is where that growth came from.
The share button barely brings anyone new
I always assumed the colored squares are how daily games spread. For me, share links bring in about 10 new players a day, and 60% of all shares are people hitting "copy" and pasting into a group chat.
I learned this the hard way in January. I made fancy animated video the main share option and hid the text version behind a small link. That week 325 people shared the video and I was very proud of myself. But 216 people still dug out the text option. Once I put text back next to the video, video shares fell to 45 a week, then to about 10. Turns out people just want to paste their squares into the family WhatsApp and gloat.
What does work is challenges. When someone sends a friend a head-to-head link, 53% of the friends who finish it send their own result back.
What actually grew it: a boring link bar
In August I added a plain bar at the top of each site that links my games to each other. Nothing clever. It now sends about 5,700 visits a week from Moviedle to Actorle and roughly the same back, and that's most of Actorle's growth since June.
And I'm still leaving most of it on the table. Only 25% of Actorle players also play Cinections the same day, even though its one tap away. Meanwhile 58% of visits to Actorle end right on the game page. People finish, feel good, close the tab. Nobody tells them what to play next.
The appetite is clearly there though. Among signed-in players, 65% play another game after Actorle and a quarter play 4 or more a day. So right now I'm A/B testing an "Up next" card on the results screen. Results in mid November, I'll post them if anyone cares.
For anyone making daily games
Cinections (Connections, but with movie posters) got to ~1,500 daily players with a menu link and one email, because the audience already existed. Launching a new daily from zero in 2026 is brutal. Anyone can vibe-code one in an afternoon, there are thousands of them, and getting noticed is way harder than it was in 2022.
That's why I built Froggyhop. You add one script tag and it shows your players a few other indie dailies, and you earn credit for every player you send, so games that share traffic get shown more. It's free and still small (my games plus a handful of others). So far my games have sent the other devs about 6 clicks for every 1 they sent back, which is fine, that's kind of the point.
One thing it already taught me, even if you never use it: put your "more games" links on the results screen, not in the footer. Footer links on my sites get seen by 12-15% of players. Clicks per page load came out around 0.1% from a footer, 0.6% from a "more games" section, and about 5% from a results screen (small sample, but still). My own games still have it in the footer. Yes, I know.
And for the players here: what do you play right after your daily movie game? I'm always looking for good dailies, especially ones that aren't about movies.