He Launched With 11k Wishlists, Then Sold 200,000 Copies
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What inspired Mateo to create Paddle Paddle Paddle and how did the initial prototype come about?
Hello.
Hello my friend, do I have a podcast for you? Now, first I want to tell you a little bit about my guest. He is a 23-year-old solo developer from Germany named Mateo. And he got the idea for his game while on a paddleboat trip in Croatia with his brother. They kept driving in circles over and over and over again because they just could not get in sync. And months later, while in the shower, the light bulb hit. Hit him. He went, he took a prototype and made it in under two hours, posted a 10-second clip on Twitter, and before you know it, over a hundred thousand views. Four months of development later, he launched Paddle Paddle Paddle, a co-op rage game about paddling a boat through increasingly difficult and more ridiculous scenarios level after level.
Now the crazy part is, four days before launch, Mateo only had about 8,500 wishlists. But post-launch, that, my friend, is a totally different beast. Paddle Paddle Paddle kept getting Picked up by streamers across YouTube and Twitch. Day after day, more people were playing his game, and Mateo, he would join the streamers to be part of the community and join in on the fun. Now Mateo, he's wise beyond his years, and in this episode, you will learn the exact content strategy that gets major streamers to play your game without paying a cent. How Mateo designed for watchability, not just Mechanics and that turned paddle paddle paddle into a great game that people could not stop sharing. How we kept the game growing months after launch through things like through free updates, player design skins, and staying genuinely close to his community.
And why Mateo hates emails and the one platform that he used instead to land all of these large streamers and creators. So if you are an Indie dev who wants to build a game that actually gets discovered and played, this one is for you. Welcome to Freight and Cool Indies. Hello, or should I say Guten Tag Mateo? And first off, thank you so much for jumping on and joining me today on the Freaking Cool Indies podcast. Um, you have created a fantastic game called Paddle Paddle Paddle that has managed to go mega viral and I want to talk to you today all about your journey of creating this game and honestly just like your different marketing strategies and everything. that whether you knew or didn't know it was going to work, um, you know, how did you get there?
What was your hypothesis and and and why is it that you kind of decided to to go with that different strategy? So to kick things off, again, just huge congratulations on the success of the game. Uh from the numbers that I've at least been able to find, about 143,000 games sold, uh almost $500,000 in gross revenue. Um, you know, s over sixty thousand wish lists. So once again, just um amazing, amazing, amazing across the board. Uh especially because you are only twenty three years old, Mateo. Am I correct on that? Yeah. Amazing. Uh again, twenty-three, just doing really, really well on that side of things. And I guess just to kick things off for anyone who maybe doesn't know what paddle paddle paddle is, Mateo, uh, if you had to explain the game in one sentence, what would you say?
Yeah, it's a it's uh like a a co-op pedal rage game, so it's basically like uh chain together for example, where you have to overcome like a big level, big difficulty with a friend and it's basically just a pedal trip, you know. So you are on a pedal boat and you have to overcome a big pedal level. So it's it contains about seven biomes. The full game has about four four hours of length. So it's a really big adventure with a co op rage mechanic where a pedal in a pedalboat together.
Awesome. Yeah. And uh for anyone who is interested, like throughout the interview I'll be throwing up some B roll and stuff on the screen. But watching streamers play this game is so much fun. Like again, I'm I'm sure obviously that really dives into just how easily and and how viral the game went. Um, but you know, without even playing it, you can watch five you can watch not even five minutes, you can watch thirty seconds of this game and understand, be like, oh
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Mateo to create Paddle Paddle Paddle and how did the initial prototype come about?
0:00–6:13
2
How did the early development process evolve from a two‑hour prototype to a full four‑hour game?
6:13–13:11
3
What role did Twitter DMs and direct outreach play in landing the first big streamer?
13:11–21:16
4
How did the German streamer’s playthrough trigger a cascade of other streamers and boost wishlists?
21:16–28:36
5
Why did Mateo choose to launch on a Friday and use a launch‑week discount to maximize sales?
28:36–37:40
6
How did free localization into 15 languages unlock the Asian market and drive over half of the revenue?
37:40–45:42
7
What pricing strategy (full price vs. launch‑week sale) proved most effective for a $4.99 indie game?
45:42–52:00
8
What ongoing community‑first practices (bugs via streams, free updates, skins) keep the game growing after launch?
52:00–58:18
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Freaking Cool Indies
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