Chapter 1: How did Mike Katz make $7k/day from his games?
The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Guys, Apple and Amazon both love my key lunch gem spinner. In 2009, the Apple App Store was featured as making a dollar a day in terms of using it, making $7K per day at its height.
Think of it almost like Candy Crush. And then quote, unquote, was featured by Amazon AppExchange many times. He was getting 3,000 downloads per day. Now he's taking what he knows about gamification and he's building wordhuddle.com. And also he's doing a lot of B2B stuff as well, whether it's a marketplace for folks to find help in terms of psychology and other stuff
Chapter 2: What is the story behind wordhuddle.com and its player engagement?
Hey folks, my guest today is Mike Katz. Great guest today. He's made games for Apple II, games for first-generation Mac, games for the 90s PC and modern PC, Macs, iPhone, Android, you name it, he's done it. He's got chemical emergency response databases and mapping built for NOAA, consumables and recommendations for Amazon, and medical devices for epilepsy, concussions, and sleep apnea.
He touches a lot. We're going to dive into all of it today. Mike, are you ready to take us to the top? All right. Let me start with your consumer play, which is interesting. A lot of people go, man, one day when I'm old and retired and rich, I'm going to launch my own game, my own little app.
Chapter 3: How did Mike acquire his first players for wordhuddle.com?
You've launched wordhuddle.com, which how many active people are playing it actively today?
I'm getting 300 to 400 players per day right now, finishing games.
And that's interesting. So how did you get those downloads? This is equivalent to a SaaS company building like an internal marketplace, right? You've got to get the players to play each other live. How did you get your first 100 players?
Well, actually, I posted on a Wordle group on Facebook and that gave me about 600 players to start right away. And it sort of dropped down to 400 now because I know some of them were just trying it out. But so so that's that's a way.
Chapter 4: What metrics does Mike track to measure player engagement?
How did you do that? Did you get permission from the Wordle group owner or did you just say, screw it, I'm just going to post and see what happens?
No, it's actually a very friendly group. There's a lot of people posting different games and so on. I think the Wordle players are generally friendly and curious to try new games, so it wasn't a problem.
Interesting. So you get all these signups when you post in the Facebook group, and you're watching the activation metrics. You strike me as an analytics-driven guy. What were you watching for? You mentioned completed games.
Chapter 5: What were the successful games Mike created in the past?
Was that the key activation metric, or what were you looking for?
Yeah, completed games is important. You know, time spent on the page. I'm actually recording all the plays that are made in the game. So I'm looking at when people get discouraged, when people give up, and so on. So actually, early on, I put in a feature just to give feedback on the puzzles. And that's been really helpful in terms of understanding what players like.
I found it was a little surprising to me, but I found that players Almost never rate a puzzle as too easy. But if they fail the puzzle, they're going to say it was too hard and it was no fun.
Chapter 6: How does game theory apply to Mike's B2B projects?
So people have fun when they win, basically.
That's really, really interesting. So if you see something that makes you believe a user is about to stop coming back every day, will you give them an easier puzzle so they can complete it and get a positive dopamine hit?
uh it's it's a good idea to have to have uh some easier puzzles on that or some alternatives for people to try different puzzles currently it's just the one puzzle per day but um uh but it's a good it's a good thought interesting and so what is average time spent on page daily today it's about three minutes so three minutes interesting is that good bad yeah i think that's good for these types of puzzles that's about how long it's supposed to take and uh um you know people uh
you know, almost everybody who starts a game finishes the game. So I feel good about that.
You've built games for a lot of companies. My audience, I think, are gamers when they're wanting to wind down from running their companies every day. What's the biggest game you've built? Most active users, the most publicly well-known.
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Chapter 7: What challenges does Mike face in balancing multiple projects?
Yeah, so there are two. One of them is called Gem Spinner, which is sort of a you know, in the match three bejeweled candy crush family, but with a pretty interesting twist. So I was pretty proud of that. It got featured on the front page of the app store, actually back in the day when, you know, the app store opened in 2009, the Apple app store.
And I think it was that year or early 2010 where we got featured on the, on the front page. And how many plays or downloads? Um, let's see, I think we were charging a dollar, a dollar per day at that point. And I remember it was about 7,000 in a day in that day.
Chapter 8: What advice does Mike have for aspiring game developers?
So that's amazing. Okay. And what's the second game?
It's called quote unquote. And so it's like a crossword puzzle where you get a bunch of clues, but the answers to the clues are found inside of a famous quotation. Like an example would be Mark Twain has a quote, familiarity breeds contempt and children. Okay, so familiar.
So then we would take parts of those words and create a set of crossword clues where you pick out the parts of the answers in the thing. So all the answers are sitting there in front of you, but you have to figure out where in the quote, the different segments of the words.
What year was this?
That was probably about 2013, 2014. And that one had really great success on the Amazon website.
app store they used it as a free app of the day multiple times and so how many downloads did you get via amazon um i think it was about uh uh three thousand a day when it was featured on the on the front page free or paid it was all free because that was that was part of their deal that they would feature your app but it is free for that day so but it was it was a good publicity
And so how does all this game theory, how does all this apply to the B2B work that you're doing? You're building some cool stuff for businesses.
Well, I mean, at the base level, I guess programming is programming. So it's all the same in that sense. But a lot of it is just to mix it up. I work for NOAA, the Ocean and Atmosphere Administration, and I do mapping programs and chemical databases for hazardous chemical response. So that's just a completely different thing.
And then I'm working on a marketplace for psychologists to find clients. So it's a completely different thing. I think a lot of it is just driven by the desire to learn new frameworks. You say, OK, I'm going to do this project and try to use this framework with it.
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