[00:00:00] Nate Kadlac: Welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your
[00:00:07] Richard Mann: day. So we just
[00:00:09] Nate Kadlac: sat down and chatted with Richard Mann of. The game Nerdle, which you can find at nerdlegame. com. And it was probably one of our favorite guests, I think so far.
[00:00:22] And I'd be curious to hear what was your favorite takeaway from that interview?
[00:00:25] Aaron Kardell: Well, I think we've heard so many diverse stories on our little podcast journey so far, but. One of the things that really resonated with me was Richard talking about some of the differences of running Nerdle as a business versus some of the B2B or, or SaaS companies that he's run or been a part of before.
[00:00:46] And I think the contrast between those is really poignant. I think it's really, if you're on the sidelines thinking about starting a game, it really makes you want to. Go build a game and have an audience for it. [00:01:00] A lot of pros to running Nerdle as opposed to a B2B company at this point. But Nate, what were some of your takeaways?
[00:01:08] Well,
[00:01:08] Nate Kadlac: being a designer, I think his answer to my questions about branding really stood out. I think Nerdle is one of those games that it just feels a little bit different from all of the other. Derivatives of Wordle, and his game, he really has made some intentional design decisions behind the colors, the character, and he's applied that to the merchandise and so forth.
[00:01:31] And I think it's just a really thoughtful approach to making the game feel very personal and stand out from all of the other.
[00:01:39] Aaron Kardell: So the other thing that really stands out in the interview was how he's really built a family business out of this and connected with his kids, which is pretty cool. But without any further ado, here's Richard.
[00:01:55] I'm Aaron Kardell and I'm here today with my co host Nate Kadlac. Today, we're excited to speak [00:02:00] with Richard Mann, the CEO and founder of Nerdle. Richard is a data scientist, physicist, accountant, financier, business executive, and startup proponent. He has a very extensive background in business, marketing, tech, data analytics, and financial industries, with edutainment, gaming, and the form of Nerdle being the most recent.
[00:02:19] Nerdle is a daily math game solved by logic and a little mental arithmetic. Each day there is a new math puzzle, leading to a hidden answer in the form of a simple calculation. Inspired by Wordle, the classic version of Nerdle has 8 cells for inputting digits and math operations. The cells light up with different colors depending on what your answer is.
[00:02:38] And just like Wordle, you aim to make enough educated guesses before your chances run out. The Mann family has built something very special with Nerdle as finalists in the great British entrepreneur awards, 2023, known as the Grammys of entrepreneurship. They are deservedly recognized as some of the UK's most inspiring entrepreneurs.
[00:02:58] Richard, what's your favorite [00:03:00] game to play? Uh, well, thank
[00:03:01] Richard Mann: you, Aaron, for such a wonderful introduction. I live up to the intro. So my favorite games, what, including my own or others? Include your
[00:03:09] Aaron Kardell: own, but let's add at least one other. So
[00:03:11] Richard Mann: I like puzzle games. I guess that's no surprise. I do tend to start my day with a run through of some of the various maths games that we've created, partly for fun and partly for QA purposes, so maybe we'll come back to those later.
[00:03:24] There's a couple of other games I, I love playing of the Wordle variants. So Wordle is still go to game, I still play that most days. There's another Word game I love called Waffle, another UK, another Brit. Who's created that one, James is a lovely guy, and then a few others that I dip in and out of, but that's the kind of the regular go to suite of games, Waffle, Wordle, and a whole handful of our Nerdle
[00:03:47] Aaron Kardell: games.
[00:03:47] I love Waffle as well, and you know, the thing that strikes me when you say that is, Nate and I have been saying for a while, it just seems like so many of these good puzzle games come out of the UK. Do you [00:04:00] have any insight as to, is there something special in the water over there, or why are so many of these
[00:04:05] Richard Mann: games from the UK?
[00:04:06] Oh, that's a good question. So I guess we can't take full credit for Wordle. Josh is a Brit, but he's been in the US for a long time, so we'll share the credit for that one, shall we? Otherwise, I don't know. I mean, if you look at our internet traffic, I mean, the UK is a big player in terms of all things gaming, not as big as the US, but maybe slightly disproportionate compared to our size.
[00:04:28] I don't know, it's, it's quite, there are quite a lot of entrepreneurs over here, getting into casual gaming isn't as hard as other things might be, where maybe the U. S. has an advantage, but maybe, I think it's just luck as much as anything else.
[00:04:40] Aaron Kardell: That's fair. Well, you've certainly got a very diverse background, looks like you achieved a master's in physics, and Just kind of curious, uh, you know, you've kind of weaved in and out of on your career path here, but seems like you ultimately decided not to pursue a [00:05:00] career in physics and curious to hear your thoughts on maybe why you charted a different path.
[00:05:06] Richard Mann: So I think the UK is a little unusual in that people who come out of university have not chosen their career. We do not go to university here with any idea whatsoever of what we're going to do next. So it's not that unusual for someone to do physics and then do a few years of accountancy and then something entirely different.
[00:05:26] In fact, I joined one of the big accounting firms. Very early on, I didn't realize I was going to spend three years learning to be an expert photocopier. But um, in the days, you know, that's what we were doing. But I was surrounded by lots of bright people having done all sorts of different degrees as a background.
[00:05:41] And we kind of thought about it as a mini MBA. A few years, got a bit of pay, got some experience under our belts. But I very quickly realized that I love technology. I was working with all sorts of clients, but I love technology. And the thing I really liked was the small firms. The company that I work with was huge.
[00:05:57] We had big, big, big clients, but [00:06:00] if I possibly could, I stuck my hand up and said, can I work with the smallest of the ones we had? And it didn't take me long to realize that I wasn't really for the corporate world, and I wanted to do something smaller. So, still not physics, but maybe a little bit closer with a bit more tech.
[00:06:15] It was in 1999 I did the first startup with a very good friend of mine. Literally a bedroom startup. We started working in his bedroom. And then I got the bug of early stage startups. So, Nerdle was a bit of a random one. Everything else I've done has followed a nice neat path of business to business. Bit of data science, bit of transactions and payments, but all B2B, all kind of fairly logical progression of things until I just completely accidentally fell into Nerdle.
[00:06:43] But along the way, I've done a bit more data science, a bit of programming. I kind of like to be a jack of all trades. I do dabble in all sorts of things. So there's still a bit of a passion for the sciences and maths and numeracy and education and maybe that's [00:07:00] part of the reason I created Nerdle. I love playing with stuff.
[00:07:02] I mean, I love playing with stuff and I love solving things, so there we are.
[00:07:06] Nate Kadlac: I love that. So, I'm curious, before Nerdle, had you built any games prior to that? And where does your love for gaming come from? Nope.
[00:07:17] Richard Mann: I never built a game. I've got two great, great kids. They're a bit more grown up now. My son's in university.
[00:07:22] And I used to play some kind of made up games with them when they were younger. I imagine half your audience might think of this as child cruelty but when my son was born I used to give him a piece of paper and I gave him a number and I said double it and keep going until you run out of paper. But I've always liked, you know, playing with little games and doing things like that with some maths involved, not always.
[00:07:42] But no, I've never created a digital game before. I've maybe had various ideas for little challenges, never created a game before. I was literally sitting in a traffic jam with my daughter. Talking about Wordle, we both love maths and it took a couple of minutes before that kind of [00:08:00] train of thought went into, well, surely this could work for a bit of maths and we kind of roughly came up with how it might work and we tried it that evening and we launched it two days later.
[00:08:09] So no, never done the game before and I suspect, But having built Nerdle and a few spinoffs from Nerdle, I'm not sure it gives me any guarantee of being successful with another game again either, so maybe this is my only big one, but I can try a few more times now, which is, which is nice.
[00:08:25] Aaron Kardell: So, you know, it strikes me like you've had such a storied and seemingly successful career in the B2B space, and there were probably a lot of learnings that you took from one B2B venture to the next.
[00:08:42] There's a substantial difference now in the business you're running with, with Nerdle and maybe for the audience, uh, that doesn't have the contrasting experiences there. What, what are some of the big contrasts that you see between your, your B2B background and. The [00:09:00] Nerdle business that you're running now.
[00:09:02] Richard Mann: Sure. So, and maybe my experience doesn't necessarily reflect every B2B business, but there's definitely a couple of stark contrasts between Nerdle and the businesses that I've been involved before. So, the first one, absolutely everything is automated. It's an absolute pleasure to run a business which is It generates its revenue by advertising, which runs itself, which scales itself.
[00:09:28] And all I have to worry about is a few ideas for new games and making sure that nothing falls over. So that presents a very different challenge. So you have to, okay, make sure that you are in a situation where you can scale as fast as the market wants to use the scale, but you don't have that much control over it necessarily.
[00:09:44] But if you can get that right, it is very rewarding in terms of just letting things happen. evolve in their own way. I'm not trying to hire staff to do everything. I'm not trying to negotiate contracts with customers every time there's a new thing I'm [00:10:00] trying to sell. So in that way, it's really refreshing having a business which effectively runs itself.
[00:10:06] So that leads me to a couple of other contrasting changes. I don't work with a big team. It's a tiny team at Nerda. We have like one and a half people and a dog, you know, it's, there's not much to it. And that brings some advantages, you know, there's less people issues to deal with, but some disadvantages, it can actually be quite lonely.
[00:10:21] I don't know whether you find this, you guys are doing something similar, but. I have to sometimes go out of my way to have reasons to talk to people about businessy kind of stuff that I never had to do before. The other thing that's quite different is the relationship with the end customer. So I find that it's a very different relationship balance.
[00:10:40] In a BTV business, the customer is always right. And you are kind of very subservient to them. You have to keep them happy. Whereas in a consumer business with hundreds of thousands or even millions of users, You want to make sure that you keep most of your customers happy, but you don't have to be subservient to every single one, you can [00:11:00] have disagreements, you can decide which kind of customers you want to look after and which ones you don't.
[00:11:04] But weirdly, that makes it extremely rewarding when a customer out of the blue decides to thank you for creating a game that they enjoy playing every day. Because they don't need to, they don't have any reason, they're obligation, they're not, you know, they're not paying you, know, paying them. So I found that extremely rewarding is, you know, the, the random emails from people who say, Thank you for telling them that math isn't scary or getting their kids into maths when they were scared of, you know, all those things that didn't need to happen But they did and someone decided to send me a message and thank me anyway, so I think very rewarding in a way that I've never Well,
[00:11:45] Aaron Kardell: speaking of thank you messages of sorts, you had a very public video from a very public figure and Bill Gates kind of talking through his daily Nerdle plane.
[00:11:58] When did you first learn of [00:12:00] that and what was your experience around that? So, I
[00:12:03] Richard Mann: mean, so this has to be one of my absolute highlights of Nerdle and probably any time. So I'll tell you what I know happened and then I'll tell you what I think happened. So, I have a Google News Alert set up for things relating to Nerdle, and I think it was one Friday evening, I was sitting at home on the sofa, and it popped up, and it said something about Bill Gates, Nerdle, and I thought, I wonder what that is, and I looked at it, and there was a video, a couple of minutes long, which I immediately assumed must be a hoax, because there was no way that Bill Gates would be sitting there telling the world how to play Nerdle, so I had to watch it several times to convince myself that it was THE Bill Gates, and not a hoax.
[00:12:43] So that's what's actually happened. I mean, it generated lots of excitement on Instagram, suddenly getting all these messages saying another person's, you know, following you, et cetera. But what I think happened, and I don't know this for sure, but what I think happened is that Bill Gates is often writing Content [00:13:00] about some, you know, extremely worthy causes like child famine and malaria and all sorts of things.
[00:13:05] I think his team decided that it would be nice to do some content about something a bit more casual, a bit more fun. Word was all the craze, and so they suggested to do a blog about that. And I can just imagine that at the end of that session, and he'd got the recording in the can, and then written the article, and he probably turned around and said, actually, do you know my favorite game isn't Wordle?
[00:13:28] It's Nerdle. And the rest of the team probably went, what? We've never heard of it. And then they just recorded a video of Bill Gates telling the world how he likes playing Nerdle, and not only that, how to play it. It's the best demo video I could ever imagine. So yeah, having fallen off my sofa, picked myself up.
[00:13:47] I thought, well, how on earth do I get Bill Gates to respond to something? So I decided my best bet was I created a Nerdle puzzle generator using Excel [00:14:00] and I posted that on Twitter. And I did get a response. From Bill Gates's account, who knows who actually posted it, saying that I'd made his day. That was as much as I could possibly expect.
[00:14:10] As you can tell from my long answer, it was quite an exciting moment.
[00:14:13] Nate Kadlac: That's so
[00:14:14] Aaron Kardell: exciting. No, it's perfect length of response.
[00:14:17] Nate Kadlac: Yeah, absolutely. I watched that video and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to kind of demonstrate how to just play the game, knowing that I think his answer was 32 or something in the demo video.
[00:14:30] And so that was just, I'm a designer. I'm visual. I. Prefer word based games versus math based games, but watching him do that was a treat and, uh, actually a really great introduction to your game. I do want to ask you a little bit about, you talked a little bit about scale and the games that you've designed, most games, you'll see that they create.
[00:14:53] Kind of an easy level, sort of the original level, maybe an expert level, but you kind of rebrand each game. [00:15:00] And I'm just curious about your thought process behind that, how you decide to come up with like a new name for a new type of game or a variation of its difficulty. And maybe just even the characters and the colors.
[00:15:11] I would love to kind of know like what drew you to all of those things.
[00:15:15] Richard Mann: Sorry. Different levels and different games. That's an interesting one. So, we were obviously inspired by Wordle, and it's a daily game, once a day. You don't get to play more than one game of Wordle, unless you go somewhere else and find a copy.
[00:15:29] So, it was an interesting, kind of, internal debate that we had as to whether it was a good idea, or a bad idea, to give people more than one game a day. It's like, the Benefits of one game a day are, it's like a little snack, you don't want to eat too many things, it might be bad for you, but if you enjoy it, you'll come back tomorrow and you can develop a habit, and that's good for You, if it's a game that's encouraging your brain and exercising the grey matter, and it's good for us if [00:16:00] you keep coming back again and again.
[00:16:01] So we weren't sure what would happen if we said, okay, all bets are off, you can do as many games as you want, or introduce other games. So we decided on a kind of hybrid, which was to provide other variants of Nerdle, which the keenest players could do all of. But also, to some extent, we're targeted at a slightly different audience.
[00:16:24] We had, I think the first one we did was Mini Nerdle, which is smaller, easier. It's better for a younger audience, but it's also quite fun to play anyway. It's just the same game, but a bit quicker. It took us a bit longer to go the other way. And maybe an older audience, too. Maybe an older audience, but I know you can do Nerdle.
[00:16:43] But also, it took us a while to go the other way and go for Maxi Nerdle, but that's a bit more for the really, kind of, passionate maths players that we have. So not only is it a longer calculation, it involves brackets and square and cube and other things like that. So There was an [00:17:00] idea that maybe it's scratching a different itch, but also we didn't want to just go for now you can do ten Nerdles a day.
[00:17:06] It had to be something slightly different. Also, the easier games were specifically for one demographic, which is quite important to us, which is schools. Nerdle is not mostly played in schools. Most of the players are my kind of age. I said, that's a very big demographic for us. But it is played regularly in schools and the fact that teachers love it and think it's educational and pupils love it and think it's fun It was something that we wanted to encourage.
[00:17:32] So providing an easier version for younger year groups, providing an option to create your own nerd was that kind of thing that was quite important for us to kind of tap into that. It's not education, but like just providing tools that if teachers think this is fun, just make it easy for them to bring into the classroom.
[00:17:49] So that was quite important. Does that make sense in answering the kind of multiple games question? I mean, it took us a while to branch even further out into some of the other games, and maybe I'll talk about that. No, you
[00:17:59] Nate Kadlac: did. [00:18:00] That's a
[00:18:00] Richard Mann: great answer. So what were the other things you asked? All right, colors.
[00:18:03] Now, I mentioned earlier, the idea for Nerdle came up with a conversation in a car with my daughter. So she is now 16. So, and she's Loves computer science, loves maths, that and she'll do all those subjects through school and university. But she's also got a much better eye for design than I do. So every idea I have, I show Imogen and she generally will tell me it looks awful.
[00:18:26] So Nate, we need one of you, probably. She'll often put me straight on what things should look like and we've, I think, 24 hours after we had the initial idea, we thought we've got to do a little bit of branding for this. So we tried to come up with a very nerdy color scheme that looks good, but it had to be nerdy.
[00:18:44] So the three hex values for our color scheme come from the magic number, the number that you find in nature or over the place. And so the hex values literally come from the first 18 digits of the magic number and we went through all [00:19:00] the other Numbers like pi and the square root of two and the square root of three that we could use, but their color schemes looked awful, but thanks to the magic number, it actually doesn't look too bad.
[00:19:10] So there you are, there's a little nerdy secret to our color scheme. Yes, I love it. The characters came a bit later, so less than a year ago, I wanted to kind of give Nerd a bit more personality. And I've worked with a wonderful kind of creative designer over the years, who's done t shirts and all sorts of things for businesses I've been involved with before.
[00:19:30] And so, I don't know why I didn't do it before, but I asked him to create me a toolkit of things that I could use. And I'm not a great designer, I can use PowerPoint and Canva and all those things, but a toolkit that I could use to create things. For a nerd that was reasonably scalable. So, components, I mean literally, a robot with arms that I can add and remove, and things that can be on his head, and all those other things, so, it was a great move, it made all of the content that we've done since, social media, in the game, so, [00:20:00] so, so much easier.
[00:20:01] And a bit more professional than I could ever have done on my own. So yeah, that was Scott helping out with, um, our robot toolkit. The robot was since named by the Nerdler audience as the NumBots. So yeah, we've had a whole sequence of NumBots that we've used since about a year ago. I could actually show, I know, I know you're not necessarily going to do this on video, but you can see I've got, even got an Amazon book with the NumBots on it.
[00:20:23] So yeah. That's available. We've done various things. Merch.
[00:20:28] Nate Kadlac: Oh, that's fantastic. I think we're going to have to purchase that.
[00:20:32] Richard Mann: So merchandise, t shirts, mugs, books and things has been quite fun. But again, not to maybe make any money. I just think if there are people out there that are passionate about enough about Nerdle to be happy to wear a t shirt with.
[00:20:46] A number and a slogan on it that talks about why not as it makes my day every time I find someone who'd be willing to do that, let alone pay for the privilege. So yeah, it's
[00:20:55] Aaron Kardell: fantastic. Kind of back to the number of games question or, or just [00:21:00] the derivatives of all these games. If I'm counting right on your site, it looks like maybe you've got approximately 13 games now.
[00:21:08] I know you just launched one last week, maybe are about to launch another. Do you have any parameters around like Oh, I really want to launch a game a month. Or is it just kind of when inspiration strikes or how do you view that? Probably
[00:21:25] Richard Mann: a little bit of both of those things. So we dabbled with marketing and advertising strategies to try to get new users.
[00:21:32] And I find it a little unpredictable and not as effective as if I can give the audience that we currently have something new to talk to their friends about. So there is an element of me wanting to use games as content, right? They are something fresh, something new. I find it is great to get feedback from the Nerd Lordians on the new games before we really make them public.
[00:21:56] So, we have quite a large email list, we can do [00:22:00] push notifications to ask people to test a new game and give me feedback before it goes out. And I think that also creates a bit more loyalty, but it gives me some great feedback on the, you know, whether it's the games are hard enough, fun enough, easy to use, all those things.
[00:22:13] But I think it is, probably 50 percent of it is to create content for something for the nerd or kind of audience to talk about, and 50 percent because, you know, I'm running a business which had a. Amazing start, you know, in four weeks, having spent 250, we had a million people a day plus playing Nerdle, but the flip side of that is it can't carry on forever.
[00:22:40] It was inevitable that it's going to, something else becomes the next big popular thing. People stop talking about Wordle, people start getting annoyed with people sharing scores on social media. So that massive spike, that peak, it was inevitable that it was going to come down a bit. So the challenge in that environment is unlike the kind of [00:23:00] businesses I've been involved with before, where you're always forecasting hockey sticks going up, it's a question of, okay, well, if I do nothing, the audience is going to decline.
[00:23:08] So what can I do? To keep the audience engaged and try to find new users and make sure I'm feeding a demand for more puzzles from people that want it. So that's where the new games come in. I think that's probably the best thing I can do is to create more games that the audience that I currently have finds fun and engaging and might talk to other people about.
[00:23:27] If
[00:23:27] Aaron Kardell: you're willing to share, I'm just curious, having these 13 or so games at this point, I have to assume, Most people are playing Classic Nerdle. Are you willing to share anything in terms of like, maybe percentage that are playing some of the other games? Yeah,
[00:23:44] Richard Mann: so roughly speaking, 75 percent of our traffic still comes from Classic Nerdle and the very immediate similar games.
[00:23:53] So the rest, the other 25 percent from the wider kind of collection of games that we have that involves [00:24:00] They're all maths games, but they are a little bit different, so cross Nerdle is like a crossword puzzle. If you've never seen a wordle before, but you know what a crossword is, you can do a cross Nerdle.
[00:24:09] Or maybe you can have a go at a cross Nerdle. I'm not promising you can do it. But they're not that. The maths isn't hard. And then nanograms involves us feeding you with a selection of numbers and symbols, and you have to rearrange it. It's a bit like a nanogram puzzle. And then a couple, including the one that we've done recently, which is 2D Nerdle, is kind of moving into more of a kind of two dimensional grid, a bit like a waffle, actually.
[00:24:33] And so, you know, going that direction. Other ideas? Well, every time we launch a new game, I ask people, what would they like to see from us next? And it's always math puzzles. So we'll stay with math puzzles for a while. We have one puzzle, which involves words. But it's not the most successful of all of our games, and it was a bit of an experiment, but everything else is trying to build out Myrtle as something where people know that they can come here for a bit of fun with some numbers.
[00:24:59] So we [00:25:00] might as well carry on in that direction, I think, you know, I've got a few more ideas, so as long as they keep coming, we'll keep generating more games. You're touching on
[00:25:06] Nate Kadlac: something that I think we think a lot about, and it's how to make games. Math fun for kids. Do you have any insight into the challenges of doing that and what you've been able to accomplish?
[00:25:19] Richard Mann: So I think maths is fun. I mean like It doesn't take much, but it's a slightly difficult position to start from. I'm sorry You know that we call it maths math, so I'll go back to math. So, but honestly, I think part of the barrier is when Someone that you know as a child tells you that math is not fun, or is scary, or is difficult, or is boring.
[00:25:48] So I think it's an attitude change. If you think If one of your parents did not like math at school, there's a very good chance that you won't either, because they will tell you that math is not fun. [00:26:00] Whereas for me, math is just a puzzle. The math that we do with Nerdle is simple arithmetic. There's nothing complicated there.
[00:26:08] That does not mean it's necessarily an easy puzzle. We had a couple of days last week involving three digit divisions. Now I don't know when they're going to come up, any more than you do, but when I'm sitting there scratching my head in the morning thinking, oh, I should be good at this by now, then I'm it.
[00:26:23] You know that simple arithmetic doesn't necessarily make for a simple game, but there's nothing complicated there. But for me, MIRDL is fun for the audience that thinks it's fun because they think of it more of as a puzzle and a little challenge and something just to get their brain around rather than the fact they think of it necessarily as math.
[00:26:40] But I think there's probably some lessons from that for how you should think about teaching math. In a much wider spectrum, you know, a much wider concept, if you want to encourage people who aren't naturally finding math accessible, easy or fun, I think we've got to turn it into something which is more of a [00:27:00] game, more of a challenge, more of a puzzle.
[00:27:02] And I
[00:27:05] Nate Kadlac: think you've done a great job with making math fun with what you've built so far. So appreciate that.
[00:27:11] Richard Mann: Yeah. I think we realized that murder was being played quite a lot in schools very early on. And I think really encouraging that was something we were keen to do that. We can't solve child numeracy worldwide, but we can make a little bit of a difference by trying to give teachers some tools and give children some fun.
[00:27:30] We've also been lucky enough to have an audience which is happy to support some charitable initiatives that we've done. So we've raised some money for Save the Children, we've raised some money for a UK charity which sponsors kids in developing worlds, and We fund things like advent calendars involving a different maths question every day and ask people to support through donations, et cetera, which have raised a few thousand dollars to along the way, but it's not massive in the grand scheme of [00:28:00] things.
[00:28:00] But, you know, if there's a little bit we can do to help whilst having a lot of fun at the same time, then, you know, delighted
[00:28:05] Aaron Kardell: to do it. And in the spirit of making this fun, you mentioned earlier, like, sometimes you'll try out a new concept, and you'll maybe send out a push notification, and you'll have a desire to see what people think of a game that you've come up with.
[00:28:20] I'm curious, is there A particular path that you take on early validation of any of these, uh, game ideas, or is the build process so short that you just sort of, you build it and you push it out and you see what everyone thinks, or is there more of a validation step on, on some of these games?
[00:28:40] Richard Mann: I'm kind of lucky enough to have enough involvement from the family that I use them as my first line of QA testing.
[00:28:48] Uh, so they can be pretty ruthless. I have quite a lot of ideas, but only about 10 percent get through that first screen. So yeah, I'm often told at the breakfast table, [00:29:00] don't be so ridiculous, that idea is rubbish. So that's the first line of testing. But beyond that, as you say, It's, we're not running a business where it takes millions of pounds to develop a new game once you've got an idea.
[00:29:12] So it's actually quite easy to test some things by making them. And that might be testing it myself. You know, I'm, I'm very heavily involved in the game development process. I can do much more coding than I could two years ago. And actually, I find once you start to put a game into, on the screen, you can quite quickly realize that some things you thought would work don't.
[00:29:36] And maybe some things you thought wouldn't work are actually quite good. But then I tend to play with a small number of friends and, uh, just to try it out. And then use the Nerdle Audience. As a bigger test group, and they're generally very willing to help. So here we, the last game that we launched last week in beta is this 2D Nerdle.
[00:29:56] And we've got a few hundred people giving us feedback on the survey. [00:30:00] We also do a bit of demographic testing at the same time. So I know whether it's resonating with the old or the young audience. And that feedback is invaluable. I think it also gets a bit more buy in from that audience, which is great.
[00:30:12] But as I say, it's fairly cheap to bin it and do another game if I, if it doesn't get the right reception. So we're in a very lucky position to be able to do that and iterate new games with a very small team. you know, pretty quickly. So I'm always on the lookout for new ideas for new games, be it from, you know, inspired by other word games or board games or other things, you know, just trying to think of other ways to incorporate ideas that could form the next best Nerd or Game.
[00:30:41] Well, I know
[00:30:41] Nate Kadlac: we have just a little bit of time left. But you've mentioned this idea of getting feedback quite a bit now. How do you best get feedback from your players? Is it, do you have a community Discord set up? Do you just rely on emails? Do you do surveys? I'm just curious, uh, what's your tactic there?
[00:30:57] Richard Mann: It's a little bit more old fashioned than a Discord [00:31:00] server, but that maybe resonates better with the Nodal demographic. So we have a very wide audience, globally, age split, but there's a disproportionate number of Nerdle players that are, you know, my age and older. So I guess the feedback comes in two forms.
[00:31:18] There's the unsolicited feedback. We get quite a lot of emails from users. We've always tried to make it very easy to find us and contact us. So emails with complaints, suggestions, comments, I've lost my score. How do I get it back? That kind of thing. Should I tell you what the most common Complaint is from the other users.
[00:31:35] Yes. The game doesn't work, but that's because there's a very common misunderstanding about order of operations, the fact that multiply and divide comes first, but not necessarily in that order. So that's the common one. But if we get beyond that, you know, lots of good suggestions from the audience, whether it's features, usability, Adding a colorblind mode, all those things, all the way through to new games.
[00:31:58] And then there's the solicited feedback. [00:32:00] So every time we have a game that we think is ready enough to let out to a reasonably wide group of people, we will send it out for early access to all the Nerdle registered users. So you don't have to register for an account to play Nerdle, but if you do, it means you can back up your scores and that kind of thing.
[00:32:19] So we've got quite a lot of people that we can contact in that way. And we encourage their feedback through a survey, so it tends to be email out, and then a, you know, survey response to come back in. And then, yeah, we can do push notifications to the people that use the Nerdal app, etc. That tends to be the way we solicit feedback.
[00:32:38] Um, some on social media, probably more when we solicit feedback by, you know, contacting that base. It's a slightly self selecting audience. Obviously, the people that have registered for Nerdal account are our fans, our biggest fans. So we try to take the feedback with a little bit of pinch of salt too, and think about how we can make sure that we're attract, um, [00:33:00] building games which attract a wider audience.
[00:33:02] But to be honest, the most important audience to me is our current Nerdle base. So if I can keep them happy, I'm happy. Would you
[00:33:10] Aaron Kardell: be willing to share, Richard? I know a lot of these games have, kind of, don't require registration and increasingly some of these daily games have options to register and save your stats and things like that.
[00:33:24] What percentage of your daily players have actually taken the time to register for an account?
[00:33:30] Richard Mann: So it's less than five percent. I kind of wonder whether that's a good number or not. Myrtle was initially created as something that you could very, we didn't want any barriers in the way of people playing. So we didn't want to put any of the functionality behind a registration in any way.
[00:33:48] The benefits of having an account are not huge. If you don't like our advertising, you can turn it off for three days anyway. You just go into settings. We don't offer a paid subscription instead. We do offer [00:34:00] a cloud storage where we can keep your stats. to avoid the risk of losing them. Well, that's not a huge benefit.
[00:34:05] So, I think the benefits are not huge. We, we have a couple of features where you can store scores from other games and things like that, but that's a, not a very visible feature. So, I do wonder whether we should push it a bit harder. It's great to have an email base that we can talk to and solicit feedback from.
[00:34:23] But, even, even though it's less than 5 percent on any given day, there's still quite a lot of people that have registered for an account over the last couple of years. So it's still, you know, it's a decent sized base that we can communicate with and a very valuable resource for us to have. I'd like it to be a bit bigger.
[00:34:39] I don't feel the need to push it too hard by taking features away from users that don't register. So, no, I'm reasonably happy.
[00:34:46] Aaron Kardell: Richard, you jocked my memory on something there. You have a site that I believe allows you to share, like, maybe your Wordle stats into the site and maybe share it with your community and maybe does that for [00:35:00] other daily games too.
[00:35:01] What's the name of that site? I thought that was a really clever idea. Yeah. So
[00:35:05] Richard Mann: we call it Leaderboardle. It's a bit of a mouthful. I'm not sure whether it was the best idea to give it a different brand or not. So at the time. We thought that it'd be quite cool to have a place to store lots of game scores for all of the different Wordle variants.
[00:35:21] Particularly given that it was obvious that there was a bit of pushback for people sharing so many scores on social media. And if you remember, in like March, April, two years ago, there were scores everywhere. I was getting a little bit annoying. So we kind of developed leaderboard in response to that.
[00:35:39] But over the last year, we've started to kind of flip that back into the Nerdle account, so it's becoming a little bit less visible as a separate brand. It's become the account registration for Nerdle and all of our 13 games, and we don't push the feature of storing other games that are not ours quite so much, but it's still all there.[00:36:00]
[00:36:00] So it's kind of evolved a little bit over time, but it's been very helpful to be able to turn that into an account registration feature for Nerdor as we've built out our own games and we still have some Die Hard. Users who still record 20, 30, or 40 different scores for different games every day. Um, so we're not going to get rid of it anytime soon, I promise.
[00:36:23] You know,
[00:36:23] Nate Kadlac: one thing that you've mentioned a few times, Richard, is you have a merch store, and we've talked with a lot of game creators about advertising in general, and it's a hot topic, you know, whether to turn on ads or to keep them off. I'm just curious about It seems like you probably monetize mostly through ads.
[00:36:41] What's your stance on in game advertising? And you mentioned that you could turn off ads if you sign up for an account, which is a great idea. But I'd love to hear your take on this.
[00:36:51] Richard Mann: So don't forget, I've never run a consumer business before, and therefore I've never done anything to do with advertising before.
[00:36:59] So I [00:37:00] had to kind of make this up as I went. We were very lucky to kind of get traction so quickly. And I Was approached for a sponsorship deal with the first piece of revenue that we did it was like a takeover every page and that Lasted a few weeks before we then decided to switch it out started with Google AdSense Which quick but didn't have much else going for it And then everybody I talked to just said look you've got to get a good agency on board You'll get quality advertising and you'll make a lot more revenue.
[00:37:28] So I mean the logic seemed obvious And the quality was actually much better when we did that than previously where I, I literally was spending all my time trying to decide which ads we were happy to run and which we were not. So someone else does that for us now, it was the best decision operationally to make.
[00:37:45] We actually allow you to turn off advertising, you don't have to have an account, you can literally turn it off at any time. And that was partly easier thing for us to do. Um, argue with people about whether we should have advertising or not. If you don't like it, [00:38:00] you can turn it off. It will reappear again in three days, but you can turn it off again.
[00:38:04] And that partly was in response to the fact that we knew that it would be better in an educational environment to be able to run Murda with no ads on it. And so it was partly to let teachers know. But if they want to run Nerdlet in the classroom on the big screen, but they didn't want ads on the page.
[00:38:20] And we tried to make sure that our ads are age appropriate. You can't necessarily please everybody. The simplest answer was just turn them off, play the game, and then they'll come back again next time. But I think without, without advertising their venue, we would hardly be a business. I mean, It's nice to sell a few t shirts.
[00:38:37] It doesn't pay the bills. It's nice to have a book on Amazon, but only because I thought, I never thought I'd be able to publish a book of any kind on Amazon, so it just ticks a box. Advertising, I think is the only way that we could run this as a business. The only one we haven't tried is some kind of subscription model.
[00:38:55] And I think we probably could charge a fee per month as an [00:39:00] alternative to advertising. It's never been a massively high priority. And if I'm honest, having run Nerdle for just over two years now, if our current audience doesn't like advertising, why are they still playing anyway? So I don't think it's an issue at all.
[00:39:14] I think if anybody who wants to play Nerdle, Didn't like our ads. They've already gone. So there's not a lot of point in us changing that model now We have I think a good model for the audience that we've got and nobody complains. So I think it's good
[00:39:30] Nate Kadlac: Well, I think you've done a pretty tasteful job with it and it can be a difficult thing to wrangle But having an ad partner definitely helps Keep your operating costs down for sure
[00:39:39] Richard Mann: Well, and it's a complex environment.
[00:39:42] I mean, I think the idea of plugging into all those ad networks would be a challenge probably that we shouldn't do. What we should do instead is use that time to go and build some new games. On that
[00:39:53] Nate Kadlac: note, you have just launched a new game, and I'd love to just hear the name of it and what is different about this [00:40:00] game than the others.
[00:40:01] Richard Mann: Yeah, so the latest game is called 2D Nerdle. A traditional Nerdle is one line of calculations, this is more like a magic square, so it goes across and down. We've done a couple of games that have already kind of moved away from the original Nerdle. This one is a twist on that, so it's less like a crossword, more like a magic square.
[00:40:21] It's quite a challenge. Interestingly, with this one, we decided we would have a number of levels. So there are three different levels. That's a kind of a new concept, which we'll see how that goes. So there's three games you can play every day. And I think, you know, depending on whether that concept is well received or not, we might think about introducing levels for future games.
[00:40:40] But I think it's just a nice twist on the original Nerda with the same kind of color scheme, the same meaning of the different tiles, but this time you have to kind of think twice as hard because you're going across as well as down. So I think it will appeal to the, to the Nerdle fans that like an extra challenge.
[00:40:58] Whether we get [00:41:00] players coming to play that, but don't play Nerdle, I don't know. I hope we do, but I think it will definitely appeal to the existing
[00:41:06] Aaron Kardell: Nerdle audience. Well, Richard, if, uh, people want to find you online, where should they look?
[00:41:11] Richard Mann: Well, come to Nerdle. That's the best place to come. Yeah, so if you play Nerdle at nerdlegame.
[00:41:17] com, you can find everything that we've talked about today. I'm not sure why you'd want to find me, because I don't think I'm that interesting. But, you can find my details in the About Us page on Nerdle, and you can find me on the usual social media channels, but I wouldn't waste your time doing that. I would waste the time coming to play a couple of maths games, and um, hopefully we can entertain you.
[00:41:40] That way, if you're not already into Nerdle, hopefully we can do what Nate was suggesting earlier and persuade you that math games can actually be a lot of fun.
[00:41:49] Aaron Kardell: Well, that's great. Thank you so much for being here, Richard, and we really
[00:41:52] Richard Mann: appreciate it. An absolute pleasure. I look forward to chatting again another time.
[00:41:56] Thanks, [00:42:00] Richard.
