Nate Kadlac: [00:00:00] It looks like you're monetizing through ads for the most part. And I know that you're working on the ads team at Amazon. Is there.
David Ngo: Yeah, I monetize using.
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 day. I'm Nate Kadlac. And today I'm excited to speak with David Ngo, the creator of. of chesshub. com. David is a software engineer by trade who specializes in microservices, web applications, REST software architecture, and agile software development.
His career had him creating apps for North American sports teams and has now landed him at Amazon. Chesshub. com is a chess website where you can play chess against an opponent of varying difficulties and solve puzzles. Driven by a powerful chess engine, its standout feature is an analysis board, a tool that will help players review positions, To give them the best possible move, even in the [00:01:00] trickiest of scenarios.
David, I'm so glad you're here today.
David Ngo: Thanks, Nate. Thanks for inviting me on your pod. it's a pleasure to be here.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, absolutely. So we kick things off usually with, I'm curious what your favorite game to play is.
David Ngo: Yeah, so in case you couldn't guess, my favorite game to play is chess. I play it every morning.
I like the strategy and the depth that it offers. It's a game that requires a lot of focus, and that makes me feel like I'm present in the moment while I'm playing it. You can also constantly learn and get better at it, and I like that there's no luck involved. It's easy to go back and see what you did, so you can Learn from mistakes in the past.
one of the things that I enjoy the most is that there's two players that are looking at the board, but the winner is the person who sees something the other person didn't. So to me, that's a constant reminder of how perspective and insight can make all the difference. In addition to chess, I have a Nintendo Switch.
So I've been going through all the classic games that I liked as a kid, and I also really love RPGs and real time strategy games.
Nate Kadlac: There are [00:02:00] times where I've played chess and I've made it someone and I did not see it happening. So there's some exceptions to the rule of knowing that you're winning. I am curious though, my chess experience, I started playing with a bunch of friends at one of my very first jobs.
As we would. Buy chess boards from wholesale chess.com, which I believe was the first company of the chess.com co-founder. And we would buy the boards and the timers and bring 'em into the kind of the shared kitchen area. And I just have fond memories of playing chess over launch every day. Where did you start learning chess and what's your background in actually developing the love for it?
David Ngo: Yeah, I remember seeing chess for the very first time on a computer that, that my uncle had. I had no IBM computer and. I saw it, I didn't know how to play it at the time, but I was immediately drawn to it just because of the way that the pieces looked, and by the concept of two armies facing off against each other.
So after that I [00:03:00] quickly learned how to play, I think I was around seven at the time. Over the years, I played on and off, but it's an addiction that I always keep coming back to. There's been times where I've gotten frustrated and had to uninstall the app or stop playing for a while just because I had felt that I had plateaued or stagnated and it wasn't getting any better, but it's something that I keep coming back to.
Nate Kadlac: Do you have a favorite variation of chess? in terms of gameplay?
David Ngo: There's openings that I like to play. I don't like the other variations. Like I, I don't really play 960 chess or any of the others. I just like the classic variation.
Nate Kadlac: I am addicted to blitz chess. And so I will, So sometimes in the wrong moments of the day, I'll open up and play like a minute blitz chess game and then it becomes too addicting and I got to delete the app.
So I don't have the app on my phone right now. I usually play chess. com, but you have a healthy relationship with chess. It sounds like.
David Ngo: Yeah. So that I do play timed, blitz chess, the [00:04:00] games that I typically play are five minutes each side. And the clock is not incremented.
Nate Kadlac: You have a healthy relationship with chess.
David Ngo: It's an addiction. At times it's made me really happy, other times it's made me quite frustrated. But when I feel like I'm improving, I'm having a good time with it.
Nate Kadlac: Do you find that chess, when you're playing online or anonymously with other people, I find that chess sometimes brings out the worst in people, especially when you're playing like anonymously.
I will never get messages from games that I play from people who are like, It's very rare that someone's nice game. It's usually, I hate your guts and I hate the move that you just made. And it's just pretty negative. And I'm curious if that's just my experience, if that's just. The platform that I choose to play on.
Have you experienced anything like that? Or. just playing online.
David Ngo: I don't think it's just you. I've experienced that too. When people, most of the time people will say nothing, but when they do say [00:05:00] something, it's usually like mocking you for making a bad move or laughing at you. Or I've experienced a lot of cases where I was winning.
a game and all of a sudden the person took 30 seconds to make a move in the five minute game, which is a lot of time. So it's, it felt like they were cheating and they all of a sudden came back with a brilliant move and then won the game and then started mocking me after that. So that happens a lot. I don't think it's specific to chess.
I bet if you played other games, where the crowd was much younger, you would get a lot worse. I think it's Just, being online and being anonymous in general.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, that's a good point. So you created chesshub. com. I actually think that's a really great domain name. How'd you come up with the name and get the domain?
And, is there anything strategic there?
David Ngo: Yeah, I, remember the domain. I started out using chess hub. com. I, the domain chesshub was taken at the [00:06:00] time. I chose the name because I wanted to give myself room to grow. I wanted to. Be something that was more generic and applies to just like generally anything about chess.
In the beginning, I was building an MVP and a tool that was very specific to just analysis, but it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to do more than that. So I bought the domain around the time, about five months after I launched. I remember it was when I got to about a thousand users, I was closely monitoring the site and the user count as it was growing.
And then as reading the feedback, some of the feedback was encouraging, most of it was complaints about how it didn't work or the moves recommended weren't always the most powerful, but some of it was constructive, like pointing out bugs or suggesting improvements or just saying, thanks for creating the site.
And it was through that, kind of feedback that I realized people were finding a value in what I had built. And so when that happened, I decided [00:07:00] to buy the domain. I reached out to the owner. The guy was a erratic. He wanted a lot of money and was trying to tell me that the website, the domain was worth millions of dollars.
Can I ask what year this was? 2015. Okay. It kept trying to tell me that it was worth millions of dollars and sending me articles, which I knew. But eventually we settled on something.
Nate Kadlac: Would you mind sharing or, is that,
David Ngo: Sure. In the beginning, he wanted around 40 K for it immediately dropped to half of that, and it was out of my budget.
So I didn't reply to him for a couple of weeks and then he would come back to me. I would reply and then we went back and forth that way. With me just playing cool and pretending like I wasn't that interested. And so we eventually settled for a little over a grand, which I felt was a great deal at the time.
And I feel like it's worth a multiple of that today.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, that is a great deal. Great negotiating skills on that one.
David Ngo: Which is [00:08:00] that down quite a bit from the million that he told me it was worth.
Nate Kadlac: Oh, that's fantastic. I think domain names, it's the value or perceived value of something is just, it's, it's.
hard to grasp, and it's hard to figure out how much should I pay for a domain and we run into this all the time and should we spend that much money on domain? is it really worth that? It's so hard to understand that. Is this the only domain name that you spent that much money on or have you, bought other domains?
David Ngo: I bought chessup. org. It was significantly cheaper. And I've had other domains usually with a dash or something in them. It's not nothing significant, but I feel like the asking price also changes based on the perceived success of your company. If you're a successful startup, whoever owns the domain is going to ask for a lot more money.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, absolutely. I think chest. com was sold for 50 or 55, 000 at the time in the early 2000s. And sounds like a [00:09:00] steal now. It does, but 50, 000, I think he was in college when he was, or just finishing up college and starting on this project. But yeah, just, it's so hard to, I love domain names because they actually, I think, bring a, an amount of creative inspiration to an idea.
It makes something feel a little bit real, Oh, this, I've got the name. Now I can build something with this packaging around it. And it, I think it's really motivating to actually build something out when you have the domain, which is just a strange way to, to think about building a business.
But is that kind of how I know you had chess dash hub. com prior to this, but did owning this new domain Ignite you in a different way.
David Ngo: I feel like it, it made people coming to the site, take it a lot more seriously. Because it's a fairly good domain and one that's hard to acquire. And so I feel like anytime you have a dash [00:10:00] or.
Or your domain doesn't quite fit, it's not taken as seriously, like Facebook was called the Facebook in the beginning.
Nate Kadlac: So I'd love to hear a little bit about creating the game. And is that something that, did you spend a lot of time into that early on? Has it met your goals, as a game creator?
David Ngo: Yeah. So the motivation, the reason why I created chess was because I wanted to get better at chess. I was playing a lot of games, and I wanted to be able to analyze them and learn from my mistakes. And at the time, I looked for online tools, but what I wanted wasn't available. So I felt like the existing options were clunky.
they didn't allow for storing or navigating back to previous board positions, and the calculations took too long. When I'm analyzing a game, I like to possibly navigate to a key point in the game and then figure out what the best moves from there would have been. Maybe there was something I didn't see or did I make a mistake at that point and then [00:11:00] possibly play a move free moves.
A few moves down the sequence of that line. And I like to do that for, several points in the game, anywhere where I feel like it was a key point and the tools didn't allow for that. So I decided to build one myself. I wanted to make a tool that addressed all the shortcomings that I saw on the other websites that were doing chess analysis.
And it really started out as a challenge to test my creative and technical abilities. But when I saw that, when I launched and I saw that people were using it, that really motivated me to keep on improving it. So what ChessHub does is it makes it easy. Easier and faster to review games. users can edit a board and add up to a thousand different positions and then navigate to any of those positions and get the best move calculations for any of them.
It's, they can quickly go back and forth and edit the board. And I try to return a move in. At most three seconds for positions that Chesshub has seen [00:12:00] before, we return those immediately. And so it's snappier and faster. And I also don't require a login for the site because I feel like a lot of people just want to quickly set up a board and calculate.
And so I do have users that create accounts and log in. But I would say like four to five times as many people use the site without ever logging in and Right now it's just that's the main features analysis of chess positions But ultimately my goal is to expand it to become a learning tool for anyone interested in becoming a better player
Nate Kadlac: Would you say the best for someone who's maybe not analyzed a game before?
they somehow find their way to your site. What's the best way? Is it to copy paste your moves from another game into here? what would be the ideal way to analyze a game if you've never done this before?
David Ngo: Yeah, right now it is just editing the board. To match [00:13:00] your current position and then asking the computer to return the best thing for it.
There is a feature that I'm currently working on where you can import a game using the PGN format. It's a standardized format for describing a chess game. So I'm working on allowing users to upload to import their games and then I will Have the engine go through each move and tell them, give them feedback on those moves.
Nate Kadlac: Got it. That's great. What does the traffic look like these days on chesshub. com?
David Ngo: Yeah, I get around 30, 000 users a month. That's great. At any time, there's probably 20 to 30 people on the site concurrently.
Nate Kadlac: And it looks like you're monetizing through ads for the most part. And I know that you're working on the ads team at Amazon.
Is there? Any tips or advice on running ads on your site that we can take away?
David Ngo: I monetize using Google ads. I would say that I don't do it effectively enough because if I look at my ads at TXT file, it's [00:14:00] just a single line, Google ads, whereas like when I look at other websites that are monetizing using ads, it's like pages and pages of stuff.
So I feel like my knowledge is a bit lacking in that area. It's also not something that I put time into and my time is limited. So I mainly want to spend it building out the features of the site as working in advertising at Amazon. The ads running on Amazon are mostly specific to products that are being sold.
On the site, but I can say that the insight I have is that we're seeing more and more that people are just too lazy to create their own ads. They feel like it's a lot of work. And so the platforms are just asking users to upload the content, give us all your images and all the keywords that, You want to optimize for, and then we'll use AI to generate the ads, even video ads, and along with generating the ads at Amazon, the AI is able to constantly tweak the ads and make recommendations for what it feels might be the most [00:15:00] efficient ad.
That's done by tweaking the visuals and the text in the ad, so we can use it for testing out, say, different product descriptions, colors, fonts. Even the shortening the text and then all of those recommendations are A, B tested and we collect the data, then feed that result back into the model, which then further refines and tweaks its suggestions.
And that creates a continuous feedback loop that allows the AI to constantly make better recommendations over time. It's less work for an advertiser and removes the guesswork as to how they should tweak the look and feel of the ad.
Nate Kadlac: Would you say that ads are It's they've never been easier to create, but they've never been worse visually.
Or is it like actually a net win overall, like with the creative changes and everything? I'm a designer, my background. So I have this sort of bias towards a little bit of human touch when it comes to creative ads and other graphics, but I would
David Ngo: say [00:16:00] that, yeah, they've There is a lot easier to create now than they've ever been in the past as for whether they're actually worse.
Perhaps they're more engaging. They, draw more clicks, but I remember in the very early days of the internet, you had like things like flashing and text scrolling back and forth and horizontally and blinking. So I would say that we're.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. That's true. That's true.
David Ngo: I hear where you're coming from though, I personally don't like advertising, but it's what enables a lot of things to be free.
Including chess hub. Yeah.
Nate Kadlac: So I, know that, and we've used this in the past, but you were talking about using, you're hooked up to Google AdSense and Amazon has their own program. Amazon affiliates, I believe. Is that right? So you don't use that at all. And now I don't use that. Yeah. That's, I that you're running it really lean.
I think that's really interesting. And that might be an insight in its own, [00:17:00] just how you're not really overthinking it either and not spending too much time trying to, squeeze the juice of the lemon. Was chesshub. com
David Ngo: your only game? I did experiment with creating Facebook games and turn based strategy games earlier on in my career.
If I could go back over and start over, I think I would have just jumped straight into chess because it's always been there right in front of me. The earlier games that I built, they didn't really stand the test of time. I spent a lot of time building them and then almost nobody played them. So they don't exist to this day.
Whereas a chess hub was built 10 years ago and people keep coming back to the site. And I still have people from that created accounts from about five years ago that regularly the site.
Nate Kadlac: How do you keep in touch with the people who have signed up for an account. Do you email them? Do you have a community that you try to solicit feedback from?
David Ngo: I don't. I have a feedback form on my site where anybody can, enter into a [00:18:00] text box their thoughts and, submit it. And occasionally if, the feedback has been really helpful, I've reached out to the person just by emailing them. But I don't have a community at the moment.
Nate Kadlac: Do you remember how you got your first 1000 users or was there a moment where you, noticed that happened?
David Ngo: Yeah.
Nate Kadlac: And I'm curious about that experience.
David Ngo: It was about five months after I launched. I remember just being on the website all the time and watching the user count grow. I was closely monitoring it and I was getting say five to 10 new users, every day. And after about five months, it hit a thousand.
I remember reading through feedback with some of it, which was pretty encouraging and constructive. And some, I was just complaining that I think honestly, if a chess hub didn't hit the thousand user milestone, I probably wouldn't be running it today. that helped me to motivate me to keep on improving the site.
And [00:19:00] so I think I mentioned before, but after I hit a thousand, that's when I decided to purchase the domain. as a,
Nate Kadlac: like a little pat on the back. Yeah. This is serious now. Yeah. Yeah. So our audience is mainly game creators who are indie creators who are building games, launching games. And then we have like the somewhat adjacent, but we really like to think through the process of creating a game, What do you decide to work on?
What do you not decide to work on? But even if it's technical, I think our audience is capable of understanding some of the technical rabbit holes that you might go into. But yeah, mostly game creators.
David Ngo: How did you decide who to invite on this show?
Nate Kadlac: We do a, we have a researcher who was two ways.
We have a researcher who scours for. small to medium sized games online. We also have a spreadsheet of just [00:20:00] thousands of games that we've tried to find through like similar web, and we then have kind of a list of people we want to reach out to. And so it's mostly through organic searching. And just trying to figure out like, Oh, that's an interesting game.
who did that? that's the question we're asking is there's a story behind this game and we want to hear it. And so I don't know exactly how we found you, but we found you in that process.
David Ngo: Got it. That's great.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah. David, when it comes to. attracting new players, do you have a sense of where people come from and do you ever try to lean into that a little bit, when you think about growing your game?
David Ngo: So for ChessHub, it's all organic search. I haven't done any advertising and I, mostly just lean into building features that I think will be useful to people. And just hoping that it grows through word of mouth.
Nate Kadlac: Have you ever had [00:21:00] anybody reach out to, to acquire, or have you had any kind of interesting stories around, someone wanting to, to purchase chesshub.
com?
David Ngo: Yeah, I get requests that, about inquiries about purchasing the domain all the time. Probably every few months I get that. But I haven't been interested in selling. the domain. This is my pet project that I intend to keep for a long time and keep building on just to see how far I can take it.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, I love that. If you had to build, your next feature, if your next feature went live tomorrow, what would that be for the site?
David Ngo: So at the moment, I'm developing a feature that lets users import their games or even collections of their games. And then I plan to analyze those games and identify mistakes in areas for improvement.
And using that data, Chesshub will eventually be able to create personalized lessons and targeted puzzles for players to enhance their game. I'm also updating the puzzles to more [00:22:00] closely match someone's skill. So right now you just get a random puzzle every time. But I want to make it so it matches someone's ELO rating and eventually also be able to match based on mistakes from games that they played in the past.
And I'm always adding more puzzles, I curate them myself in the mornings. I'm also looking to make the openings on the site searchable. Right now it's just one big list that you have to scroll through and it's hard to find anything because There's thousands of openings. I can make that more useful with just a text box, a search text box.
And eventually I'd like to add multi player, but that's, it's going to be a lot of work. So I need to have a large block of time in which I could do it. It's also a pretty intimidating feature because it opens up a whole can of worms.
Nate Kadlac: I love the, Kind of the idea that you're leaning into the educational side of chess hub, which it already is But I also think [00:23:00] that getting games into systems or even you know moving all the pieces around to set up the board correctly like it's a lot of work and But someone like myself who doesn't take the time to analyze my own board I would love it if I were playing or could Throw in a bunch of games and you come back and say Nate This is the aspect of your game that you need to improve like of the beginning middle and end like your middle sucks and you need to improve that and You'll become a much better player if you focus on that part of your game more, right?
I would love an email kicked off to me and said hey These are the things that you should be learning come to the site And then there's some puzzles for me customized to actually practice with.
David Ngo: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get to. There are a lot of chess sites out there and they help you analyze your mistakes.
But it's, in my experience, it's always in the context of a single game. And for [00:24:00] someone that's trying to get better, they may make the same mistakes over and over again without knowing it. And so if, I had a lot of their games, I'd be able to tell them. This is, you keep doing this over and over again, and it could even drill them on their mistakes and just like constantly, maybe quiz them on, this position to see if they make the right move and get it to the point that where they're no longer making those mistakes anymore.
Nate Kadlac: Oh, and I, We'll make the same mistake over and over, and I know it because I am too lazy sometimes to stop and learn, the better move. But I would love a persistent nudge, Hey, that's, you're doing the same thing over and over. you're doing it wrong. Here's what you should be thinking about.
That would be fantastic.
David Ngo: Yeah. I feel like that's how people learn is through nudging and repetition and Absolutely. And so if we can continue to. To, help them know where they're making those mistakes, they can improve in those [00:25:00] areas. But most people just play games and then they move on to another one without looking at what they did before.
And so having a way to easily analyze those games in a low effort way, I think would help a lot of people improve.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, I do too. And I think onboarding and educational part of games is. Often overlooked or underappreciated in some ways because it's like building a new game for your game it's a lot of work to help people learn in the right way I actually think that Zach Gage and the team at Puzzmo.
com are doing a really interesting job with Teaching you step by step as you play a new game because they're launching new games all the time and they just launched a new one with Seth Godin, but they prompt you to explore, not necessarily follow a set of rules, but Oh, just move any card around over here.
In their pilot poker game, and it then step by step walks you through different ways to discover a game and [00:26:00] it's boundaries and constraints. But that's a ton of work, so that's just a lot of work to help people.
David Ngo: That's interesting, so like a tutorial?
Nate Kadlac: It's like a tutorial, but it's really made to be fun.
So there's no set of rules necessarily in the tutorial. It's not trying to help you win. It's really actually trying to push you to explore the game's constraints and let you know there's not really a wrong move, during the onboarding experience. That's cool. Do you think ChessHub. com is your only game from here on out, or do you anticipate that you'll be making other games in the future?
David Ngo: I think that the scope of it and what it can grow to is more than enough for now. Then I have time for, and I think it's something that there's no end to the amount of features and the number of improvements that I could make to chess hub. So at the moment that I just plan to work on that, I, have thought from time to time about making other games.
Like I, I see [00:27:00] people making crossword. like word type games and those are all very interesting to me, but I really have to prioritize what I put my time into. Something I have a
Nate Kadlac: big, a hard time doing myself. So that's, I feel the pain there. David, if you wanted to speak to a junior game creator, someone who's maybe just starting out in their career.
Do you have any advice or takeaways for them as they think about what to work on and pursuing something like this?
David Ngo: Yeah, I think figure out something that you can prototype in a few weeks and just build it. Release it without overthinking and don't spend too much time perfecting it. And don't worry if you're embarrassed by the first initial release of it, just get it out there.
But build and release something that's an MVP so that you can test if people actually want to use your product and then start collecting feedback. I think it's most important to build a quick feedback loop early on. And if you can start with the website, [00:28:00] because it allows for quick iteration, you can push out new releases.
When I'm working on Chess Hub, I try to make it a point to push out a release every day, even if it's something small, like updating some text. But that just gets you into the habit and builds that process of, I can iteratively improve on this thing every time I work on it. Also with the website, you don't have to rely on third party approvals, like with the App Store and the Google Play Store, there's an approval process.
And then you have to get people to download your app. So let's say if you start with the website, everyone has a browser and can easily access the website. And I feel that makes them ideal for an ideal starting point over building a mobile or a desktop app. And it also helps if it's something that you can personally relate to.
So I built a lot of B2B software over my career. And I've often felt disconnected from the users because it wasn't software that I was using or I would want to use. So if you're working on [00:29:00] something that you care about and you understand, it's easier to stay motivated and you'll have a better sense of what the users need.
Should be something that you can relate to because that passion will help drive development and it will be a more rewarding experience for you.
Nate Kadlac: That's so well said. Thank you for that. It's really insightful. David, thanks so much for being here today. If people want to find you online or reach out and say, Hey, or have a question.
And if you're okay with that, where might they find you?
David Ngo: Yeah, they can email me at david at chess hub. com. They can also go to the site and there's a feedback form where they can submit feedback. I read all the feedback that comes through. And I'm grateful for all of it, even if it's just something that tells me that, hey, this is broken or doesn't work.
I'm not, really active on social media. I do have personal social media accounts, but I haven't created any for chess hub. So I would say the website or email is the best way to contact me.
Nate Kadlac: That's fantastic. thanks again for being here.
David Ngo: Awesome. Thank you, Nate. Thanks for [00:30:00] having me on your podcast.
Nate Kadlac: Absolutely.
