Jeff Chen: [00:00:00] I've had a lot of different ideas for games over the years, and most of them just feel like, ah, sort of derivative, not that interesting, and I've tried to develop a couple things just With PowerPoint slides so that I get a rough idea of, you know, somebody can beta test it, something like that. And this particular one.
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. So we just got done chatting with. Jeff Chen of the game. I'm squeezy. com and Aaron, what did you love about that interview?
Aaron Kardell: So many things it's hard to pick, but I'll just go with his persistence and the fact that he created prototypes and he really actively sought feedback and really refined and honed the game squeezy based on a lot of early [00:01:00] feedback and just his persistence to figure it out.
Aaron Kardell: So what were some of your takeaways, Nate?
Nate Kadlac: Just kind of coming at this with a beginner's mindset. He really just put himself out there to learn JavaScript, SQL, putting together a puzzle and just having no experience. I think it just is inspiring to know that even at our age, we can always approach things with a mindset.
Nate Kadlac: So that was a great interview and here's Jeff.
Nate Kadlac: I'm Nate Cadillac, and I'm here with my co host Aaron Cardell. And today we are so excited to speak with Jeff Chen, the creator of Squeezie. Jeff is a writer by trade and authored works such as the Ultra Ball series. And bridge crosswords. He has created many puzzles for different publications, such as the New York times, the LA times, the wall street journal, and many others, and is also recognized by will shorts himself as a prolific crossword maker.
Nate Kadlac: He is also a [00:02:00] philanthropist and charity proponent being the vice president of the Paramitas foundation, which is dedicated to supporting causes that are humanitarian and scholastic. He has also personally donated around 13 gallons of blood with a lifetime goal of 20 gallons. He created Squeezy, a recent game, with the help of Jim Horn.
Nate Kadlac: And it is a daily game that works kind of by creating new words, by inserting given tiles in between existing letters of, of those words. Jeff, we're so excited you're here.
Jeff Chen: Thanks to have me. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to chat.
Nate Kadlac: Yeah, we're excited. And we usually kick this off just by asking, what's your favorite game to play?
Jeff Chen: Right now I'm really into Connections. I know, Wyna from the editing team at the New York Times. And I just love the way her mind. Works and makes these links that, you know, some of them I just never would have thought of. And some of them I still, like I get to the very end. And I have four squares left.
Jeff Chen: I think, I don't know, tell me, go ahead. And I'm usually surprised. [00:03:00]
Aaron Kardell: We've got a little family thread going with that right now. My wife, my brother in law and my son. It's a lot of fun. It sounds like you've got a little bit of insight, insight on how those are created. Is that, are those all by the same puzzle creator or?
Jeff Chen: Most of the puzzles on the New York Times game site have one editor that's kind of in charge of everything and wine is taken. I've never met her in person, unfortunately, but we've exchanged lots of emails and she's super, super nice. So it's been great to see her have success with that.
Nate Kadlac: I'm so curious.
Nate Kadlac: So how does someone get into crossword puzzle making?
Jeff Chen: Yeah, mostly falling ass backward into it. So back in 2008, I had just come off of working at a startup, which a friend started back in 2002 and we were working crazy hours and just burning out. Pretty badly [00:04:00] by the time 2008 rolled around, things had been going much better.
Jeff Chen: And so I took the opportunity to exit and got some flexibility that way. That was really thankful for that opportunity. But at that point, I was trying to figure out what the hell should I do with my life? What am I going to be when I grow up? And I didn't have any answers. So I started trying a whole bunch of things, including writing crosswords, philanthropy, travel.
Jeff Chen: Just you name it. I've probably tried it, even some coding, things like that. And I had met my, my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife. And we started exploring some things and she had always been a crossword solver her entire life. So she was able to solve the New York times Sunday crossword in about 15 minutes.
Jeff Chen: And on some of our first dates, I had just started doing crosswords, kind of out of curiosity. And we would sit down with two copies of the New York Times crossword on a Sunday. You know, have [00:05:00] coffee, have breakfast, she'd be done quickly. And sometimes three hours later, I'd still be sitting there trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
Jeff Chen: And that got shorter and shorter, but still, she was always able to beat me by quite a long margin. And finally, I just decided one day, I kind of want to try making one of these. Because, like everybody, I saw the movie Wordplay and realized that there are human beings behind this thing. And I figured, okay, well, I'll try it.
Jeff Chen: And I made one, and It was terrible. Thankfully, Jill, my wife is very, very sympathetic and empathetic. So she gave me a lot of support and I submitted it anyway, even though she kind of gently and kindly tried to say, this is terrible and Will wrote me back pretty quickly, actually, and said, Hey, thanks for the submission.
Jeff Chen: I think you have a lot of promise. However, there are some rules with crosswords, including you shouldn't make up your own [00:06:00] words. Like in one little corner of the grid, I couldn't fill it because I was doing everything by hand and graph paper. And all I could figure out was sun, sun, S U N, S O N. And I figured, well, Apollo must have had a child, right?
Jeff Chen: So I put that in, and of course he said, this would never fly, but try again. So I kept on trying, and he was really polite and encouraging the entire way. All throughout submissions 1 through 5, up to 10, up to 15, up to 20, and every single one of them ultimately was a rejection. And finally, Jill had an idea on the crossword and She wanted to figure out how to lay it out.
Jeff Chen: And I said, no, I've learned a lot. You can't do it that way. It's just not going to work. She said, well, why don't we just try it? Let's see what happens. No, it's not going to [00:07:00] work. Why don't we just look? Just try it once, see if it works. And of course it just serendipitously worked out. And within a couple weeks, we had our first acceptance, which tells you who's the brains in the operation.
Aaron Kardell: That's great. It sounds like a great, partner in more ways than one there. And, yeah, also that's, really intriguing that usually you think of anything involving publishing, like, you're lucky to get an acknowledgement of a rejection, and to get, like, that kind of Candid feedback and active feedback from Will Shortz, that's amazing.
Aaron Kardell: So, kudos to you for keeping at it and keeping with it. That also speaks really highly of Will too.
Jeff Chen: Absolutely. He is amazing at what he does. I mean, he certainly has critics and he certainly could do some things better, but and overall I have been really impressed with his process and [00:08:00] just how much attention he spends, time and attention he spends with the submissions.
Nate Kadlac: So I'm just so curious about like the process of creating a puzzle. So do you come up with like the grid, but are you just kind of coming up with like the And then questions, or how do you tackle this? Like, how would someone start?
Jeff Chen: The biggest thing by far is trying to figure out a good idea or what they call a theme behind a crossword and sort of like connections some way that links for really good, colorful phrases together.
Jeff Chen: That's surprising. That might generate a like, Oh, that's pretty cool. So you have to start with that. And then the entire process of laying out a crossword is, gets into technical details, which it's not that difficult to learn, but it takes a lot of practice to go through and get good. And once you get the right tools in place, it really doesn't take nearly as long as most people think.
Jeff Chen: I think a 15 by 15 crossword these days, [00:09:00] once I get the idea and the theme phrases, most of the time, if there's nothing, Really difficult about a particular set of constraints or anything like that. Everything might come together in two or three hours.
Nate Kadlac: That's much quicker than I thought. The first puzzle that you did, which took weeks.
Jeff Chen: Definitely. I mean, and it's, it's gotten a lot easier, but it's still a learning process after 15 years of doing this. I recently heard from the editing team that they liked an idea that I sent in. However, they wanted to change some of the theme entries. And did I have any other alternatives that I could sub in and I had a couple.
Jeff Chen: So we agreed on some things and I put a grid together and sent it back in. And Christina, who's one of the people on the editing team, she's great. She's fantastic. I said, you know, overall. We just think as a team that it's got too much crossword ease. You have the Dutch cheese EDAM, but you [00:10:00] pluralized it and that sort of thing.
Jeff Chen: And, you know, yeah, I let things slide and definitely I need, I know I need to go back and correct things. So kind of blow up the entire thing and start over again. And. Keep in mind specific editor's tastes and try to do better.
Aaron Kardell: So outside of crossword creation, can you tell us a little more about just, it seems like you've been in and around puzzles for quite some time.
Aaron Kardell: And can you tell us about some of your other puzzle involvement?
Jeff Chen: Yeah, I think it started back in college when there was this thing called the game, based on a movie, I think. But overall it was this 24 to 48 hour kind of whirlwind of activity where you didn't go to sleep. you got a clue with some sort of code that could be mathematical, could be foreign language based, could be just about anything, lateral thinking.
Jeff Chen: When you [00:11:00] solved it, it would tell you where to go next. And it was so compelling. I would just love doing it. And after graduating, work sort of got in the way of things. But then I started getting more into these online puzzle hunts. And same sort of thing. There's one called the Puzzle Boat, which a group of us look forward to every year, where it's roughly a hundred puzzles.
Jeff Chen: That all work together to get a set of meta answers. And those meta answers all feed into each other to come up with a meta meta. Like a hundred puzzles, you think, well, okay, if you have six people, you can kind of crank through them. But one of the puzzles this year took me about six hours to figure out.
Jeff Chen: And it was all about the way that bell chimes work. And it involved the switching of. Different pairs of bell chimes and you had to go back [00:12:00] and figure out, I actually had to write some computer code to figure out, like, how would I go determine the initial setting of these bells? So, super, super fun and I've met a lot of really interesting people that way.
Jeff Chen: One guy that I got to be friends with online that I've, I've only seen on a Zoom call once. I've never met him in person, but he's great and it turns out he's the director of The Last of Us. And a couple of years ago, we were working on this puzzle together. We're trying to figure this thing out and it was just breaking us.
Jeff Chen: Finally he said, I'll try to work on it tomorrow, but I got to go catch a plane to the Emmys, the Emmy awards and another friend of ours said, yeah, you should come along. Come along to the Emmy Awards? Okay, and who are you? So I looked him up, and sure enough, he's Craig Mazin, who has written and directed The Last of Us, as well as HBO's Chernobyl, which was amazing.
Jeff Chen: I thought, wait a second, [00:13:00] this is the guy that I've been solving puzzles with? So all kinds of fun connections like that. I just love the puzzling world. And these days, my kids and I, I don't know how we got in this habit, maybe during the pandemic, but every night before dessert, I make up a little puzzle for them.
Jeff Chen: So sometimes there'll be coin weighing puzzles, or sometimes I'll make up a Sudoku or a variant puzzle or a tiny crossword or something like a math puzzle. I like, I trick them into doing math. So it's been really fun to have that tradition in our family.
Nate Kadlac: We just spoke with the founder of Nerdle and how he incorporates these little math games at his dinner table, his kids and everything.
Nate Kadlac: That's great. I'm looking forward to doing the same. They're still a little, little young, but yeah. So you doing and building crossword puzzles. When did X word info come around and when did you start that with, it sounds like you co founded that with Jim Horn?
Jeff Chen: Jim's [00:14:00] been, he started it 15 years ago, roughly.
Jeff Chen: And five years into it, he decided he wanted to stop. And by that time, he had made it such a valuable tool. For a constructor like me, I was on there fairly frequently using the finder tool to look up specific letter patterns that I needed to fill. And when he announced that he was going to shut the site down, I realized that he, he only lives about half an hour away from me.
Jeff Chen: So we kind of coordinated and got together and liked each other and super fun. And he said, you know, I just can't spend the time doing this anymore. It's just. Way too much of a commitment and frankly, it's just, it's not that much fun anymore for me and a lot of people had come forth and said, can I take it over?
Jeff Chen: And Jim said, well, do you know SQL, you know, C JavaScript, HTML, and you know how to work a database [00:15:00] and almost all the questions at the time people would say, I don't know any of those things. And I also said, I don't know any of those things, but I liked the idea of the challenge of it and trying to figure things out.
Jeff Chen: And Jim sort of looked at me and said, well, we could try it. And I could tell like he was thinking, you know, this is not, there's no way. Yeah, exactly. But we got together and I'm a recreational coder. So I just kind of hammer things away with total brute force. So he kind of laughed at some of the things I was trying to do.
Jeff Chen: And, sure. Let's try this. Let's see how it goes. And I decided that I wanted to write some commentary just to kind of keep things positive and light in the cross, crossword world or the cross world as we like to call it sometimes. And just had a lot of fun doing that. And, I'd even asked Will, Will Shorts if, should I write something that was just pointing out [00:16:00] the positives of each puzzle?
Jeff Chen: Because there's a lot of negativity in the world. And, he said, I don't want you to do that. I want you to give me fair opinions that give both the positives and the negatives, so no one's going to believe you or put any stock in what you say. If you're just pointing out the rosiness of the crossword.
Jeff Chen: So yeah, try to look at things from both sides. So my background isn't, isn't as an engineer and I tend to think things through technically. So a lot of my. blog commentary was about the technical aspects of putting together each puzzle and how kind of opening up the curtain behind the entire thing and it was really fun for me to do that for 10 years and When I hit the 10 year point, I think I had gotten repetitive and I just didn't have that much more to say So, and I also had this project that squeezy that I was interested in spending more time on, and [00:17:00] that helped me free things, things up quite a bit.
Jeff Chen: But Jim and I still remain good friends and he's been working on squeezy with me, developing the server side. applications that we need to get the data to users every day. And it's been really fun having this new project with him.
Nate Kadlac: Yes. Which we will get to in a second. I am kind of curious though.
Nate Kadlac: So you are running X Word Info still or not?
Jeff Chen: Well, not on a daily basis anymore. Okay. Jim still uploads the puzzles that we get from the New York times team, but it's more like whenever he can get around to them. So maybe every other week, once a month. Uploads a bolus and we try to keep it up to date. We do still maintain our word list.
Jeff Chen: So I upload a big bolus of words once a quarter, roughly, just to make sure that we have kind of the most up to date, the freshest entries, and also things [00:18:00] that have fallen out of favor. We score. down to the point where people shouldn't be using them as much. And when the puzzles do come in, when Jim uploads them, we try to score all the new stuff, the debut material, so that, you know, at least you get a sense for, is this something that I should use all the time, or should I be a little more careful?
Jeff Chen: About when I need to dip into this. Well,
Nate Kadlac: I was looking kind of at the analytics of this. I don't know how much you track, but it was, I mean, according to similar web, it's like 250, 000 visitors to that site every month, incredibly popular. And. It looks like you, you have kind of a support subscription model in place for that.
Nate Kadlac: Does that just kind of help cover costs or has that actually been, helps you a little bit more than that overall?
Jeff Chen: Mostly cover cost. Yeah. There's just so much database management and bandwidth that we have to pay for. So. It's, it's very expensive to run, unfortunately, and, [00:19:00] we tried to figure out ways of kind of either selling it to somebody or porting it over somewhere, but things just haven't worked out.
Jeff Chen: We're hopeful that we can kind of keep it running at this sort of lower level every other week kind of thing for as long as possible. But. You know, at this point, we can't make any guarantees.
Nate Kadlac: Well, as you alluded to earlier, you are working on something new. And I'll just say personally, I came across this game.
Nate Kadlac: I think it was in Kevin Kelly's newsletter. Who's the founder of wired or co founder. And. Recommendo and I came across and I just happened to land on it one day. I would love to hear more about this game. Tell us how it came to be and what you're doing with it right now.
Jeff Chen: I've had a lot of different ideas for games over the years, and most of them just feel like, ah, sort of derivative, not that interesting.
Jeff Chen: And I've tried to develop a couple of things just with PowerPoint slides so that I get a rough idea [00:20:00] of You know somebody can beta test it something like that and this particular one. I have always been interested in crosswords Where you have a word and you can cut out a couple letters and it becomes a different word, a new, a different valid word.
Jeff Chen: For some reason it all just seems kind of magical to me. Like, or if you have a short word and you insert a couple letters it becomes a longer word which is also valid. There's just something neat about it. I don't know, there's something kind of like wizardly or something. So, I came up with this idea of inserting letters into words.
Jeff Chen: And at the very base idea, it was just kind of that. And I talked to David Steinberg, who's over at Andrews MacNeil, and he really liked the idea and gave me some suggestions on how to improve it. I had given him a PowerPoint of a couple. examples of just words that can transform into other words when you insert a [00:21:00] certain letter or a couple of letters.
Jeff Chen: And he noticed that the example that I gave that had six letter insertions, those six letters, if you anagram them, they become a real word. And he said, why don't you do something with that? Oh, that's a great idea. And they were interested in kicking it around and seeing, you know, if they could prototype a beta test at that sort of thing, but they just didn't have the bandwidth or the resources and then their programmer quit.
Jeff Chen: So David was like, yeah, at this point we just, we can't pursue this. And so I sat around for a while and I thought, ah, I don't want to wait. I don't want to pay somebody to do this, especially because I don't really know. I wouldn't know what they were doing. And every time I wanted to change something, I'd have to contact them and explain it.
Jeff Chen: Why don't I just figure this out myself? And it turned out to be pretty difficult. I watched a lot of videos. I watched a lot of YouTube. [00:22:00] I started with. Wordle clones, so there are a lot of people out there who noticed how popular Wordle was and then figured out I'll make a video on how to make a Wordle clone in an hour using basic HTML JavaScript and CSS and so I watched I don't know, half a dozen of those, and I didn't understand a thing.
Jeff Chen: I probably picked up 5 percent of each one of them, but then I watched some more, and I picked up another 10%, and I got to the point where I could start, like I could put together some basic HTML, and I know enough, like, basic computer programming to write some JavaScript behind it. And it took me probably two months to come up with my very first prototype, which I was so proud of.
Jeff Chen: And I took it downstairs and I showed Jill and the kids and you know, tap on this, move it over here. And they're like, Oh, that's pretty [00:23:00] cool. Okay. Now I just want to move it backwards because I didn't put it in the right place. Oh yeah. I don't have a way to reset it. What do you mean? So I just have to reload the entire game every one Yeah, and Jill was like, oh, okay, well, great.
Jeff Chen: I remember thinking that night, This is impressive! I learned all this stuff! How come you're not more impressed? And we went out to dinner a week later, and I just kind of mentioned it. With the laugh. And she said, I'd never had an over, I never thought about how much effort it takes to figure something like that out.
Jeff Chen: Honestly, when you look at it, you're just moving a tile from here to there. There's no undo. You can't remove tiles once you're done. You don't even have a reset or anything like that. Those are things that you could consider adding later on. And I thought, yeah, you're right. So I went back and made a second prototype, which had a lot of these features.
Jeff Chen: And by that time, [00:24:00] I kind of had gotten up the learning curve and gotten the ball rolling. So I could figure out a lot of. Logic behind moving tiles around resets and hints and things like that. So at that point I had switched things so that instead of the word, the secret word appearing at the end, when you're done and you're like, Oh wow, that's cool.
Jeff Chen: I had started with a secret word on the tile side on the left side. So you would take this word, this perfectly valid word and break it up in the bits over here. And I tested it out with some people and they thought, well, why'd you do that? It's terrible. So I went back and built a third prototype and then I kept on changing things back and forth for different levels versus two different levels.
Jeff Chen: And I came up with the idea of connecting the secret answers from the three different levels. And Jill suggested, why don't you have people [00:25:00] kind of guess, like put three buttons here and say, these are the three answers, which of these three buttons, three options connects with the theme, and that would help kind of prove that you figured it out.
Jeff Chen: I thought, oh, that's a great idea. So that took forever to implement, because there's a lot of logic behind it. And I tested it out. Some people loved it. I thought, oh, great, fantastic. But a lot of people, I think it's the same with the majority of people thought, eh, there's no way I would have ever gotten that.
Jeff Chen: And then some people got super frustrated. Like. You're expecting them, guess what the fuck Jeff is thinking? This is terrible. Okay, well maybe that's just a couple people. And then, my twin brother, identical twin brother, who was testing it at the time as well. Kind of gave me the same feedback and said, look, there's no way I would have ever gotten that and at best it's frustrating.[00:26:00]
Jeff Chen: So I slept on it a couple of nights and decided to take out the buttons. And I think overall, that was a good idea, but I still get a lot of feedback these days that I'd kind of like some way to prove that I can guess the theme. Like, Oh God, I don't know what the right answer is. And just like with most of my life, I don't know what the right answer is.
Aaron Kardell: That's a good place to be is just, uncomfortable and not knowing what the right answer is, but it, it strikes me, Jeff, I think across a couple of your stories here, you're super persistent, you know, whether it's, sending 20 crossword submissions and 19 rejections or whatever the numbers were and three prototypes and, and not, you know, Maybe the warmest feedback on the first one.
Aaron Kardell: I just got to say kudos to your persistence. I don't have a question around that, but like, I think it just demonstrates you've got a real skill here and good work. Thanks.
Jeff Chen: There's [00:27:00] a fine line between persistence and stupidity, and I don't know which side I'm on.
Aaron Kardell: Well, as a, somebody who's, Really enjoyed Squeezy since, discovering it.
Aaron Kardell: I think, I think it's time well spent. Haha, thank you. I'm curious, about so many aspects of this game, but let's start with, so you, you built your first prototype. How long ago was that very first prototype that you built? Kind of back in September, October. Okay. And when was the first daily launch to the public?
Jeff Chen: January 31st.
Aaron Kardell: Okay.
Jeff Chen: Back in November, I sent Jim a screenshot I had mocked up saying, Squeezy, you know, launch, Squeezy number one, February 1st. And he said, okay, and he said, well, if you want to work really hard over the holiday and bang your head for most of January, that could be realistic. And I [00:28:00] thought, okay, I can do that.
Aaron Kardell: So I guess one of, one of my next questions then is, I played earlier today. I can't remember. It must've been number 37 or number 38. What, are you using a generator for any of these? Are you manually creating all the puzzles yourself?
Jeff Chen: Yeah, mostly the same with crosswords, kind of the same approach that I come up with an idea.
Jeff Chen: It doesn't have to be as tight or as interesting an idea sometimes. And there's only three answers instead of four answers. So it's pretty easy for me to come up with. Dozens, hundreds of ideas that I can kind of play with and call through. But then at that point, kind of figuring out how to break up the secret words and then what letters fit into what words to make those secret words up.
Jeff Chen: At first it took me about two hours maybe to create a puzzle, but these days I've picked up steam and created some spreadsheets that help [00:29:00] me figure out what possibilities are available for each letter or for each pair or triplet of letters. So it probably takes half an hour to crank things out. So back when we first launched, I had 50 games made and now I'm at 180, roughly.
Jeff Chen: So about six months.
Aaron Kardell: That was like one of the next things I was going to ask is, how, how far ahead have you worked here? That's really cool. I think on, you know, so many of these puzzles, I think a lot of people, whether explicitly stated or not. They get kind of emphatic around like, well, there can only be one solution.
Aaron Kardell: It kind of was interesting to me just thinking about Squeezy. And if you're not using a generator, do you end up giving a lot of thought to like, is there some alternate solution that somebody could stumble onto with this? And, and is that a hard problem to think through or is it really [00:30:00] not that common?
Jeff Chen: It's a difficult problem to think through. and Jim and I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to programmatically check for those things. So he's helped me. With a couple of validation steps to make sure that there's not another possible. Well, especially like you don't want to have a word like cap and you insert an R it can either become carp or crap.
Jeff Chen: I mean, you could code it so that both are accepted as correct answers, but it's just not. It's at the very least inelegant, and it kind of feels bad, I think, if you could put it in either of those places and just have it be counted as correct. So, one thing that was really surprising, that was really difficult to predict, well, there's been a lot of stuff that's just kind of taken me by surprise, and I'm like, Ah, I gotta go ahead and fix this.
Jeff Chen: Like, one [00:31:00] time, in the wheezy mode, There's been a lot of call for, like, crossword people want this to be harder. So I made an easy mode or a breezy mode for, Just regular folks and, wheezy mode for people who want a real challenge. And I always have an extra tile and that extra tile isn't just to kind of keep you from anagramming the word in your head, but it's also possible to insert it in a certain place or multiple places and kind of mislead you.
Jeff Chen: But one point there was a puzzle where the answer was Jillian. And it was, the first letter was a J inserted into Mu to make Mojo, but this, the extra tile I had put was an M. And somebody wrote me and said, Ah, my streak is broken. I got this wrong because I put the M in to make a Momo, which is a type [00:32:00] of food, and it made millions instead of jillion.
Jeff Chen: And I thought, ah, no, I didn't even, how am I supposed to figure this out? Thankfully, I quickly corrected that just by changing the, the extra tile. But I'm sure there are going to be other things that are unexpected that I have to figure out. Jim has been, I mean, he's such a strong programmer that He's helped figure a lot of this stuff out, pointed a lot of these things out to me.
Jeff Chen: So,
Aaron Kardell: and, speaking of that, I'm just curious, where'd the, lemon theme for the game or where'd you come up with that?
Jeff Chen: One of my wife's wordle group friends said, originally come up with the idea of calling it squeezy. Cause you're squeezing a letter into a word. And my kids say easy peasy lemon squeezy all the time.
Jeff Chen: So then I started, at first I kind of just called it easy, medium and hard. And then I thought I was gonna try these things like [00:33:00] breezy, wheezy, squeezy, squeezy or something like that. And I put a lemon logo in for lemon squeezy or something. And. My wife's friend suggested just leaning into the entire thing and just go with lemons and, you know, maybe you could have like lemons exploding on the screen if you solve it correctly.
Jeff Chen: And I thought, I don't know how to do that, but. I, you know, what I could do is I can make him dance around a little bit. So that's about it on my list of things to do and work on. I'd love to have some sort of lemon animation to, you know, but I, my skills are still somewhat limited.
Nate Kadlac: Jeff, I'm, my background is in, design and branding.
Nate Kadlac: And I have to say there might be a hack here for people looking for names of companies to like go seek out crossword puzzle builders, because I think it's absolutely brilliant. I love the theme. I love the name. It kind of feels like a New York times [00:34:00] game. Like though, just the, the way that, you know, the green kind of floods out full bleed on the, on the page.
Nate Kadlac: And is that, was that intentional to taking some of the aesthetics from a New York times game?
Jeff Chen: Yeah, I think especially during the pandemic, my wife got super into the spelling bee. So she would spend an hour, and sometimes during our date nights, we would just hang out and try to figure out how to get the queen bee, you know, what's the, the four letter word starting with T that we're missing or something like that.
Jeff Chen: And then Connections came along and they even beta tested this game called Digits, which we both liked. Unfortunately, they killed that game, but so much what the New York Times Games Department has done has been such a huge success. That it's only natural to kind of look at how they laid things out. The idea that there would be one puzzle a day felt really strong from Wirtle's background.
Jeff Chen: So absolutely. I think [00:35:00] the biggest compliment is to copy and I compliment a lot of what they do.
Aaron Kardell: You know, you put so much thought and intentionality into the game design and getting feedback ahead of time. Curious, as you were thinking about launching the game and you kind of put that stake in the ground that you were going to launch on February 1st, what were you planning ahead in terms of getting the word out and how did you think about things like distribution and marketing?
Jeff Chen: I'm terrible with social media. So that was the big challenge for me. But thankfully, I've built up a big network of crossword friends, most of which I've never met, but going to the crossword tournament every year, back when I didn't have kids, I was able to just establish a lot of friendships, so that was the biggest way.
Jeff Chen: But surprisingly enough, my kids elementary school, the teachers really got into it. And, started sharing it with some [00:36:00] of the parents and I'm going to give a presentation next week on, you know, for PI day and software development, stuff like that. So it's been great. Just a lot of local people have kind of clung onto it and started spreading the word.
Jeff Chen: So a lot of word of mouth.
Aaron Kardell: Well, and I, I gotta say just personally as a startup founder who thinks a lot about go to market, you're certainly putting in the hustle and the legwork of, you know, even as I was emailing you, like, you know, it was, tell your friends, tell your family, and you're embedding that in every email, so that's, that's great.
Jeff Chen: But if you have any ideas, I would love to hear about spreading the word. It's, I would have been happy to have, you know, just a hundred people a day doing it, but. Just blown, blown us away at having several thousand people a day. And I would love to grow that, you know, 50, 000 at the end of the year. I mean, that's kind of the, the stretch goal.
Jeff Chen: But, you know, just to have something, it's such a [00:37:00] pleasure to create this thing that at least once a day, I get an email from somebody, some random person saying, you know, I love this game or, you know, I don't understand the connection. Can you explain it to me? And it's just fun to have the interaction.
Nate Kadlac: So you haven't talked to the New York times yet.
Nate Kadlac: About acquiring a game.
Jeff Chen: We definitely kind of nudge, nudge, let him know, like, Oh, we have a lot of people solving this and a lot of people saying, gosh, why don't you just have the New York times by it? Well, be open to talking. Certainly only are that easy. And we had discussions with some other parties as well.
Jeff Chen: So
Nate Kadlac: you mentioned a kind of a stretch goal for the end of this year, 50 K I don't curious. Like, do you have. You know, I know it's early, but do you have any ambitions for this past the fir, you know, end of the year? Are you working on other games?
Jeff Chen: Well, at some point it would be great to get paid for doing this.
Jeff Chen: I don't know. I mean, it would [00:38:00] have to be for the right party under the right conditions because I enjoy doing it so much. But yeah, I mean, absolutely it would be fun to have a partnership that, especially one that would. Allow the user base to exponentially grow. That's great. But for now, I just enjoy having the connection with people and creating something that a lot of people seem to be really enjoying.
Jeff Chen: It brings me a lot of joy just to kind of know that. So, yeah, especially when I'm dealing with kids.
Aaron Kardell: Well, it's a journey we were talking beforehand. It sounds like you've got two kids. I know both Nate and I do all different ages, but it's a journey, right?
Jeff Chen: Yeah. Absolutely.
Aaron Kardell: Well, I could talk your ear off, all day long about Squeezy or, or just some of these past experiences, but it sounds like you've got another release coming up later this year, perhaps in book form.
Aaron Kardell: Do you want to [00:39:00] tell us more about that?
Jeff Chen: Yeah. My writing career has been a lot like my crossword career, where it's a fine line between persistence and stupidity and failing at kind of every, Point along the way, but getting right back up and failing with my first agent, failing with my first book, failing with my first book shopped around and finally getting to the point where I, my agent sold ultra ball.
Jeff Chen: But after that, I've been writing a lot of puzzle books and putting other proposals together. And a guy named AJ Jacobs, who's just an amazing writer, I've read all of his books, got in touch with me saying that could he get a plug on Expert Info about his latest book called The Puzzler, which if you haven't read it, it's fantastic, really entertaining non fiction about the world of puzzling.
Jeff Chen: and yeah. You know, so I was absolutely happy to do that. So, afterward he said, Hey, I'd like to put you in touch with a friend of mine. This guy, Stuart Gibbs, who's a [00:40:00] children's book writer. And I said, The Stuart Gibbs? You mean the guy who I've read all his books and I would love to have kind of a career, a writing career like his?
Jeff Chen: He's a best selling New York Times author. He's got three series out that are just huge hits at my kids school. I had read them before my kids were Even born just because I was so entertained and so I was intimidated and I thought I'll wait a couple days before I email him because I don't even know what to say and Before I did that Stewart emailed me and said gosh, I'm such a huge fan of your puzzles This is so cool to meet you and I said what what's going on here?
Jeff Chen: And so we started chatting and just, it was fun because he's really into crosswords and likes puzzles and is entertained every day with not just crosswords, but the other New York times games and other kinds of things. And I [00:41:00] thought, you know, what'd be really fun is if we could do a puzzle book around one of your series.
Jeff Chen: And I kind of proposed something around this fun jungle series that he's got. I really like those books. And he said, my spy school books are by far and away my biggest successes. They're just like selling like hotcakes. There's 11 books in that series now, and people are just clamoring for more and more.
Jeff Chen: What do you think about that? Yeah, okay. Let me think about it. And I came back a couple of weeks later with a proposal. I had fleshed out some ideas on like. How to get eight different types of puzzles to come out with answers. And those eight answers work together. And, so I sketched things out enough so that he could kind of understand what was going on.
Jeff Chen: And I didn't think anything of it. It's just kind of fun to do. And I sent it to him and he said, wow, this is really fun. It's super [00:42:00] entertaining. I didn't hear him back from them for a month or two. Didn't go anywhere. I And then my agent got in touch with me and said, Hey, what do you know about this contract Stuart sent over what contract my previous books?
Jeff Chen: It's always been this, this horrendous process of, all right, you got to get the book ready for submission. You have to make a list of the different editors you want to talk to. You have to go back and forth, figure it out. And you know, it might take a year. I think the first book we shopped around. It was about a year and a half before we finally called it and decided there's just, there's been some interest, not enough interest.
Jeff Chen: It doesn't quite fit for our series, our offerings. And it's just been such a hard process, even ultra ball, which was only on submission for two weeks before it got picked up. It was really, stressful, you know, and you kind of figure out like, you gotta have these two parties that you're trying to, you know, get the best deal.
Jeff Chen: [00:43:00] And, you know, what, what should we do? And this time, you know, Stuart's agent just sent over an offer. My initial response was, let's take it. Let's take, let's take it. My agent said, well, hold on a sec. Hold on a sec. Let me ask for X more. And I said, no, don't mess this up. It's not going to hurt, trust me on this.
Jeff Chen: And they took what he countered with and I, okay, let's go ahead and do it. So we've been working on it for the past year and are now into the layout phase. And it's scheduled, I think, to release in fall of 2024. It's called Spy School Entrance Exam, so that when kids, if kids can come up with the correct eight answers and figure out how they work together, which is definitely doable, like some of my beta testers have figured it out, they can enter their [00:44:00] answer into a website.
Jeff Chen: And gain kind of admission to spy school, you know, kind of a series of prizes basically. So yeah, it's super, super fun. And, I've been enjoying working with Stuart and just the power that he's got, the leverage, he's got an entire team behind him and kind of sends in these sketches and the art department scurries off to go to work and produces something.
Jeff Chen: And it's amazing. And it's just an honor to be part of the process.
Nate Kadlac: That all is incredible. And I'm, I'm so curious what a day in the life looks like for you working on squeezy and writing, like, how do you, do you have a schedule of writing? I'm curious. I write a little bit, but I've never written a book.
Jeff Chen: Yeah, I try to spend an hour or two in the mornings. Right now it's been mostly dedicated to Squeezie because I'm so interested in having an incredible amount of fun putting [00:45:00] the puzzles together that sometimes I just let the writing slip. I'll try to force myself to work on a project. Right now I've got edits that I have to go back through for Spy School entrance exam.
Jeff Chen: So there's a deadline that I have to meet. But after I get that done, I'll go back to another project that I've been drafting out. And, try to avoid getting sucked into just making squeezy puzzles from eight till five, because they're just so much fun to put together. And there's something satisfying about it.
Jeff Chen: Like when you, when you solve a crossword puzzle. It's fun because you get to the last square and you fill it in and you think it's complete, I did something. And it's even better when you make a crossword puzzle because you get, it's really difficult and you get to the point where finally after five hours, I figured this horrendous problem out and I filled in the last square and it all works out.
Jeff Chen: Fantastic. Squeezy, there's something [00:46:00] super satisfying about working on something for half an hour and kind of nailing it. Getting it done and then moving on and churning through, like by the end of the day, if I've made 10 puzzles, God, it feels great. But basically I don't have a fixed schedule unless one of my editors or agent comes back and says, look, you got to get this done by Monday.
Jeff Chen: So right now I'm on deadline, so I have to shuffle things around. But otherwise I'm in a really lucky position to be able to make my own schedule and kind of work on. What sounds interesting, which was fantastic. I didn't think that I had no expectation that spy school entrance exam was going to go anywhere, but because I was able to free up a lot of time to come up with this draft to show Stewart things got rolling and it was great.
Jeff Chen: Hopefully more stuff
Aaron Kardell: like that will come along. Jeff, what are [00:47:00] some takeaways from building your games that might help aspiring game creators?
Jeff Chen: The biggest, the thing that people ought to remember is that the persistence. That's the biggest factor. And it's really difficult to know when to say, Okay, let's just.
Jeff Chen: Change course. It was so important to listen to beta testers, you know, and even if you're married to something, you can just can't be married to any one particular feature. So super important to get testers and listen to what they're saying. Yeah. And then. Being okay with spending an incredible amount of time for something that may or may not pan out, learning to live with frustration.
Aaron Kardell: Jeff, I'm, I'm sure you'll want people to check out Squeezy. So if you could give us the address for that, and then where can people find you online more generally?
Jeff Chen: So, it's, the website is imsqueezy. com. I'm in Squeezy, there's no [00:48:00] space or underline or anything. Just imsqueezy. com. And, my contact information is on the front page of that.
Jeff Chen: So you can write me that way. Or you can also go to jeffchenwrights at whatever it is. jeffchenwrights. com. C H E N, not any other spelling. And, my contact information is there as well. And don't hesitate to contact me. Like, it's really fun for me to hear from people. And I get a lot of people asking me, like, can you help me get published somewhere when, with the crossword idea, and I don't know how to go about technically putting this thing together.
Jeff Chen: And I love doing that kind of thing. It's been kind of the biggest change for me over the past five years is that. I used to kind of do it because I had a lot of interesting ideas or what I thought were interesting ideas I wanted to make in the crosswords. But I find [00:49:00] so much more pleasure now in helping others achieve their bucket list goals or their items.
Jeff Chen: Like, just the other day, I've, I've been working with a woman who's 70, something like that, and, has always wanted to make a crossword and she's done, she's solved crosswords for decades now. So it's been super fun to help her craft her idea into something that. Hopefully the New York Times will take now and, you know, I, that's the kind of thing there.
Jeff Chen: It's great seeing others excitement at the first acceptance, that kind of thing, and living vicariously again through them.
Aaron Kardell: Well, that's great. You're definitely, paying forward, what, what Will Shortz, did to invest in you. Thanks a lot for being here, Jeff. Really appreciate the insight and in your background.
Aaron Kardell: Thank you.
Jeff Chen: Yeah, and if you guys have any ideas that could help out Squeezy, spread the word, or features, [00:50:00] or any feedback, I'd love to hear them. I mean, I'm always open to different ideas, and whatever I can do. However hard I can work on something, I'm absolutely willing to do it. So if anyone out there has suggestions, please give me a, drop me a line.
Jeff Chen: And I'd love to chat about anything that might be interesting. That's great.
Nate Kadlac: Thanks a lot, Jeff.
