Richard Mann (nerdle’s CEO and founder) joined Paul Essery of the Tech Business Podcast to discuss the technology and other challenges involved in building nerdle’s mathematical gaming business.

The full interview is on Spotify here, but read on if you prefer the written word.....

[Paul] Hey folks, Paul Essery here, and I'm delighted this afternoon to be with Richard Mann from 'nerdle'.

Richard, thanks for taking a bit of time out to come and have a chat with us. I know you've got plenty to keep you occupied, as all entrepreneurs have. So just for the folks that might be listening, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the business. Then we'll talk about the tech and more.

[Richard] Hi Paul. Thanks for having me today. Nice to see you. Let’s start briefly with me: I did a physics degree then became an accountant (like most people who don't quite know what they want to do after doing a science degree in this country). I've spent 20 years since in early-stage technology businesses and have recently completed a Data Science Masters. So, I think that pretty much qualifies me as an all-round poly-nerd!

The most fun thing I've done in the last 25 years or so is the thing you're just about to hear about: nerdle, my latest business. So maybe we can get onto that now.

So, what is nerdle? Nerdle is a daily maths puzzle inspired by the success of Wordle two years ago and a love of maths. In January 2022, I was in a traffic jam with my daughter, talking about Wordle, and we decided there must be an equivalent game for us mathematicians. And so, we came up with an idea for a puzzle, tried it on a piece of paper, and my son helped work out all of the valid calculations (a nerdle is an 8-digit calculation, so there are something like 17,000 of them, enough for our daily puzzle to last to the year 2070).

With the idea for a daily calculation, we found out it worked pretty well on paper. I tried it with a couple of friends, and then we created the game in a matter of days, and it was phenomenally successful in the first few weeks. And the rest, as they say, is history - but we'll talk a bit about 'the rest' in a minute.

So in summary, nerdle is a daily maths game played around the world, including, when we're lucky enough, by a few celebrities like Bill Gates.

[Paul] So, I mean, it sounds like great fun actually. I like those kinds of math quiz things. So, tell us about the tech, and more importantly, tell us why what you're doing is a little bit different from lots of the other games out there.

[Richard] Sure – I’ll do those in reverse, if that's alright.

Why is it a little different? I think casual gaming has really taken off in the last couple of years. There is a massive demographic that doesn't traditionally play online games. I count myself in there. And, in fact, the biggest demographic for nerdle is an older demographic, people aged perhaps like you and me, Paul. People who may have a little more time on their hands, perhaps more typically a crossword reader than an online gamer. They are looking for puzzle games that are challenging and fun, and I think there was a bit of a pent-up demand for this kind of thing when Wordle came along. Having demonstrated the appetite, it wasn’t surprising that a number of spin-offs like nerdle weren’t far behind.

And what about the technology? So, given that context, when we came up with the idea for nerdle, the most important thing was to execute quickly. It was very obvious to me that other people were going to have similar ideas. And the fact that we managed to go from concept to launch in three days, I think, shows that we made some good technology choices.

Now, I'm slightly technical - I do more coding now than I used to - but I was working with a couple of good friends on this in the first few days, and we decided to go with a React Web app. Almost everybody who plays nerdle even now isn't logged in doesn't have an account, so almost entirely a front-end application, and there's no real load on our hosted servers, and all we need to worry about is the bandwidth to get the application out there. That was a really good choice because we had a million players in about a week. Literally from nothing. I think with any other technology decision, the servers would have been smoking!!

The technology choice also allowed us to do a couple of other things. We didn't initially launch a mobile app. But when we did, we launched a progressive web app, which is effectively a wrapper around the React Web app. So that made development and deployment very easy. Scaling too. And really, just focusing on time-to-market and scalability was the right thing to do from day 1. To put that in context, we probably spent a couple of $100 to get to a million users. We've spent a bit more than that since, but it's amazing, isn't it, that the tools and cloud hosting infrastructure are available these days to allow literally anyone to get off the ground without much capital. For example, I started this as a hobby - it was not a well-thought-through business decision to launch an online game. I just decided, well, why not? Those tools weren't there even a couple of years ago, really.

Yeah. And proof of that adage that if you want people to do things, make it easier, make it fun. It just goes to show, doesn't it? But it's easy and fun, so what's not to love?

Agreed. And one of the most rewarding things we've done as nerdle is to see teachers play our game in the classroom with their pupils. It's great to see them taking a few minutes trying to solve a little puzzle and then the smiles and the cheering when they manage to succeed. What’s great is that, when I talk to teachers about this, they tell me that they see the game as educational but the kids see it as fun. And if I can keep that balance, then I think we're onto a winner.

Well, I mean there's all that stuff about people not being mathematical and all the rest of it? But if it's fun, they'll just do the maths naturally, which is why I think that's fabulous.

Of course, a maths puzzle is not for everyone, though. As you may imagine, I have spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of years trying to persuade people to have a go at my little game (or games because we now have at least fifteen of them), but there is a 50:50 chance that someone will turn around and say, “Oh no, no, no, I don't do maths,” and it doesn't matter that there is no complicated mathematics in a nerdle - it's just simple arithmetic - but some people just don't like the idea of doing anything with maths, and I think it's such a shame because there can be as much fun in a maths puzzle as in any logic problem or word game. So yes, I am slowly battling against that headwind. But if we can convince a few people that maths isn't that scary, we've done a good thing.

Absolutely. And I mean you're quite a way down the track from where you started. Tell us about one or two of the challenges you've had to deal with along the way.

So I already mentioned scaling. That was the big challenge of the first few weeks. But because of the choice of technology, it was actually a cost challenge rather than a technical challenge. We ended up hopping from one cloud hosting provider to another based on their free tiers until we worked out what the best option was.

But there were other interesting challenges as well….

The speed that we grew caused a few copycats. You know, people launching websites, registering domain names, and launching apps using our name or something very similar. Deciding what to do about that when, at the time, the business wasn't generating revenue and it was just a hobby, was a bit of a business challenge. We actually launched the nerdle app because other people were doing so. As it turns out, it's much easier to take an app down that's copying your trademark if you've got one of your own. But in hindsight, launching an app was a brilliant decision as it’s allowed us to develop a much better relationship with our users than just through the website.

Working full-time on something else whilst we launched nerdle was also a challenge. It probably took me 6 months to realize that nerdle was really enough of a business to justify me making the move to go full time. But that shift from thinking of nerdle as a hobby and something fun to thinking of it as a business was quite a shift. Starting to think about how do you professionalize everything, setting a strategy for where you are going next, and what other games are going to create. What do users want? This was a fascinating shift to go through and actually one that I really enjoyed once I finally dedicated enough time to it.

Another challenge? Nerdle is an ad-funded business. We have ads on the screen all the time. So trying to get the balance right between revenue-generating opportunities and customer experience was a good challenge. You're never going to please everybody, but the lion’s share of our users are in the US, where it's particularly acceptable to have advertising, which helped.

Yeah, it's the norm isn’t it?

So we’ve tried and get that balance right. We decided not to fight things too hard. We decided not to do subscriptions to avoid ads, but we allow players to turn off ads for a few days at a time if they don't like them. And that was a very good strategy for us to counter any arguments. But at the end of the day, we've got some costs to cover, and nerdle needs to generate revenue. It also needs to generate revenue for some of the other things that we want to do with the business.

And in terms of the future, tell us about what your plans are going forward? What are your ambitions for nerdle, let's say medium to long term, 5 to 10 years out. What are your thoughts about the way forward?

So you can imagine from what I just described that we didn't start off with much of a plan at all. So it's interesting to see how those plans evolved. I think our ambitions are probably in two camps, and I'll start with the medium-sized ambition, which is what we want to do with the business.

When I ask our audience (and I do ask them whenever I have a good excuse) what they want more of, they basically say ‘more maths inspired games.’ So that's what we're trying to do. We've gone from one game with the classic nerdle puzzle that most people still play, to a dozen different mathematical games. And we'll keep going. We're currently working on some arcade-style games very different from anything we've done before - quite fun to play around with and we'll see where that goes. But I think expanding the business from one game to a number of different games that are attractive to a similar audience is where the strategy is going, making sure we also have fun doing that along the way. As if we have fun, hopefully our users will too.

So that's the kind of that's the medium-sized business ambition. To understand our bigger ambition, you need to understand what we say our mission is: to try to make maths more accessible and even a little less scary for everyone. This is what we were talking about a little while ago, Paul. The bigger challenge. So we're trying to do a couple of things in that regard. If we can keep our games fun and educational, that's a start. But we've also designed some tools for educators so they can use nerdle in a more flexible way in the classroom. And I want to do more of that. I want to make sure that people can adjust the difficulty level and tailor our games to suit the education environment that they're in.

But we also know that not everybody has the opportunity to learn these skills or even play games like nerdle. So we have this initiative, which we call “Positive Numbers” and that is to, in some small way, have a positive impact on child numeracy. We support some great charities. We've had some real fun with charity Advent calendars (and I love math puns, so “Advent” is obviously “A-D-D-vent”) and we sponsor education for some children in India. I know we can only make a small impact on child numeracy, but if we can make a little bit of an impact somewhere, we'll all be very happy.

Yeah, absolutely. And what a great thing to do. What a great legacy to leave, you know, to have an impact like that. I mean, because maths is such a valuable skill.

Well, you never would have had any difficulty convincing me of that. But yes, I agree. And if we can convince a few more that you're right, then I'll be delighted.

Fantastic. Richard. Thanks for taking a bit of time out to tell us your story. And come back in a year or two and let us know how you're getting on with all those things because it looks like it's going to be a really interesting story.

I'd love to. Anytime, Paul.

Fantastic. See you soon. Cheers.

Thank you.