[distribot]

Is the couple days work thing really relevant? You could have a solid Airbnb clone in a couple months (I'd imagine) and it's worth thousands of times Wordle. I think it has to be customer base, IP, and developer team that they're really paying for.

[woah]

> You could have a solid Airbnb clone in a couple months (I'd imagine)

I've never worked there, but I imagine you are hilariously wrong. You couldn't even make static copies of the website and mobile apps on all platforms in a couple months. That's not even talking about the servers needed to serve a high volume CRUD app with built in messaging platform. There's also the fact that none of it would stay running without the active maintenance by the ops team and developers. Zooming out, the consumer facing stuff we are talking about probably makes up about 10% of their total codebase and the practices around it. Zooming further out, the business would grind to a halt without the operational practices and personnel keeping it running.

You might be able to make a clone of what Airbnb looked like a few months after it started in a few months.

[bbulkow]

While building all of airbnb is hard, let's look at a clone like outdoorsy, which is airbnb for rv's. It was very functional a year ago, and i doubt if it took a decent team more than a few months. The lore of how to build for scale is now far more widely known, and anyone doing dd on a codebase can figure out if scaling a monolith will require a full scorched earth or whether its has nice modularity allowing it to scale in flight, and/or get to fairly high scale with light application of autoscale shards and now commonplace cloud methodology.

The issue is brand and usability, and wordle has it. The method for social sharing is genius, i think. A great example of privacy by design (sharing is explicit and through an image not a share button going who knows where).

[distribot]

It would take months to make static copies of the website and mobile apps? There are youtube videos where a single guy does it in 40 minutes.

The AWS bill and ops are definitely relevant but didn't seem to be in the spirit of the original point about it taking X days to make. I didn't take "make" to include the effort of staffing up customer service people and whatnot. Maybe I should've but I dont think that's even what the person I responded to meant.

[woah]

Web, Android, and iOS? Fully internationalized? Every single screen, including hundreds of variations that only apply to specific weird scenarios that you only see once you're managing hundreds of thousands of stays a day? Special promotions? Screens that only appear in specific markets? All of the little frontend interactions?

I'm guessing you saw a guy bang together one or two simple screens in english and skip a bunch of details

[aardvarkr]

Akshually, you’re just a kill joy who thinks they’re always right all the time. Great job being literally correct but missing the point by a mile.

[tshaddox]

> There are youtube videos where a single guy does it in 40 minutes.

I don't believe this, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!

[throwaway81523]

" That's not even talking about the servers needed to serve a high volume CRUD app with built in messaging platform. "

Nah, people use way too much bloatware in that stuff. OKCupid had a big advantage over its competitors back in the day because they wrote fast code that saved them a ton of bucks on servers. Some of it is FOSS now: see okws.org . These days I'd consider seastar.io as an alternative.

[sequoia]

There's not much network effect for wordle. If you make another one tomorrow I can just as easily play it there. To be honest buying his game was as much a courtesy from the times as anything, if they were unscrupulous and didn't fear brand hit, they could simply copy it.

[zamadatix]

They definitely bought it for the current userbase not the actual content, the NY Times article opens straight into how they are hoping to switch it to a subscription after the "initial" period.

Even if they only convert 2% of current players to 1 years worth of subscription that's 2 million of whatever "low millions" they put into it without having to grow their own userbase from scratch while competing with the original free one everyone is already using today.

[luplex]

It might be a defensive acquisition. They don't want free word games to be out there. They want a monopoly on word games.

[doopy1]

> There's not much network effect for wordle.

The game is viral because of the way people share their results on social media. This is a huge network effect.

[allturtles]

I don't think so. You could make a Wordle clone with exactly the same ability to share results, and there would be no reason to use the original Wordle over Wordle 2. This is not true of say, Facebook - the fact that all your friends are already on Facebook makes it more valuable than Facebook 2.

[doopy1]

It's like a magic trick, you can only do it once, the network effect is cultural.

[manquer]

Airbnb is not about the app, it is the database of available rooms with reviews and photos and all the details, also the brand value that generates page views to make those bookings happen.

The app is very very small part of Uber or AirBnb business

[tasha0663]

You could have a better Twitter even faster. So I suspect you're right.

Isn't the dev team one guy? I don't think they are hiring him.

[distribot]

I think it's normal to acquihire for stuff like this. But I'm not confident. Maybe it's just a condition of sale that he spend a week talking to the NYT games team about the design and codebase.

[gowld]

There is no Wordle IP except the name and the color scheme.

Developer time would cost $10K.

Customer base... who like wordle because it's a simple, clean, free, not NYT.

[prawn]

They could work around that last point pretty easily. Add NYT logo top left, add NYT puzzles promo and sub up-sell on the stats page after the daily play. That could be done in a way that wasn't overbearing.