When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. An indie dev story.

Tuesday, March 5th, 2024. Day 1 of our honeymoon.

My wife and I are set up at the beach, ready for some chill vibes and sunshine. As I relax into my chair and open my phone to start a podcast, a message from a friend catches my eye.

“Check out the NYT’s latest game — it’s a WordBox twin!”

My heart skips a beat.

I open the link, and yep, there it is — a word search without any clues where you need to fill the entire board. Almost exactly like WordBox.

GAH!

At first, I’m defeated. Here I am, grinding away at WordBox for years, doing what I can to nab a few more downloads each day, and bam, NYT drops a clone of my game to its millions of users.

I’m frustrated.

(Although, I admit its hard to remain frustrated looking out at the beautiful blue waters of the Bahamas.)

As the frustration settles, I’m now curious. Questions start popping into my head.

Why would NYT make a word search?

What does this say about WordBox?

How will this affect the mobile word search industry?

One could interpret this as validation that a massively successful company like NYT believes in the profitability of word searches. This is a good sign.

Then my mind jumps to this:

How can I capitalize on this situation?

Before diving into my thoughts, let’s quickly touch on App Store Optimization (ASO). Basically, developers tweak their app’s metadata — think title, subtitle, keywords, screenshots — to boost its visibility in the App Store. So, for example, when someone types “word search”, my goal is to have WordBox be the first result.

In the ASO game, it’s all about finding those goldmine keywords — tons of searches, but hardly any apps filling the gap. High “popularity” and low “competitiveness.” High demand, low supply. Developers use ASO tools to spot these under-served keywords and then create apps to cash in on the demand.

Consider Wordle and Connections, NYT’s latest hits, and most popular games. Searching them on the App Store doesn’t lead you to the NYT Games app, but instead to a bunch of clones riding the ASO wave to snatch top spots and rake in downloads.

This same phenomenon would certainly happen for Strands.

That’s when I opened up Appfigures and researched the following keywords:

• strands
• strand
• nyt strands
• nyt strand
• strands nyt
• strand nyt

Just 48 hours after the Strands launch, those keywords started trending with barely any competition. Now, as we enter week 3, here is where they stand:

For reference, let’s look at “wordle,” a keyword that’s been established for many months:

NOTE: Popularity and competitiveness are not linear, but actually closer to exponential (i.e., a competitiveness of 10 is not 2x higher than a competitiveness of 5; instead, it is likely closer to 5x).

The keyword “wordle” is ultra competitive, making it tough to rank. “Strands,” however, has way less competition but is still popular. Plus, “nyt strands” and “strands nyt” offer an even better mix of low competition and high popularity.

So, I tweaked the ASO to align WordBox with those keywords and voila, within 24 hours, we were in the number 1 position.

In the first week alone, WordBox’s downloads skyrocketed by 15x thanks to this strategy. I’m betting these keywords will get even hotter and more competitive as Strands gains traction and more people search the App Store. My plan? Keep riding this wave all the way to indie dev glory.

Update March 27: Downloads have now reached a 50x increase!