The Solo Developer Making Seven Figures From Free Browser Games

About this episode

Most studios have teams, funding, and a publisher behind them. Abe Train has a laptop and a handful of contractors. In this episode, Kalie Moore sits down with Abe, founder of Trainwreck Labs, to unpack how a former head of business intelligence at HelloFresh became one of the most successful independent developers in daily browser games. Abe quit his job on the last day of 2021 with about six months of runway, and a month later Wordle took over the internet. He built Globle, a daily geography guessing game, posted it to one Reddit community, and watched it climb to over a million players a day at its peak. They get into why that post worked when the identical one in a bigger subreddit got zero traction, why most Wordle clones vanished while Globle stuck, and why the best creator marketing he’s ever had came from people he never spoke to, including a Thai TikToker playing an English word game and a biology teacher who plays Metazooa on camera every day. The conversation also covers how Abe has built a catalog of daily educational games as the only full-time employee. He explains why a small, obsessive audience is more valuable than a big casual one, why players always ask for gam