Six weeks ago I had never written a line of code in my life.

Today Proximath has 61 registered users, players in 15+ countries, 53% day-two retention, and three daily word challenges. Here's exactly how it happened and what I learned.

I play Wordle every day. I love it. But I always felt frustrated by one thing — when a tile goes yellow or grey, it doesn't tell you very much. You know the letter is wrong or misplaced, but you don't know HOW wrong.

I wanted a game where every wrong guess still teaches you something precise.

The idea: every letter in the alphabet has a number. A=1, B=2,
all the way to Z=26. When you guess a letter, the tile tells you
exactly how many steps away you are — and which direction to go.

🟥 Red = 11+ steps away
🟧 Orange = 6-10 steps
🟨 Yellow = 2-5 steps
🟦 Blue = 1 step away
🟩 Green = exact match

▲ means go higher in the alphabet. ▼ means go lower.

Every guess gives you actionable information. You're never just guessing blind.

The first version — a working daily word game — took one evening.

In the two weeks since launch I've shipped:

• Hard Mode (6 letters, blue tiles give no direction)
• Evening Mode (7 letters, no arrows on any tile)
• Monthly leaderboard with a £10 Amazon prize
• Streak tracking and daily email reminders

All of it built through conversation with an AI. No prior coding knowledge required. The retention number is the one I'm most proud of. More than half the people who play once come back the next day.

What surprised me most:

How fast you can ship. I went from idea to live product in one evening. Features that would have taken a developer weeks took me hours.

How much there is beyond the game. The game itself was the easy part. Email reminders, GDPR compliance, trademark filing, Google Ads, Meta campaigns, SEO, structured data — building a product is 20% code and 80% everything else.

Retention beats acquisition. Early on I was obsessed with visitor numbers. Now I watch the returning players SQL query every morning. 100 returning players today is more exciting to me than 350 daily visitors.

Total monthly cost to run: under £30.

If you want to see what I built — or just fancy a daily word game that gives you better clues than Wordle:

👉 proximath.com

Morning word resets at midnight UK. Midday at noon. Evening
at 6pm (registered players).

Would love any feedback from the dev.to community — especially
from anyone who has built something similar with AI tools.
What worked for you? What didn't?