⏳ Chess.com makes $77m/year — Time Billionaires #006

Hey Time Billionaire — Aadit here.

Today’s issue covers:

• How much money does Chess.com make?

• Don’t make this mistake in your 20s

• How to build products that people need

Now, let’s jump in ↓

How Much Money Does Chess.com Make?

Everyone knows Chess.com. It’s the largest chess website. Did you know it gets 135.50M website visits per month. That’s huge (#238 most visited sites in the world).

Let’s see what a business like chess.com makes per year.

Firstly — the basics:

1. Employees: 200+

2. Users: 77 million +

3. Available in: 57 languages (this is smart because although the game is language-less, interaction with the website becomes easier in your language.

Rough assumptions:

1. 2% conversion rate. This is a conservative estimate. 2 out of every 100 people become a paying user (of the pro plans). 99% of the people enjoy the game for free.

2. Average spend of paying user of chess.com = $50/year

77,000,000 users * 2% conversion rate * $50/year = $77,000,000/year

That’s huge. In terms of revenue per employee that is:

$385,000/employee.

That’s similar to the revenue per employee statistic of Amazon ($392,034/employee).

Pretty cool business in my opinion!

Don't Make This Mistake In Your 20s

I’m 20. I’m in the stage where I’m learning a ton, meeting a lot of people, building this newsletter, providing social media consulting, and probably making a lot of mistakes on the way.

But I’m always looking to make the smaller mistakes to learn from and avoid the huge ones.

This is one mistake I’d love to avoid: reading, consuming, learning but not doing anything.

I see a lot of people ask everyone for entrepreneurship advice, or for book recommendations. What’s the use if you don’t do anything about it?

My friend Romeen explains this well (and no he’s not my brother):

Romeen Sheth @RomeenSheth

I talked to a super smart 20 year old this week. All the potential in the world, but had a major major flaw in his thinking. This flaw is becoming the most common mistake I am seeing young people make early in their career. Let's break it down:

Build Products That People Need

What products do you need?

Look at some of the biggest social media products: Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp.

We need to be connected with our family and friends. That’s a core motivation.

Think about some other core human motivations:

1. Motivation to look good (we want to be socially accepted)

2. Motivation to have power (we want things to work our way)

3. Motivation to provide for family (we want to take care of our loved ones)

Kunal Shah (Founder of Cred and Philosopher) shares multiple other core motivations in the podcast with Shane Parrish.

Here are some of my favorite moments in the podcast:

Some people are paid hourly. Others monthly. Either way, it’s worth calculating how much an hour of your work is worth.

Unless you know your salary and hourly basis, you will never really know what the value of time is.

Most people I see are never willing to risk their reputation. For anything. But Kunal says that you can’t develop wealth without risking reputation. To build wealth, you need to take risks (hence risk reputation because you won’t always be successful).

You cannot develop substance, networks, wealth, experience, unless you’re constantly willing to risk your reputation.

Listen to the entire podcast here:

That’s it for this week. I enjoyed writing this.

See you next Tuesday — Aadit

PS. Here are a couple things you'll love:

My Best threads

Favorite Twitter tools

Audience-building course for founders