I'm a solo developer and I've been building The Ball Grid in my spare time. It's a free daily Premier League football/soccer trivia game where you fill a 3x3 grid naming players who satisfy two intersecting stat-based criteria. Think Immaculate Grid but stat-based and rotating rather than static club/nationality questions.

A few weeks ago I posted here and in a handful of football subreddits looking for testers and feedback. That was my first real exposure to actual users rather than just me clicking around my own site. Here's the honest picture from what followed.  
The headline numbers: 373 monthly active users, 31 DAU today, 461 total sessions over 3 months. Google is my biggest traffic source by a distance. Game completion rate is actually decent at 28% of grids fully completed which surprised me. Average score 300.

The retention though. D1 is 0%. D7 is 1.8%. Nobody is coming back. Someone in a previous thread made the point that retention mechanics like email reminders and streaks rarely fix a product people weren't excited to revisit in the first place. That stuck with me. I don't actually know if people had fun. I built a feedback button that sends me an email and not one person has used it. So before I build anything I really need to understand what people actually thought of it and whether there was anything that made them want to come back.

The most interesting thing the Reddit testing surfaced was that the scoring system was silently broken in three separate ways at once while looking completely fine from the outside. The rarity script had never actually run on the production server. The label mapping between frontend and backend was mismatched so validation was failing quietly on every pick. The tier thresholds were wrong so almost everyone got the lowest possible rating regardless of what they picked. It looked like it was working. It wasn't.

I caught it because my own test scores didn't match what the code claimed was happening. Lesson learned: deployed does not mean working. Test with real eyes.

If you've played a daily game and kept coming back I'd genuinely love to know what made you return. And happy to get roasted on anything else.

theballgrid.com and the stack is Flask, SQLite, AWS EC2 if anyone's curious.

I spent 3 months building a daily football trivia game and just got my first real users. Here's what the data actually looks like.