How PlayJoy is built and run by a small team: what we automated, what we deliberately did not, and what we learned shipping daily.
PlayJoy is built by a very small team in our spare time. That constraint is not a marketing story; it dictates almost every technical decision we make.
Automate anything that repeats
Puzzle generation, scoring, verification and the daily rotation are all code. Nothing in the daily loop needs a human. The only things we write by hand are the guides you are reading now, and those are written once.
Do not build what you can borrow
Payments are Stripe Checkout, not a bespoke billing system. Analytics is a handful of counters, not a data platform. Every hour spent re-inventing infrastructure is an hour not spent on the puzzle itself.
Ship the smallest honest version
Our first version had two games and no profile. It was still worth playing, and it taught us what players actually did — which turned out to be replaying the arcade games far more than we expected. The unlimited arcade exists because of that.