OMG Pop

OMG Pop started with a simple idea from developer Charles Foreman: what if the internet could connect people to play games together, just like throwing a football in the garage? The company built a Flash-based gaming website with millions of players, but faced an existential problem. When Farmville launched with 100 million players, suddenly having "millions of people" felt inadequate. The board meetings turned grim—investors weren't interested in funding "good but not great" businesses. Dan Porter recalls: "Why do we want to invest in something that is good, but not great?" With four to five months of runway remaining and cutting snacks adding only one extra day, the company faced a choice: wind down gracefully or make one last bet.

With the rest of the company working on a complex fighting game, Porter decided to try his hand at game design—despite not being a game designer. He had a simple drawing and guessing game called "Drama" (later renamed "Draw Something") that felt fun on the subway commute home. Every Friday, he'd play-test his latest iteration and look for one small tweak to improve it. "I'd recognize every Friday when I played it on the subway home, like, wow, this is really fun and I get it," Porter recalls. The genius wasn't in complexity—it was in one key feature: showing the other player a playback of the drawing process, complete with erasing and mistakes. This made the experience feel like playing with a real person on the other side. Porter also solved a fundamental problem with competitive games: how do you make a game where nobody loses? He found the answer watching his kids play catch: streaks. In Draw Something, if you kept going back and forth successfully, you were both winners collaborating together.

When Draw Something launched, they promoted it to their existing audience of a couple million people. Day one brought 30-40,000 downloads from free in-game coins they offered, but it then "blipped up a little bit and then kind of crashed down." A week later, the backend developer discovered the game had critical bugs—calls weren't going through. He and another developer rewrote the entire backend over the weekend. Porter called a famous seed investor and asked for one favor: fast-tracking the app store approval. The investor agreed but with terms: "A, you never get to ask me another favor. B, one day in 12 years when you're on Sam and Sean's podcast, you can't use my name." The updated version went live, and suddenly Draw Something "just like blows up. It just like goes through the roof."

The game's viral growth was staggering: "In the first nine days, we got to a million downloads. And then in the first 50 days, we got to 50 million downloads." Within months, it became the number one game in every country for six months straight, ultimately reaching 250 million downloads. Daily active users hit at least 25 million. The viral engine ran on word-of-mouth, particularly in tight-knit communities like liberal arts colleges and countries like Sweden. Counterintuitively, Porter didn't implement standard gaming features like XP or experience points, and he didn't add built-in sharing—yet the game spread everywhere because it was so simple and fun that people shared screenshots naturally. Celebrity adoption happened organically. Ryan Seacrest discovered it when his studio assistants and bookers wouldn't stop playing. Celebrities tweeted about it unprompted. The game became cultural phenomenon.

One design choice solved a real problem: Porter refused to implement features to block offensive content like explicit drawings. Instead, he made the game require playing only with friends—a structural fix that was more elegant than algorithmic censorship. As he notes, "The solution for the problem is actually something that's like bigger in a way."

Six weeks after launch, Zynga acquired Draw Something for $200 million—one of the fastest startup-to-exit timelines ever. The deal closed in just nine days, with two law firms working around the clock. Porter had negotiated hard: when buyers came in at $120-150 million, he pushed back, telling the board the game was worth $250 million. He was right. Porter walked away from the deal and successfully leveraged the competition among buyers (EA, Zynga, and others were all hemorrhaging users to the game) to dramatically increase the valuation. Beyond the financial windfall, Porter focused on ensuring his team benefited. He used discretionary cash to rehire employees he'd laid off before the acquisition, guaranteeing their options would vest. He gave hundreds of thousands in bonuses to help employees pay off college loans and distributed $100,000 worth of iPads to the entire team. "This is just a chance to do like all this insanely non-capitalist, but like super cool shit to change people's lives," he reflects. The experience taught Porter that authentic product-building—making games people genuinely enjoy rather than chasing metrics—could succeed spectacularly, and that success gave him the power to distribute that success generously to the people who built it.