Number
Chess.com: 200M monthly uniques and likely $100M+ in subscription revenue
Sam revises the hosts' earlier estimate upward: Chess.com gets roughly 200 million monthly uniques, 60 million registered users, and likely does at least $100 million in recurring subscription revenue, potentially worth a billion dollars.
$100M
Estimated annual recurring subscription revenue · USD/year
“So Chess.com gets around 200 million monthly uniques. They have 60 million registered users. Their, uh, traffic has grown significantly. If I had to guess, they do at least $100 million in recurring revenue, subscription revenue. Uh, potentially is worth a billion dollars. Super fascinating company.”
Fact
The 'New Zealand' business: profitable, cult-following, nobody competes with it
Shaan describes the 'New Zealand' type of business (a phrase coined by Andrew Wilkinson): an independent, simple, profitable product with a cult following that nobody bothers to compete with, using Chess.com as the example.
“It really fits the, what we call the New Zealand type of business that Andrew Wilkinson kind of coined that phrase, which is it's this independent thing. It has like a cult following. It's profitable, it's simple, nobody competes with it. It's like New Zealand. Nobody's going to war with chess.com.”
Steal thisLook for simple, profitable niche products with a devoted following that no competitor finds worth attacking.
Idea
Own the .com for games people Google: chess.com, sudoku.com, the next one
Shaan lays out the formula for these businesses: a game played by tens or hundreds of millions of people that isn't owned by a brand, paired with the generic top-level domain (sudoku.com loads an instant playable board feeding a mobile app).
“You need a game played by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people that is not owned by a brand. Chess works. Checkers also works. But the problem with checkers is it's so simple that it's not as like, there's not as much depth to it, therefore not as much of a kind of like money made and passion around the sport. Sudoku was the second one that came to mind. So I went to sudoku.com and sudoku.com, it's just like chess.com.”
Steal thisAcquire the generic .com for a beloved unowned game, make it instantly playable with no signup, and funnel traffic into a monetizable mobile app.
Framework
Build on substrates nobody owns: chess, religion
Shaan loves businesses built on high-affinity 'substrates' that no one owns the IP to, like chess (chess.com) or religion (the Pray app, 'Calm for Christianity'). You get a billion people who already know and love the brand, with full freedom to use it.
“So still dead simple business model around a classic game that nobody owns the IP to, right? It's not like saying Monopoly. Well, you can't do Monopoly. Somebody owns Monopoly. You know, I don't know who Hasbro or whoever owns Monopoly. You can do it with chess. And this is one of the reasons why we talked about religion as a really interesting, you know, fundamental or like base layer for any business because nobody owns religion, but it's a highly recognized brand with super high affinity.”
Steal thisBuild on a beloved public-domain substrate (chess, religion, classic games) so you get free brand affinity with zero IP risk.