about

Puzzel.org was kickstarted by me, Daan Weustenraad, between 2016 and 2017. I wanted to learn how to build web applications and was having fun creating cryptic descriptions as you normally see in the newspaper cryptic crossword puzzles.

I wanted to combine the two to create a web application that could generate an interactive crossword puzzle grid, which was solvable online and easy to use (by my family, since these were the only users at the time)

And so looking for a domain name to host this application, I found 'Puzzel.org', the Dutch word for 'puzzle'. Bingo! I would have never have guessed what was about to come..

While building all sorts of extra games and puzzles as a hobby to challenge my programming skills and develop more features for the couple 100 users on the platform, crisis hit. It was COVID-19 time.

Virtual education became a necessity very quickly and many teachers did not know exactly how to keep their lessons fun and interactive from a distance for students and themselves.

Crisis brings the most creative side out in people and so the teachers discovered that creating puzzle-type exercises via crossword puzzles and word searches, worked very well for their students and so the Puzzel-boom began.

I was and am not a business-man at all, so I just wanted a good web application that only did one thing right: serve the teachers and students to have an easy time creating and doing online puzzle exercises.

I got a lot of questions and requests during the pandemic and responded to all of them. Every feature request had something valuable and relevant and so I treated them very seriously. I had quit my job to work on Puzzel.org fulltime and so had the time and 'authority' to process each request instantly (and still do!).

And so I could surprise friendly teachers with a kind return, often on the same day or in the same week, notifying them that their requested feature has already been integrated. This mechanic would be the true rise of Puzzel.org. Putting teachers first, not any extra financial gain.

The pandemic paralysed most of the other activities and so I could work on Puzzel.org as often as I wanted. (Except for the fact that our daughter was born in June 2020, creating some other parental puzzles :-))

Thousands and thousands of teachers were now on board and therefore the application reached some of its limits during peak times when classes in the US started. The Puzzel.org application had to better and so I reinvented the original structure and created a very stable, reliable infrastructure to host the 100k+ students solving all of the puzzles, and the 4000 puzzles that were being created each day.

For the past couple of years and the years to come, a nice portion of the profits that Puzzel.org has created due to the friendly low-priced subscription model (and without any advertisements!), will always go to charity (minimum of 10%).

The charity donations vary from planting trees to combat climate change and preserve nature at its best (spot the daughter, (5000+ trees have been planted in total currently via TreesForAll) to supporting lower incomes in society with extra food ('Voedselbank' in Dutch).

Puzzel.org and I will invest in the future as much as possible, by providing awesome easy-to-use interactive activity generators for educational purposes, and will always listen to you, the teacher, to make the platform the best it can be.

Puzzel.org kept growing and growing and so it was again time to take a step back. If I wanted to support the broad range of features and keep the platform reliable and user-friendly, I had to rebuild.

Driven by desire to deep-dive into programming I picked up a new framework and built the new platform from the ground up, making it faster than ever.

The design was made very clean, and complex pages were split up into theme-specific tabs to make it easier to find and change what you need.

The year is 2025 and we will see what the future will bring!

I love Puzzel.org and I love working with you, the teacher (and kind others as well of course!). Any questions, remarks or possible issues that you come across during the usage of the platform, feel free to let me know.

Contact me (Daan) via: daan@puzzel.org