BRAVE. SHIFT. RISKY. ADAPT. MAKER. PIVOT.
Each five-letter word could fill your Wordle grid, but they all describe GW alum Savannah DeLullo’s recent career shift to become a full-time content creator on TikTok, solving the daily Wordle — the online word guessing game where players have six tries to reveal the randomly selected five-letter word.
Defying GW’s typical postgrad expectations of nine-to-fives or corporate America, DeLullo recently quit her research assistant job in economics to become a professional Wordle player.
During her three years at GW, DeLullo said she packed her schedule as a full-time student by getting involved in organizations on campus like GW Program Board and GW Women in Economics. After earning her degree in economics with a minor in business in the spring of 2021, DeLullo landed an economics research position.
But after settling into her new job, DeLullo said she found the transition to the corporate world difficult. Compared to her hectic schedule as a student doing everything from studying for exams to event planning, she had more free time in her postgrad life than she knew what to do with.
“Being a full-time student, I was involved in so many different things,” DeLullo said. “I would be working and having meetings and doing stuff all day along with my classes. It was very different to go from being so busy with that from just having the nine-to-five job.”
DeLullo said she turned to making videos on social media as a hobby in January 2022 and spent time on TikTok looking for inspiration on what type of content to post. She said she started by posting simple screen recordings of her solving the Wordle.
“There was someone I had followed on TikTok for a while who posted videos of him playing the New York Times Mini Crossword every day, and I always liked those because I would play the Mini Crossword and then see how he did,” DeLullo said.
When looking for content to post, she said she wanted to do something different that no one else on the app had done yet. With Wordle gaining popularity, she took the opportunity to start playing the game and documenting it through her TikTok page.
“I searched TikTok and couldn’t find anyone doing Wordle videos, so I was like, ‘Okay I guess I can do that,’” she said.
Since then, DeLullo has racked up 1.8 million followers on her TikTok account, dailyxsav, posting split-screen videos of her solving the daily Wordle while talking about the happenings in her life, like getting her driver’s license or her love of Taylor Swift. Rather than sticking to a specific five-letter word to start with, like audio or crane, DeLullo picks a word that can be applied to whatever is on her mind that day.
“I start with a different word every day, so I want to make it a fun word or something that relates to what I’m doing,” DeLullo said. “Wordle videos can kind of be a template for me to talk about other things or do other things, so if I was starting with one word every day I probably couldn’t do that as much.”
In a recent TikTok, she said a lizard crawling across her security camera inspired her to use “GECKO” as her starting word.
As her TikTok career began to take off, DeLullo found herself busier than ever. She said that each day, after working eight hours in white cubicles and inputting figures into spreadsheets, she would dedicate hours to making content for social media, leaving little to no downtime for herself.
“I kind of realized that I needed to make some more time for myself, not only to just kind of be a person and be able to do normal things, but also if I wanted to take it to the next level with social media, I didn’t feel like I had the time or the bandwidth to be able to put all of my energy and effort into that,” DeLullo said.
As she reached the two-year mark at her job and her lease in D.C. was coming to an end, she was unsure if she could commit to staying in the city for her work. It wasn’t long before she decided to leave her position in August to focus on cracking the five-letter puzzles.
“The safer route would have been just to continue on with my job and keep doing that,” DeLullo said. “But I decided to take that leap to kind of be able to do more things and kind of try new content.”
Since leaving her corporate job to become a full-time content creator, DeLullo has been able to grow her page through collaborations with celebrities, like the Jonas Brothers and Ed Sheeran. In these collaborations, she asked each of the celebrities for a starting Wordle guess and used her platform to promote the artists’ albums and tours.
“A five-letter word to start Wordle with? Jonas,” Joe Jonas told DeLullo after she asked him to help solve the puzzle that day.
She has also been given opportunities to work with brands and even write some of the daily Wordle review columns for the New York Times, which owns the game.
She said other TikTokers have since begun posting similar content, contributing to a community of Wordle creators. DeLullo competes with other Wordle creators, like Michael DiCostanzo and Kenny Haller, to see who can solve the Wordle in fewer guesses.
As DeLullo continues on with her career as a full-time professional Wordle player, she plans to experiment with new types of content through more livestream videos and potentially expand to YouTube in the future.
“I definitely will keep making Wordle videos at least for as long as people will want to watch them, but I have been also trying to do some other types of content,” DeLullo said. “Now that I have all day to do it, I think it’s good that I am able to branch out more and try other things besides just Wordle-related stuff.”
