About Puzz.com, LLC

By Bill Bultas, Founder, Owner and President of Puzz.com, LLC

First, WHAT is Puzz.com? When I first started my small online company in 1998, which was a site that featured hundreds of brain teasing PUZZLES I had written, Puzzles.com was taken, along with some other names. But very short, sweet, PUZZ.COM was available. I registered it, licensed the company under that name where I was living at the time in St. Louis City, and the rest is history. In 2005 we "upgraded" and became Puzz.com, LLC in Missouri, and in 2022 formed Puzz.com, LLC in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, where my wife and I had moved the year before.

Today Puzz.com, LLC is 8 employees, including myself, along with some independent folks who have written or edited the brain teasers, trivia, opinion polls (surveys) for our site, and who have developed and designed our pages. We operate several different DBAs, all licensed in the state of Florida under Puzz.com, LLC, along with site themes such as Trivia Dragon, Survey Goddess, Surveys and Quizzes, Prize Ninja and more. But all of those different lists, themes and DBAs are really just Puzz.com, LLC, and all of them give you access to our same contests and content (see our How It Works page).

From the very beginning in 1998 I was giving out prizes for contests I ran through my email newsletter at the time. I didn't have much money (I think the tax return for our first year was for well less than $8,000 - barely enough to keep the lights on even then!), but I'd send $20 checks, puzzle (brain teaser) books, and even brain teaser Puzz.com t-shirts I had printed up as prizes. I did this off and on for years until sometime in 2004.

We ran a small ad network from late 1998 until 2004. And from 2004 and onward we became more involved with running advertising in our emails, building an IQ test site that was quite popular for some time, and even an online games and an RPG site that grew a small following, plus a few other projects with varying levels of success. But the advertising in the emails is what really paid our bills.

Melissa Bultas joined me in 2017 in helping to run the company, and the next year we hired our first non-family employee, Amy Perkins, who had known Melissa for many years. With Melissa and Amy taking over some of my responsibilities, I was finding time to focus on more projects.

In 2019, I got the idea of returning to our roots, sending our emails that contained advertising as usual, but also linking to daily quiz contests we ran in every message, and offering much better prizes, both gift cards AND larger Grand Prizes. And how about upping the ante: Having it so every time you answered one of the questions for a daily prize, it gave you a "double entry" and entered you toward an annual Grand Prize? And what if we offered all of these questions and prizes for FREE, all funded through the advertising in our emails and site, none of which people had to interact with to answer and win prizes if they didn't want to (see our How It Works page)?

And that's what we've done, sending people over 4,700 gift cards and over $300,000 in total prizes as of this writing in 2023. And very soon we will double our number of contests and prizes, going from 3 $50 gift cards given away daily to 6, and from 3 to 6 $5,000 Grand Prizes. At $300/day in gift cards, that's $9,000 each month going to folks such as yourself by Priority Mail, and $30,000 in annual Grand Prizes. This is starting to be real money! And where do we go from here? Let's find out! :-)

After Amy, Melissa's daughter Lynnlee Hunt joined us, and a few months later my good friend Moises Salazar; soon after, Erin Rivera came on board, then Dillon Jones, and finally Kayla Pilkinton. Our early trivia questions were mostly written by retired teacher and 4-time Jeopardy winner Lynn Laniewski, most of our brain teasers I acquired over the years from famous puzzle author Terry Stickels, most of which have been edited by gentleman scholar Tom Turpin. Tom has also provided significant feedback over the years regarding errors he's spotted and improvements he's suggested which we've often implemented. A gentelman scholar indeed! Lynnlee also wrote many of our opinion poll/survey questions and trivia questions.

Web design and development services have been provided by LA Web Development, since 2019, and we've been sending our emails using BigList, Inc. since 2002(!).

I started this small company when I was 25 years old, having left a job that wasn't for me, with next to no money, no car, no techincal training or skills, and just some puzzles I'd written and a dream of reaching millions of people each day and making them happy. I sincerely hope that we are fulfilling that goal, and we'll continue to make strides to do so. Enjoy our quizzes, and we hope you win (and then keep winning!) some of our prizes!