How I grew a simple solitaire game to $10k MRR

I'm the founder of Online Solitaire, a website where 1m+ people play 4m+ games of Klondike Solitaire, FreeCell and Spider Solitaire each month. I developed the first version of my solitaire game more than ten years ago as an app for the Mac App Store and earned around $30 on the day of release. Since then, I've made my app into a website and have recently reached a whopping $10.000 MRR.

I've always run my solitaire website/app as a side project and have had the goal of making a side income from the start, though I never expected to reach $10.000 MRR. In this post, I'll go through how I started and got to where I am today.

I hope that my experience will help you build a successful side-project that might even turn into a viable business.

Let's dive right in!

Go for tried-and-true rather than new and sexy

I'm a 33-year-old designer-turned-developer, and throughout my career, I've done a lot of different projects, with most of them being outright failures, some of them being somewhat successful, and only a few being really successful.

I've made a slew of iOS apps, a jigsaw puzzle site based on Unsplash photos, and I've even co-founded a venture-backed startup with an American friend. Recently, I've ventured into making a physical product, a jewelry box made from solid oak, which is a whole blog post onto itself. Despite all of those efforts, the solitaire game that I've run on the side throughout most of my career has proven to be the most successful.

I attribute much of the success of my solitaire game to the fact that I chose to build an "unsexy" app that I felt pretty sure had a market rather than a "sexy" app where the market wasn't as clearly defined. The first solitaire app I built was for the Mac App Store. Ten years ago, and still, today to some extent, the competition on the Mac App Store wasn't as fierce as was on the iOS App Store. I decided that I wanted to try and build an app that could generate some side income for me, which was kind of the main criteria for this little venture.

I didn't know what I wanted to build, but I knew that there had to be a market for it already, and that market would have to be willing to pay for what I made. Given those criteria, I knew that I probably had to look for Mac App Store apps with a big userbase, low ratings and in-app purchases.

I went about finding those types of apps in a very methodical manner. I created a script that would scrape App Annie, which was the biggest app store analytics service at the time, and then created a simple algorithm that would rank the apps based on earnings, downloads and ratings. The earnings I had to estimate, but I already had a calculator and a 2048 game in the app store, so I could make a guestimate on the basis of what they earned.

For reasons I can't remember, I focused on the games category. The result was a list of 16 potential games that I could program. I downloaded all the games to get an idea of how much they could be improved upon and how hard they would be to develop. I then made a manual color-based ranking of the games and decided on creating a solitaire game. Not because it was the easiest to make or made the most money, but it seemed to have the right combination of criteria. I'd be able to make it during weekends, I was pretty sure people would pay for it, and I felt confident that I would be able to make a better version. On top of that, there seemed to be several different versions of solitaire, which meant that I could re-use a lot of my code-base if I decided to make the other versions as well.

I designed and developed the apps in my spare time, and it took less than a month from when I decided to make it until it was released in the app store. If I remember correctly, the game earned $32 on its first day and hovered between $20 and $30 for a long time after. That might not seem like a lot, but I had made several apps that weren't making any money at that time, so a $25/day side-income felt like a great success!

Use every trick in the book to grow your userbase

I've never been a natural at marketing, so it was essential that the app I created would be able to grow without marketing. In the good old days of the Mac App Store, that meant tweaking titles, descriptions and keywords to make the app store rank you for the keywords with the most growth potential. Apple became smarter at some point, so those cowboy tricks stopped working. The same applies to Google. In general, I find that there aren't any tricks left one can use to rank better. So these days, all you can do is read up on how SEO/ASO works and go through the hard work it takes to rank well.

Most of my time these days is spent trying to rank better on Google. I recently updated all the written content on my site. My main focus was on making a much more thorough guide on how to play solitaire, optimizing the content for specific keywords, and implementing as many SERP features as possible.

Adding SERP features is a smart way to get boosted to the top of Google for certain search terms and to draw more attention to your site in search results. Going through the different SERP features and implementing whichever makes sense for your site is an easy win.

Moz's on-page ranker is a life-saver when it comes to keyword optimization. I use it every time I want to optimize my site for certain keywords. I find the keywords I want to try and rank for on Ahrefs, and then I use Moz to optimize my pages for those keywords. The on-page grader gives you all kinds of great suggestions on what you can improve, what you're missing and what you're doing wrong.

If you're writing a blog post, it might be better to stick to general guidelines, such as using your keywords once or twice in your title and a few times in your text. If you have a static page, such as a product's front page, it might pay dividends to hyper-optimize that page.

All of the above is called on-page SEO. The real difficulty often comes when doing off-page SEO, which basically means getting other sites to write about you and link to you. A solitaire website isn't very newsworthy, so it's been difficult to get people to write about it. My most successful off-page SEO method has been my solitaire embed generator. It lets people create a solitaire game with their own logo and colors that they can implement on their site. If you have any suggestions on how to people to write about and link to a solitaire site, please let me know!

Wrapping up

For most of the time I've had my solitaire game, the revenue that came from it has felt like an extra bonus, which means that I've never felt the pressure of relying on that income alone. The revenue has given me room to do a lot of different projects and grow my solitaire game slowly over time.

The best advice I can give is to try and make success happen when you still have room to fail. If you have a day job, then making $30 extra a day feels like a bonus and not a disappointing daily revenue.

Hit me up if you have any questions.

Best of luck!