Online solitaire game making $15K/month | Starter Story

In 2022, the founder of Online-Solitaire.com was making $1,500 a month. By the time of this episode, that figure had climbed to $15,000 a month. The business is a single-page website where people play the classic card game. It gets 441,000 visitors per month, and the average person who lands there stays for nearly 13 minutes. The founder, who works on the site as a side project, has never spent a dollar on advertising.

The traffic flywheel: direct visits and search volume

The most striking number in the episode is not the revenue but the search volume for the keyword "solitaire": 86 million searches per month globally. That is the entire addressable market for the game. The site captures a fraction of that traffic, but the growth pattern is self-reinforcing. Currently, 61% of the site's visitors arrive by typing the URL directly into their browser. Another 31% come from organic search. The direct traffic is the key: people who have played before remember the site name and come back. That repeat behavior builds a compounding base of users who do not need to be re-acquired through ads or social media.