Solitaire Game App Earns $10,000/Month

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Have you ever played Solitaire on a computer or your phone? It is a pretty classic game, also known as Patience in the UK, some other parts of the world, and no one owns the rights to it. It was invented long ago. Nobody knows exactly when and by home. So anyone can make and sell their own version of it, which is exactly what you're gonna hear about today.

In this story, after a failed attempt at growing a startup, this developer revisits an old Solitaire game he made as a side project. Now, this game now brings in $10,000 a month in largely passive income. Pretty cool, right? And to make this happen, he had to make a few changes to how the app functioned. He actually went from app to website.

So I'll tell you exactly what those changes were, as well as his clearly successful strategy of how to identify profitable apps in the first place. So buckle up, or should I say, deal me in. [Music]

If we go back about 10 years, some of us were reading the Hunger Games, some people were doing the Harlem Shake, Call Me Maybe was playing on the radio, and Holger Sinbeck was really getting into Bingo. Well, I should be more specific. Holger wasn't interested in playing Bingo, exactly, but was more fascinated by how it could be used to make money.

While reading Hacker News, he came across a man named Robert McKenzie's, who had a website where people could create their own Bingo card games. Not only that, but Robert was actually making real money from it. It wasn't a ton of money, but the income that came in was largely passive. Holger wanted to make an app or website of some sort himself, and he started to analyze several gaming apps. He used a popular analytic service called App Annie.

And with that service, he could see how many downloads the apps had, as well as their ratings and estimated income. All that research led him to notice something strange. There were a bunch of apps that were getting a lot of downloads and were profitable, but those apps also had really bad reviews. If he could make a better version of one of those apps, he thought, he'd get even more downloads and make even more money than they were. Holger ended up making a solitaire app, which he called Freestyle.

He knew he could make a better version of the game that was currently out there, plus it just seemed like fun. It took him about two weeks of work to get the first version to launch, and that was a moderate success. People were downloading it. A few of them were even willing to make some of the in-app purchases he offered. He even made two other versions, Klondike and Spider solitaire.

For a few years, these three apps were garnering about $1,000 to $1,500 each month. During that time, Holger made a career move that fully consumed his life. He left his hometown of Copenhagen for the bright lights and promising opportunities of New York City. And his attention to solitaire apps fell to the wayside. However, they still made the same amount of money every month, which was nice.

His day job was a business venture with a friend to sell streetwear and sneakers. Holger primarily worked as a developer, and all of his time was taken up by creating and maintaining the website and app. Unfortunately, after three years, the pair had no choice but to give up on their company. There was just too much competition, so they left the experience feeling burned out and exhausted. To console himself, Holger began thinking back to his old solitaire game.

While he liked the app he'd made before, he knew it needed some improvements. He began recreating it from the ground up, this time as a website. Then he began working on those improvements. He combed through customer reviews and really paid attention to what people were suggesting. When he began to implement ads on the website, his $1,500 in monthly revenue soon jumped to $3,000.

Positive change there. And since then, Holger has also added video ads. He increased the size of the ads and how frequently they change, trying to find the right ratio of as many ads as possible without being too annoying. And besides that, Holger says he generally tries to keep making improvements on the site to get people to stick around longer or download the desktop app. He also continued to improve his SEO, which has ended up being a trump card.

All this work brought in a lot more people and in turn, a lot more money to the site. Now in the past few years, with introducing those ads and continuing to optimize, the website slowly began to rank for different keywords related to solitaire, which a lot of people search for. And now the website makes more than $10,000 every single month. Holger is using that money to play his cards well. He's going back to school to study mechanical engineering and even starting a new side hustle.

This one's totally different. For this one, he's focusing on making jewelry boxes with precision cuts from one solid piece of European oak. He doesn't plan on stopping his solitaire game anytime soon. And he also likes the way it is right now, something to do on the side, bringing in real money every month with no pressure to scale. [Music]

If you'd like to check out this solitaire website, which as you'll see is very simple.

It does exactly what it's supposed to do and nothing more, but also makes a lot of money for its creator. Just go to online-solitaire.com, online-solitaire.com. Of course, I'm going to link it up in the show notes page. In addition to the other resources I mentioned, that website you can go to to compare apps, perhaps find something of your own that has a lot of downloads, but not great reviews, in which case there might be an opportunity. Or of course, this might just get you thinking about something else of your own.

And that's the whole point. To get you thinking and get you taking action, as I say, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Those show notes for today, sidehustleschool.com/17671767. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I make this program every single day, seven days a week.

I hope you will subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

- From the Onward Project.