holgersindbaek

Joined 15 years ago

Karma

472

Submissions

181

Member since

Oct 3

I’m a designer and developer from Denmark and the creator of https://online-solitaire.com/, a website that lets people play Freecell, Klondike Solitaire and Spider Solitaire online for free.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. Optimizing the ads are on my todo-list.

Comment · 3 years ago

I improved the game and functionality over time. The game has always been above the fold, but the content was greatly revise this past year. I've been doing a lot of optimizations on the game, but nothing big. After all, it's limited how much innovation can be done a game like that .

Comment · 3 years ago

I started a solitaire website 5+ years ago. When Covid hit, I ended up finally putting ads on it. Since then it's been growing steadily and about half a year back I made it my full-time gig.

You can check out the game here: https://online-solitaire.com/.

I wrote a post about my journey on Indie Hackers if someone is curious about it: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....

Comment · 3 years ago

I'd loved to have implemented this for my chrismas themed solitaire: https://online-solitaire.com/?theme=christmas.

Good job!

Comment · 3 years ago

Thanks . Shout-out to Greensock for making an awesome animation library. I've recently used their FLIP plugin (https://greensock.com/docs/v3/Plugins/Flip/) to make a version of 2048: https://2048-online.io/.

Comment · 3 years ago

I've created an online solitaire platform (https://online-solitaire.com/) that's earning me $10k/m now. It started as a side-project 5 years ago, but I've recently gone full time on it.

It actually started as a Mac app 10 years ago and I choose to create a solitaire game because I had made a string of side-project that I didn't earn any money on, so I wanted to see if I could find a project that would actually generate some side-income.

I did it by scraping the Mac App Store so I could find apps that had a lot of downloads and bad reviews. I figured that if an app had a lot of downloads, but got bad reviews then I could create something better and there would be an audience for it. The app ended up making enough money that I've kept it as a side-hustle for all these years. I've written about how I picked the app here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-a-simple-solita....

Comment · 4 years ago

I'm a bit late to the game on this thread, but here goes.

For the longest time I had a solitaire app for Mac that I ran as a side-hustle. A couple of years ago I programmed solitaire from scratch for the web. Fast-forward a few years and the site starts to generate some actual traffic. I then decide to put ads on it even though I thought you couldn't really earn money on ads anymore. It didn't generate a lot of money, but enough that I wanted to keep working on the site.

Today the site is earning $10.000/month from ads. It wasn't until the site started to earn $5.000/month or so that I actually started to talk to people about it.

You can try out the site here if you want: https://online-solitaire.com/.

Comment · 4 years ago

Love it. My favorite bookmark manager.

Comment · 4 years ago

How did you market your app to the point that it has 1m+ downloads?

Comment · 4 years ago

Congrats with the side income .

I've kind of thought about the moral of it myself. I ended up integrating Stripe to let people remove the ads. For a blog that might not make sense, but for a solitaire website where some people play an hour or two a day, it makes sense. I think the lowest pricing I had was a one-time fee of $5 and basically no-one uses it. I'm super surpriced how few people use it. But if you won't pay for playing, you're gonna get ads . And from what I can see, people are fine with this arrangement.

Comment · 4 years ago

Damn man. Sounds nice . What website was it?

Comment · 4 years ago

I can't remember the specifics, but about 4 million games are played on the site each month.

Comment · 4 years ago

It's intentional. The first 5 games are ad-free. Most of the ad-revenue are from people who stick, so I kind of try to give people the best experience the first 5 games.

Comment · 4 years ago

Something like that .

Comment · 4 years ago

I switched from Adsense to Freestar and have been very happy with them. I think you'll have to have a certain amount of volume to get signed with them, but it's difinitely another ballgame than Google Adsense.