Spider Solitaire Online - From Concept To Distribution

My name is Paul and I am now the CEO of a very successful social gaming website. I started this project at the beginning of the year and I want to share my journey with you so that anyone else that is thinking about getting into the industry can not only learn from my mistakes but also find out what really worked for me.

I had been trying to come up with a project for quite a while that involved gaming and one day I came across an article that was about Candy Crush. In this article it stated that Candy Crush was making around $633,000 a day and the success was down to it being so viral on the social network we all know and love Facebook. After reading this I knew that the road to monetising games of the future would be by using the power of social networks.

For the last 10 years or so I have been a web developer and I can program in various programming languages but I had never created a game or worked with the Facebook API. After looking through the documentation I realised that it would take quite some time to grasp and implement it so I made the decision to hire a couple of coders from Upwork.

Before I did this however, I needed a solid plan of what kind of game I was going to make and how I was going to monetise it. I spent a few weeks throwing ideas around and eventually I came up with the idea of doing a solitaire game that unlike the conventional solitaire games, had levels and could interact with your Facebook friends.

The next step was working out how to monetise the game. Now, in Facebook you can have users pay for items in the game using Facebook credits or you can use third party advertisers to generate revenues. I decided that in my solitaire game that I was going to offer various items in the game that could be bought using Facebook credits that would help the user complete the level, such as extra lives and certain special items in the game.

I also wanted to use adverts in the game so I started by contacting advertisers that were Facebook approved and found to my dismay that their pay-outs for adverts were really low. The best advertiser that I ended up finding was Google Adsense but Adsense is not allowed on the Facebook platform due to a disagreement in terms between Facebook and Google.

So on the advertising side I was back to square one until I saw the obvious answer that was staring me in the face. You cannot use Google ads on the Facebook platform but you can on your own website. That was when I decided to make a game that was on Facebook but also on a website so that I could get the best of both worlds.

Now that dilemma was over it was time to contact some people on Upwork and here was my first mistake. I tried to find the cheapest people possible, overlooking skills in favour of cost and this was a very big pitfall. I ended up hiring a couple of guys from India that were really cheap and as the weeks went past, I realised that they lacked the skills needed to do what it was I was after and at this point I decided to put the project on hold.

By this point I had already spent nearly $1000 with nothing to show for it apart for some really shoddy code that I couldn’t use for anything. I realised that I needed to hire a professional team that had experience in social gaming so I set out to find some.

After interviewing a few teams, I ended up finding a great team of coders in Canada that had produced a number of social games on Facebook and smartphones. We had a meeting and the timescale to produce what I was after was going to be around 6 months and $20,000. At the time this was just money that I did not have so I had to really decide if this was still worth pursuing or should I just quit now.

I thought it over for a couple of weeks and decided that I was going to take the risk. I had come up with a solid game idea by this point and was certain that I could make the money back if I implemented it right. So I took the plunge and got a loan from the bank and got the coders started on my project.

The next 6 months was solid work, from dawn til dusk I was sat at my computer directing the team and creating graphics for the game as well as creating a website that I could showcase the game on.
Working with a professional company was great as there was no hurdle that they could not overcome and they brought a lot of ideas to the table that I had not considered such as viral points in the game that could show the game to many more users on Facebook.

So after alot of testing and a great deal of work the game was ready to launch. There were two versions, first was the version that can be played on Facebook here and the web version on my website Spider Solitaire Online.

For the first few weeks I paid for Facebook ads to get users to the game and after that the viral features in the game made the user base rise day by day. After only a month I managed to get over 130,000 monthly active users and some great feedback from my new users.

The game has been out now for 3 months and has been in the Facebook hot chart for the last month. It was really hard work to get here but I am glad that I did it and I have learned a lot along the way. I hope that anyone looking to get into this industry has found some useful information in this post and if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below and I will get back to you.