Everyone tells you to build a platform. An app. A whole product suite.
Meanwhile some of the most profitable internet businesses I've seen are a single page.
One page that does one job, ranks for one search, and quietly collects money every month while the founder does something else.
Pat Walls from Starter Story dug into three of them on the Build channel: an Excel practice site, a PDF converter that did $318K in 2024, and a solitaire site pulling $25K a month from ads.
Here's the video, then the numbers behind each one.
Excel Exercises: $12 Domain, First Sale While He Slept
Jake Shimota started Excel Exercises in January 2020 with a $12 domain and $700 for a logo and landing page design.
That's the whole startup cost.
He built it himself with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a Firebase backend, evenings and weekends around a full-time job. The first version took about a year and launched with four lessons.
The idea is stupidly simple: instead of watching Excel tutorial videos and zoning out, you do interactive drills right in the browser. Duolingo for spreadsheets. Pat tries it live in the video, learns a keyboard shortcut in 10 seconds, and immediately gets it.
My favorite part of Jake's story is the launch. There wasn't one.
"I woke up one day shortly after getting everything working and saw an email from Stripe notifying me that somebody had paid for the annual subscription. At first I thought I had made a mistake."
That was launch day. He put the paywall up before he had an audience, and the paywall found the audience.
Today the site does $4-6K a month per his Starter Story case study, with zero employees and roughly 80,000 visitors a month riding one keyword: "excel practice". The growth channels:
→ SEO articles about Excel functions that were genuinely better than the official documentation
→ Free premium access for schools and nonprofits, in exchange for backlinks
→ A COVID bump that never fully left: people stuck at home, upskilling for new jobs
Pat's takeaway in the video is the one I'd steal: people paying to upskill for a job never goes away. Swap Excel for AI prompting and the same one-page playbook is sitting there right now.
Bank Statement Converter: The Most Boring $318K You'll Ever See
Angus Cheng spent 14 years as a developer, including time at Credit Suisse. In April 2021 he quit and started building.
What he ended up with is a website that does exactly one thing: it converts PDF bank statements into Excel spreadsheets.
Upload a PDF, get a spreadsheet. That's the entire product.
He started it for under $100. Here's his revenue by year, straight from his own X post:
→ 2021: $3,181
→ 2022: $49,427
→ 2023: $147,336
→ 2024: $318,112
At the time of his case study he had 11,000 monthly visitors and $12,500 a month. In the video, Pat checks the traffic and finds 62,500 visitors a month, does the multiplication, and estimates $40-50K a month today. Third-party trackers land in the same range: $38-40K MRR in 2026. Still one founder. Zero employees. Costs of a few hundred dollars a month.
And here's the part most people skip: his marketing failed.
Angus spent about $1,000 on Google search ads in the first six months. It brought in less than it cost, so he turned them off. What actually grew the business was supporting more banks. When a conversion came out wrong, customers sent him the PDF, he fixed the parser, and the subscription rate jumped. The product getting better WAS the marketing.
Why does it work? Accountants and bookkeepers hit this exact problem every week. Retyping a statement into Excel eats hours. They search the exact phrase "bank statement converter", and Angus owns it. The domain is the keyword. The page is the product.
Nobody wakes up excited about PDF conversion. That's precisely the point. Boring problems with commercial intent print money, and the unsexy back office is where most of them hide. Most founders chase the shiny consumer idea while the accounting firm down the street would happily pay $30 a month forever to stop retyping numbers. If you want to hunt in that direction, this guide to business automations is a decent map of the workflows small companies still do by hand.
Online Solitaire: $30 a Day to $25K a Month
Holger Sindbæk is a designer from Copenhagen. His first solitaire app made about $30 a day on the Mac App Store.
Most people would call that a failed side project. He read it as a signal.
He noticed the top solitaire results were janky, paid $1,000 for the domain online-solitaire.com, and rebuilt the game in React with Firebase for the browser, where Google search lives, instead of fighting the App Store algorithm.
The numbers Pat pulls up in the video are absurd for a card game:
→ 441,000 visitors a month, average visit almost 13 minutes
→ 61% direct traffic (people literally type the domain), 31% organic search
→ "Solitaire" gets searched 8.6 million times a month
And he doesn't even rank #1. He doesn't need to. When Starter Story first interviewed him he was at $1,500 a month. A year after adding ads he was at $10,000. Today online-solitaire.com and his second site worldofcardgames.com pull around $25,000 a month combined, with over a million people playing every month.
The revenue is almost all ads. He sells a $5/month subscription to remove them, and by his own admission almost nobody pays. Doesn't matter. At 12-minute sessions and half a million visits, ads alone carry the business.
His playbook was picking a game with demand since 1990 instead of inventing a new one, winning on search instead of app stores, and paying once for the exact-match domain that compounds forever.
The best part of the video is Pat going down rabbit holes mid-research. He stumbles on a PNG-to-PDF converter getting 1.8 million visitors a month, then a backgammon site at 1.9 million visitors that he guesses could be a million-dollar-a-year ad business. The one-page graveyard is enormous, and it's full of money.
What These Three Have in Common
Three founders, three completely different products, the same machine underneath:
→ One page, one job. Not a platform. The product answers a single search intent completely.
→ The search IS the marketing. All three live off organic traffic to a page that matches exactly what people type into Google. The one who tried paid ads (Angus) lost money and quit them.
→ Solo, with near-zero costs. A $12 domain, a $700 design, a sub-$100 start. Every dollar of revenue is basically margin.
→ Boring beats clever. Excel drills, PDF conversion, solitaire. None of these would impress anyone at a startup dinner. All of them out-earn most funded startups per employee, because the employee count is one.
→ Patience. Jake built for a year before that first Stripe email. Angus made $3,181 his entire first year. Holger sat at $30 a day. The curve bends late, and everyone who quits early never finds out.
Pat's closing advice in the video matches what I keep seeing: start with one page to get users, figure out monetization after (ads, a backend product, a course), and run several small bets instead of one big one.
I've written about the same pattern before: the job board doing $28K a month and these database businesses built on one well-structured dataset. Narrow wins.
FAQ
Can a one-page website really make $10K a month?
Yes, and two of the three in this video make more. Bank Statement Converter did $318K in 2024 (about $26K a month averaged) and Online Solitaire does around $25K a month across two sites. Excel Exercises sits at $4-6K a month. Same format, different ceilings, all profitable.
How do one-page websites get traffic?
Search, almost exclusively. Each site owns one high-intent query: "excel practice", "bank statement converter", "online solitaire". Exact-match domains, a page that answers the query better than anyone, and backlinks earned over years. Angus tested $1,000 of Google ads and turned them off because they lost money.
How much does it cost to start one?
Jake spent $712 total ($12 domain plus $700 design). Angus started for under $100. Holger's biggest single cost was a $1,000 domain. The real cost is time: each founder spent months to a year building before meaningful money showed up.
What kind of ideas work best for a single-page business?
Boring, recurring problems with search demand that already exists. A task someone does every week at work, like converting statements or practicing Excel for an interview, or an evergreen habit like solitaire. If people already type the exact phrase into Google, you don't need to invent demand. You just need to deserve the click.
Steal Playbooks Like This Every Week
Stories like these are exactly why I run the Profitable Founder Podcast: real founders, real dashboards, and the boring mechanics behind the numbers.
If you're grinding toward $100K MRR and want tactics that survived contact with reality, come listen.
