When I opened ozerlyn.com a year ago, the idea was simple: a clean place to play good puzzles without being buried in clutter. Today the site has sudoku, skyscrapers and more, and there are sudoku and Zip apps for phones. This is not a success story. It is an honest account of one year.

What I built

From the outside, a sudoku site looks simple: a grid and some digits. Once you start, you find out it isn’t. A good puzzle needs exactly one solution, the difficulty label has to mean something, and a new puzzle has to be ready every single day. So most of my time went into work nobody sees:

A puzzle generator that checks every puzzle has a single solution.
Measuring difficulty with the Sudoku Explainer rating, and explaining it in a separate guide.
A daily sudoku and a daily Zip puzzle, prepared automatically.
Five languages: Turkish, English, German, Spanish and Hindi.
Mobile apps for sudoku and Zip.
Guides that explain solving techniques step by step.

I did all of it alone: the design, the code, the puzzle generator and the articles.

Where are the players?

After building the games, I opened pages on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), Reddit and TikTok. I even set up a system that posts the daily puzzle to Facebook automatically every morning. I expected a good product to find its own way.

It didn’t. Posts from a small account mostly reach nobody. Sudoku is one of the most crowded game categories in the world, and large newspapers and platforms have their own puzzles. After a year, my conclusion is that making something is much easier than getting people to hear about it.

The numbers

I would rather share the numbers than hide them:

In one year, puzzles on the site were opened 193,430 times and completed 31,805 times.
182 people created an account and played. Together they started 14,792 games and finished 5,204.
Ad revenue from the sudoku and Zip apps is between 10 and 20 Turkish lira a day.

10 to 20 lira a day is very far from what I imagined a year of work would bring. It isn’t easy to write that, but it is the truth. Most of what I read about indie game development is about big wins or about projects that never started. We rarely read about the ones in between, the projects that work but don’t pay the bills.

Why I keep going

The part of the data that moves me most is small but real: 60 players played on at least 10 different days, 32 on at least 30 days and 8 on more than 100 days. Some people have made these puzzles part of their day. It may be a small number, but it tells me the work has value.

Looking at player data has also taught me a lot about design. As I described in the article on solve times, the top three difficulty levels actually take about the same time; what separates them is how often people finish. I learned that from real games, not from guessing.

What one year taught me

Quality alone is not enough. Single-solution puzzles and honest difficulty matter, but if nobody sees them, nobody knows.
Writing code is more comfortable for me than promoting. I spent most of my time coding. Looking back, some of that time should have gone into talking with people.
Being everywhere is like being nowhere. One person cannot feed five social platforms. Focusing on one or two makes more sense.
Search engines need patience. A good article can take months to be found.
A small audience is still an audience. A few people who come back every day are worth more than thousands who never arrive.

What I’m doing now

I’m trying to focus on fewer things, more deeply: articles that share what player data shows, guides to sudoku techniques, and improving the difficulty levels based on that data. I don’t have a marketing budget. What I have is the care I put into the puzzles and the ability to talk about it honestly.

If you read this far, it means a lot to me. Solving a puzzle, recommending the site to a friend or writing to me at ozerlyngames@gmail.com genuinely helps this small project grow. And if you are running an independent project and going through something similar, I’d be glad to hear from you too.