How It Started
My brother bowls in a league. One night he was complaining — couldn't find reliable info about his local alley. Hours, prices, whether they had open lanes. All the usual stuff that should take 30 seconds to look up was scattered across outdated Yelp pages and broken websites.
I didn't think much of it until a few days later when I was doing keyword research for something else entirely. I pulled up search volume data for bowling-related terms and stopped scrolling. The demand was real and consistent — people search for bowling alleys constantly — and the sites that were ranking for those terms were genuinely bad. Thin content, slow load times, no structure, terrible mobile experience.
That's the gap. That's all you need.
I bought bowlingalleys.io that week. The first working version was live in 72 hours.
The Numbers
What Made This a Good Bet
The keyword research told a clear story. "Bowling alleys near me" and related local search terms get searched millions of times a month collectively. The sites ranking for them were mostly: outdated local business directories, Yelp pages with incomplete info, and a couple of thin content sites that hadn't been updated in years.
None of them were built by someone who actually cared about the product. They were built to rank, not to be useful. That's the opening.
The best niche site opportunities aren't hidden. They're hiding in plain sight in industries that developers find boring. Nobody's fighting over bowling alley keywords. That's the point.
The domain was the easy part. bowlingalleys.io is an exact-match domain for one of the core search intents. It signals relevance to Google immediately. Combined with a fast, well-structured site and real venue data, it had everything it needed to start ranking without any link building.
The Build Timeline
The Stack
The prototype was Replit — the right tool for the job when the job is "validate this idea in 72 hours." Once it proved out, I rebuilt it properly with Cursor into a full production architecture.
Why Session Duration Matters More Than Clicks
4 minutes and 38 seconds is a long time to spend on a directory site. That number tells the real story — people aren't just landing on bowlingalleys.io and bouncing. They're browsing venues, reading reviews, checking hours and prices, exploring leagues in their area.
That's what separates a useful product from a thin content site built purely to capture search traffic. Google's ranking systems are increasingly good at detecting the difference. The session duration is partly why the site has maintained its rankings rather than declining after the initial indexing bump.
What I'd Tell Someone Starting Today
The 72-hour prototype is the most important part of this whole story. Not the stack, not the SEO strategy, not the domain name — the decision to build something real and get it in front of Google fast, before spending weeks on architecture.
Replit exists precisely for this. It's not a production tool, but it's the best possible tool for answering the question: does this idea have legs? In this case it did. So I invested in the full build. If it hadn't, I'd have lost 72 hours and a domain registration fee, not months of engineering work.
The other thing: boring industries are underserved by definition. The developers who could build something great in those spaces don't want to. They're building AI tools and SaaS products. That's fine — it leaves the bowling alleys, the car washes, the pest control directories wide open for anyone willing to actually ship.
What's Next
The platform has real user engagement now — reviews, ratings, a community system (Pin Points) that rewards people for contributing venue information. The next phase is monetization through venue owner partnerships and expanding the league and specials features that keep users coming back beyond the initial "find a bowling alley" search intent.
If you've got a niche site idea and want help thinking through the SEO strategy or the build — hire me on Upwork. This is exactly the kind of project I enjoy, and I'm good at it.