Launched a Dota 2 stats site on Oct 16. Two weeks later: ~2,000 unique visitors, 10k+ pageviews, basically $0 marketing budget. I’m the solo founder. The product is StatsDota — a Russian-language Dota 2 stats service (hero counters, guides, meta, matches, news). There is an English version, but most of the content and SEO are built for RU/CIS players. Where the traffic actually came from Organic Google + Yandex — still the main channel, and it grows every week as pages get indexed. AI / ChatGPT citations — people land from answers that mention the site. About 135 users so far, roughly 10–25 per day. Feels like a real channel, not a one-off. Tiny Yandex Direct test — I had ~500 RUB sitting on an old account. Spent about 150 RUB from Oct 24; got 187 visits. Not a growth engine, just a sanity check. YouTube — short AI-assisted review videos of the product. Channel is at ~11.7k views and ~100 likes. Video quality is still weak; I’m learning the tool, not pretending it’s polished. I didn’t buy backlinks. No budget for that. How it was built I coded and SEO’d it myself. AI helped a lot with speed, but it’s not a throwaway vibe-coded demo — I understand and control the stack, the pages, and the data pipeline. I also built automations that find sources, pick important Dota news, and publish to the site + a Telegram channel without me copy-pasting all day. What I learned in two weeks For a niche like this, SEO landing pages that match how players actually search beat ads early. Being cited by AI assistants is already measurable traffic, even at small scale. Cheap Direct is fine for learning CPC, useless as the main lever when organic is working. Shipping a real product with AI assistance is fine; shipping something you can’t debug or maintain is not. Ask Honest feedback welcome — product, positioning, what looks weak from outside RU, whether an English-first push makes sense, monetization ideas that don’t kill trust with players. I’m also open to a quiet conversation about investment / partnership / sponsorship if this niche is interesting to you. Telegram: @Dmitrii559. Prefer product critique in the comments first.   submitted by   /u/StatsDota_Dmitrii [link]   [comments]