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The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
- sha256md5 10y agoSo pretty much a long winded advertisement for his company.
- mtmail 10y agoFor me the key take-away is that he couldn't recreate his success later. "First, he tried Pixelotto, a spinoff of the Million Dollar Homepage selling advertising space, then PopJam, a social network for sharing funny content, and One Million People, similar to his first success, just with photos instead of advertisements. None succeeded the way he hoped."
- estefan 10y agoIf you win the lottery and think it was because of something you did, well...
- personjerry 10y agoHaha, this reminds me of Taleb's The Black Swan.
- coldtea 10y agoWell, in this case if was because of something he did. The initial page idea was great and almost inevitable to succeed: cute when you hear about the concept, very easy to implement, almost sure to attract media attention (and have stories bring in more interest), etc. So, in a sense, the lotto was coming up with this idea, not that the idea succeeded. The problem is that his other attempts where either rehashes of the same but with no novelty factor anymore, or not that interesting in the first place.
- scoot 10y ago"One Million People" - Huh, well I never. I had a similar idea, inspired by the Million Dollar Home Page, but 5 years before "One Million People". I think mine was a bit more innovative, (but just as likely to have failed!) - rather than just a grid of faces, with users paying $3 to add theirs, mine was free, and was going to scale the images in proportion to traffic and likes for that user. The aim was to get users to promote their image (therefore the site) through social media. The user that drove the most traffic would share in a prize funded by ad revenue. I wrote the shape fitting algo, then abandoned the idea! :)
- GFischer 10y agoInteresting. Some kind of vanity contest will definitely attract a lot of traffic if done right and with initial traction. I don't think that was dumb at all :) .
- bertjk 10y agoRule #1 of advertising: Don't pay for your advertising...
- jfktrey 10y agoSponsored content. http://www.hulu.com/watch/873050 http://www.hulu.com/watch/873050 It is South Park (so you get all the crude/offensive humor that comes with it), but this episode is a pretty good microcosm of this sort of thing.
- ascorbic 10y agoIt's the BBC. Sponsored content isn't allowed.
- laurent123456 10y agoMakes you wonder though. The story about the million-dollar page is pretty interesting but there's nothing special about the Calm app, yet more than half of the article is about it.
- manarth 10y agoIt's BBC Capital, part of BBC Worldwide, who are a commercial organisation. I don't know whether BBC Worldwide permit sponsored content, but they don't operate under the same rules as the "proper" BBC.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoThey allow sponsored content they're just really restrictive about it. For example I couldn't wear my work shirt (with logo) during a 2 minute piece on a kids TV program. However, watch whatever is on on a Saturday night, guest appearance from some "star" and the host's question will be "so, you've got a [media product] coming out", with a promo image of the book/movie/CD/whatever. Or if it's a movie then they'll often show a short clip (aka advert). If you watch a cooking show then it seems it's fine to promo a restaurant as long as it's high-end - here's such-and-such chef, fresh from his Michelin starred restaurant at Poshtown. It's quid pro quo but waiving [part of] an appearance fee in order to get publicity surely counts. It's curious, some kids shows are all black-tape over the carton being used to make a craft project but then they have an "inside the factory" series which is a massive promotional piece - though probably not paid - for the companies with branding clearly shown. You might argue not "sponsored" but "we'll let you do this filming if you show our factories in a good light and keep our name and logo in the show" seems sponsored to me.
- mtmail 10y ago"Fast-forward 11 years and Tew is still doing things differently than most [...]. Today, he lives in San Francisco, [...] and is founder and CEO of start-up Calm, which offers a mobile app" At least on HN this wouldn't be seen different at all. Wikipedia retells the story of the million dollar homepage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
- icc97 10y agoHe comes from Wiltshire. SF is very different. 'bucolic' is the only word I've heard to describe the village I grew up in.
- leejoramo 10y agoWonder how many of the links on this page are still active.
- kingofspain 10y agoAt least one is still going strong (I worked there at the time they bought in).
- birdman3131 10y agoI am half tempted to try and find out.
- seren 10y agoI have been using Headspace and Calm.com. While the services are valuable, I have hard time justifying buying a subscription with a monthly cost for something that is basically some guided meditation mp3. Compare buying a meditation book with a few guided meditation track for 20$, or subscribing to an app with a recurring cost of 70$/year, I don't really see the added value. Can someone shed light on what I am missing ?
- contingencies 10y agoApp has social/word of mouth buzz, is instant gratification, and is easy to pay for.
- DigitalJack 10y agoI've got some audio from Jon Kabat-Zinn, and sometimes I use it when meditating, sometimes not. However, people pay for stuff sometimes for the psychological effect. For example, we pay to have someone clean our house. But the day before they come to clean, we pre-clean. It keeps us accountable to not letting clutter take control. I listen to the Kabat-Zinn audio, not so much for the instruction, but that it helps keep me "on the cushion" for a longer duration. Without it, I'm more likely to get distracted and stop early to do something else. So sometimes that is the actual value, the accountability. It's an intangible value.
- PatentTroll 10y agoYup, I actually paid for two of these services before I realized they're just audio content. Great business for them, bad product for me.
- icc97 10y agoThere is the free 10 day content as well as a 30 day money back guarantee.
- brianbreslin 10y agoSpotify has some tracks in there on guided meditation as well.
- sharemywin 10y agoI remember reading the blog and thought it was cool how the story progressed.
- DanHulton 10y agoI always wondered how he got that site running in the first place. I had my own similar "dumb idea" that I created: http://www.ipaidthemost.com http://www.ipaidthemost.com, but I have no idea how to get it out in front of people, even though folks tend to react well enough when I show it to them.
- LanceH 10y agoI feel the same way about the kind of art that "a 7 year old could do". The part I admire is their ability to get funding.
- SixSigma 10y agoI think the success of some naïve art is the audacity of the person making it. "I could have done that" "Yes, you could, but you didn't" http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kk-61u6leYU/UrB3Cfg6x1I/AAAAAAAAEOo/fp3MMElQJrI/s1600/art.png http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kk-61u6leYU/UrB3Cfg6x1I/AAAAAAAAEO...
- burkaman 10y agoThis explanation of modern art never makes any sense. "I could have done that" "Yes, you could, but you didn't" "Yeah, exactly, why would I? Why would anyone? Why do you like this? Why did you pay for it?" Somebody who doesn't understand the point of a piece of art is not going to be impressed by the bravery of the artist for publishing it.
- danenania 10y agoI don't think it's just audacity--there are people all over the world doing unique, audacious, amazing things every day, and an incredibly small percentage get much attention at all. The people getting lots of attention are, with few exceptions, either leveraging an influential personal network that was built up over a period of years, working very hard at marketing and promotion, and/or spending money to get that attention. As far as I can tell, this seems to be as true in the art world as it is in tech. "Yes, you could, but you didn't." should really be: "Yes, you could, but no one would pay any attention because you don't know the right people, and even if you did, you don't know how to frame a few colored squares on a giant canvas as artistically important."
- plg 10y agois the "lifetime" subscription just a hail-mary money-grab?
- celticninja 10y agoI expect it is one of those strategies that allows you to channel buyers toward your preferred pricing structure. e.g. 1 month = $10, 3 months $20, 1 year $75, lifetime $250. In this example you really want to sleep at $20 for 3 months, so your $75 for a year is for customers convenience, the 1 month for $10 is there so people see how good value it is to get a 3 or 12 no the subscription, the lifetime is there so people who get a year subscription don't think they are taking the most expensive option.
- manarth 10y agoThere's also the effects of price-anchoring and price-bracketing: $20 may look expensive compared to $3 or $5 or $10, but stick it up against $75 and $250, it appears to look more reasonable. It's exactly what you're saying: the $250 option isn't intended to sell people on lifetime subscriptions, it's designed to make the $20 product look reasonable.
- fudged71 10y agoI've always sort of been inspired by his project, and how powerful crowdsourcing can be. We built a physical version of the million dollar homepage using 3D printing and crowdsourcing. A few thousand pieces were printed around the world and mailed to us for a crowdsourced sculpture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/printtopeer/sets/72157636133314925/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/printtopeer/sets/7215763613331...
- rconti 10y agoCalm seems interesting, though not something I'd want to do with my phone (even though I get the appeal of it being everywhere). Wouldn't mind an AndroidTV app so I can do it at home, sitting on my carpeted floor, in the relative darkness, in front of a TV.. rather than squinting at a phone
- danneu 10y agoSurely you're closing your eyes and listening to the voice as you meditate. At which point, it'd be nice to do it wherever you please.
- exadeci 10y agoYou only use the screen to start a session and it's better with headphones
- rconti 10y agoAh, the pretty pictures shown as demonstrations of the app led me astray!
- bsharitt 10y agoOnly 11 years. It seems like it was older. I guess it seems like such an idea of the late 90's internet, I just associate it with that era.
- levelist_com 10y agoThe company I worked for at the time this site gained notoriety would field several calls a week from individuals and companies both wanting to have a clone of that site built thinking they would achieve the same level of success. About the same time I had an investment group contact me, via a close friend, to build them a Match.com clone, except their time frame was 3 months with a budget of $15k. I told them that they lost their damn mind. Didn't hear from them again. People are dumb!
- edpichler 10y agoLesson learned: it's not the complexity of an idea that will make it valuable.
- whamlastxmas 10y agoBBC uses an iStock image in their article, complete with watermark? Seriously?
- manarth 10y agoThe watermarks are also on the other images that they've licenced from Getty, and the unwatermarked image is credited to the photographer. I'm not sure that there would be all that much value in creating new images for the story though, if a cheaper stock image can communicate the same thing.
- whamlastxmas 10y agoMy point is that they should either have real, relevant photos or no photos at all. Not just filler garbage that has nothing to do with the article.
- antaviana 10y agoIn a local newspaper, I once saw an article about some gang members being arrested for making and distributing fake coins that were worth some $5 in my country, and there was a huge photo of a coin with this caption: "A legit coin"
- robbiemitchell 10y agoThis is a great PR play -- leverage the founder's origin story as a hook for the real point: promoting the app.
- volatilitish 10y agoWe need a more intelligent adblock that spots and blocks things like this :)
- softawre 10y agoIt would then block hacker news for promoting YC, right?
- lookupmobile 10y agoExactly like South Park's previous season's main theme.
- vannevar 10y agoBut Tew was the first to do it, which left a lot of people wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea, missing one crucially important ingredient: page-views. Anybody can put up a web site, it's getting people to look at it that's hard. And once people are looking at it, it's easy to sell ad space. What no one could have known, including Tew, is that the story was going to get picked up by the media, which would generate his page-views for him. Nowadays, lots of people are trying to hack the concept of virality, which despite the name is really more a matter of climbing the media hierarchy rather than spreading in some kind of peer-to-peer manner. You get picked up by a few small tweeters or bloggers, then by bigger tweeters and bloggers, and then by major media, and---voila! You cash in and look like a genius. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and no one has a repeatable recipe for virality, so in the end it's largely a matter of luck.
- dennisnedry 10y agoAgreed, kind of like gambling.
- IgorPartola 10y agoI'm not sure that nobody has it. It's basically a matter of hacking the system to get cheaper CPM than what you can get with ads. If ads are the market index fund, you are trying to beat it by exploiting some oddity in the system. Once you do so on a large scale, the market adjusts and the oddity either goes away, or becomes useless. But I can think of a few ways to do this: - Produce awesome content. Remember the Old Spice YouTube channel where they set up and produced videos for a few days in real-time response to people tweeting at them? That got lots of people looking at their product. Sure, it was an expensive stunt, but a stunt that worked. I bet it'd work again and again, as long as it's not done too frequently. - Send out brand ambassadors into random communities. There are lots of brands present as specific people on places like Reddit, Imgur, etc. They are not customer service, they are not there as the official faces of the brand. They are just there to hang out, shoot the shit, and occasionally give out some free stuff or do something "awesome", "rad", or whatever. - Provide comprehensive media kits to journalists. The dirty secret is that nowadays people who make money by writing articles need to write lots of them. Do 90% of the work, and they'll jump on the opportunity to customize it a bit, and post it immediately. They get to take a longer lunch break, you get free page views. - For small or personal projects, go and do the "Show HN" equivalent on various communities. Even if they generally don't allow self-advertising, the rule is usually overlooked if you don't push too hard, and just present it as "I made a thing. Check it out." - Start a KickStarter campaign for no reason. Ideally, if you can afford to not hinge your business on it, you can just use it as both a pre-order platform, and as an easy way to grab attention of lots of people. - Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too!
- tempestn 10y agoIf not for this guy, my life would probably have been totally different. It's silly, but the Million Dollar Homepage was definitely one of the motivating factors that got me into web development. After seeing his page I had every intention of making some ridiculous, gimmicky advertising ratings site or something and making millions of dollars with ease. Then I decided it would make sense to get some experience first, before I dove right into it, so I decided to make a simple little tool for my own use first. THEN I'd make the "real" site (ie the doomed gimmick site). Turns out my throwaway test idea was actually useful to people though, and it grew into an actual business that I'm still running 10 years later.
- DanHulton 10y agoThat's amazing. What's the actual business?
- keltex 10y agoIt's in his profile: http://www.searchtempest.com/ http://www.searchtempest.com/
- tempestn 10y agoHa, ya, although I left out the get-rich-quick aspirations in my profile! At the time I was a poor grad student and was shopping for a portable AC unit to survive the summer in my sweltering apartment. There were about 5 craigslist sites within driving distance, and I was checking all of them, since saving 20 bucks was easily worth an extra hour of driving at that point. :) Figured a simple thing to learn some basics would be a page that would just spit out the links to multiple craigslist results pages matching a given search. I literally went to the library and got a book called something like, "Basic web development using PHP and MySQL". The initial site was... very basic. Before I made it I'd looked around for existing solutions, and so when it was done I replied to the few forum threads I'd found, where people were looking for the same thing. It basically grew organically from there. (And over time I made it somewhat less basic. Although the design is looking pretty dated at this point; we're currently working hard on a long-overdue responsive redesign.) A couple years later I made (an early version of) http://www.autotempest.com http://www.autotempest.com, which is like kayak.com for used cars. Then around 2009 I quit my day job and hired my first employee. Have been doing this ever since.
- nyrulez 10y agoI just used calm at work and then read this right after. Weirdest coincidence I've had in recent times. I couldn't have imagined this guy is doing Calm in a million years. Thank you for pivoting this way. Its such a great app. Love the daily stuff to keep it varied and exciting to come back to.
- Bakary 10y agoThere's something quite ironic about paying for a smartphone app in order to relieve the stress and anxiety induced by our society. And also the fact that there is a billion dollar mindfulness industry.
- DonHopkins 10y agoI'm working on my second million. I gave up on my first.
- DonHopkins 10y agoMy get rich quick scheme is to run a site called penis-length-registry.com, where insecure people who want everyone to know how well hung they are can publicly register their penis length, and I'd charge them by the inch (using a freemium model: the first inch is free, with additional inches progressively priced, and special "grow it now" bonus packages, plus there's a monthly subscription fee to keep it from shrinking). Also their friends and admirers could buy them "gift inches", and users could play with themselves or compete with each other using a Flash based MMORPPG online pissing contest! All that's required to verify is a valid credit card number, and they can buy their way onto the top-10 leader board. Then I could sell ads for Hummer H2's, Steve Martin's All Natural Penis Beauty Cream [1], fashionable Italian designer brand Ausilium Orchidometers [2], and other high priced vanity products like that. All I'd really need was one rich tiny-handed narcissistic whale like Donald Trump, and I could retire! [1] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/steve-martins-penis-beauty-creme/n10590 http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/steve-martins-p... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Ausilium-27337-Orchidometer/dp/B00F37FJA6 https://www.amazon.com/Ausilium-27337-Orchidometer/dp/B00F37...