3 ms·

When I was a teenager, I made a website with a friend called "I'm really sad" and the idea was that if people searched that, our site would pop up and show a pi

When I was a teenager, I made a website with a friend called "I'm really sad" and the idea was that if people searched that, our site would pop up and show a picture of a kitten or a puppy or other cute animal. The site was really successful, hit a high of 750k visits in one day. I later sold it because money is fun, but I've seen that sort of site/service/forum pop up all time time (such as r/eyebleach or r/wholesomememes). There's definite good in giving people tiny, inconsequential bites of happiness, even if it's just a distraction.

DanBC 8y ago
One of my favourite current versions of those is the Anotherly email newsletter. http://www.anotherly.com/ http://www.anotherly.com/ (Their signup page could do with an example newsletter.)
elpakal 8y ago
Would you be willing to share how much that sold for back then?
- mmanfrin 8y ago
  I think $3500? At it's peak it was making around $200/m, so that is a bit more than the 12x monthly rate that websites used to go for. It was making a fair bit less when I sold, though, I just didnt have the time to keep it updated. In hindsight, there are some websites I used to run that I really wish I could tell my younger self to keep running. I had a little video site (pre-youtube) that was doing well, a few forums (although those were an absolute pain to keep active), a link shortener (that got my server shut down over, as spammers found it useful), a music video site for myspace. When I was 15, I hired a programmer on scriptlance to build me a php script to run a site I had sketched up. The project never really materialized, but the programmer I hired was none other than a (then 15~ year old) Guillermo Rauch, who later went on to author socket.io, mongoose, and found Zeit. I like to think I did my small part to help him on his path to being such a prolific programmer :]
overcast 8y ago
Easiest sell ever! Congrats.

DanBC 8y ago

One of my favourite current versions of those is the Anotherly email newsletter. http://www.anotherly.com/ http://www.anotherly.com/ (Their signup page could do with an example newsletter.)

elpakal 8y ago

Would you be willing to share how much that sold for back then?

mmanfrin 8y ago
I think $3500? At it's peak it was making around $200/m, so that is a bit more than the 12x monthly rate that websites used to go for. It was making a fair bit less when I sold, though, I just didnt have the time to keep it updated. In hindsight, there are some websites I used to run that I really wish I could tell my younger self to keep running. I had a little video site (pre-youtube) that was doing well, a few forums (although those were an absolute pain to keep active), a link shortener (that got my server shut down over, as spammers found it useful), a music video site for myspace. When I was 15, I hired a programmer on scriptlance to build me a php script to run a site I had sketched up. The project never really materialized, but the programmer I hired was none other than a (then 15~ year old) Guillermo Rauch, who later went on to author socket.io, mongoose, and found Zeit. I like to think I did my small part to help him on his path to being such a prolific programmer :]

overcast 8y ago

Easiest sell ever! Congrats.