The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
bbc.com
bbc.com
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, 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.
Anyways, keep up the awesome work, and I'm glad it has all worked out for you!
Any way I can get this half decade long question answered? :)
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.
- 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!
There are people (mostly teenagers/early 20s) who set up catchy Twitter accounts with endless streams of funny photos or videos along various themes. They cross promote and cross retweet these accounts (often retweeting each other's posts for just 5 minutes, then unretweeting again to remove the trace) until they build up over 100K legitimate followers. They then sell "spots" on these accounts to (mostly) people running Shopify fashion stores or mobile app developers ($18 per 100K impressions is a typical rate right now). I've also seen a couple of musicians "come up" through this approach using Soundcloud. (What they do is have fake female accounts repost Vines, tweets, or screenshots of Tumblr raving about thing X, then get those retweeted on "decks" - people then impulse retweet, then they delete the original content to make it all look organic.)
This is the wild west of social right now, it's hard to find info about it, you gotta spend weeks digging around and warming up to the right people, especially since a lot of the trail is destroyed shortly after it's posted.
I'm not going to go into much more detail as I've spent months figuring out this space, but believe me, there are some amazingly savvy 15-25 year olds out there making things on social not look exactly what they seem(!) :)
Huh? What's the story there?
At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers.
Which is one reason why Uber is winning. You do not even bother to check taxi fares.
I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.
Did people stop tipping cabs?
Maybe you meant Ubers were 20% more expensive, or maybe people don't tip cabs anymore, I don't know.
Honestly I'd pay more than cabfare + tips just to have the price be explicit. Tips basically become a tax on nice people. I'd much rather everyone was paying the same price.
When I first got here, I used Uber all the time, but the government passed some anti-über laws and Uber withdrew from the market. Now I just use the public transport, which is pretty good, but less convenient than Uber. I felt bad for all the drivers that lost their jobs.
They are still losing billions a year.
Don’t assume your local shitty laws are an issue everywhere.
My understanding is that these cases are usually very hard to prove, unless you have 'smoking gun' evidence of some kind.
So whilst he was lucky, he did kind of make his own luck by putting the money into it -- he could have just taken that money and sat on it.
[1]IIRC it was discussed in Paul Carr's Bringing Nothing to the Party, which isn't exactly complimentary about Tew
"His friends and family paid the first $1,000 dollars, which he spent on a press release. That small publicity gave his site more traffic, which in turn persuaded more advertisers to have faith."
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4585026.stm
I remember from the TV news coverage he talked about how he'd sent that press release out to hundreds of news outlets. So I feel he (in part at least) made his own luck on this one.
I worked on an internship back in 2004, and one morning my manager walked in and asked a coworker and me something like, "Do you think people would buy pixels on a website?" We asked what he meant, and he explained this exact idea.
Of course we told him it was dumb and nobody would buy pixels and it would be pointless, and how would anybody find it, etc., and he decided not to do anything with it.
Then, about a year later, this site came around, made the news, and sold out in no time.
Like you said, there's a lot more to it then just putting the site online, but I've always felt a little bad for dismissing it so quickly.
Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea
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
'bucolic' is the only word I've heard to describe the village I grew up in.
Seems to highscore.money was popular because of the network of the creator https://twitter.com/marckohlbrugge
Maybe ask him for advice.
Sofar he has raised almost 8000, but I'm also looking for a way to get it out there!
And I really hope that some day Terence's campaign really takes off without me really noticing it.
"I could have done that"
"Yes, you could, but you didn't"
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Kk-61u6leYU/UrB3Cfg6x1I/AAAAAAAAEO...
"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."
"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.
(Go to history in the dropdown, then click on the entry in question.)
It goes to show that when I'm thinking about a website, I go very quickly to Internet Archive to check out its past, often before even reading much into the web site.
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 ?
With Calm, there's new content every single day with our Daily Calm meditation. We've got more daily content coming soon too.
In addition to the content people also like us for our tracking features and daily reminders, which people consider valuable.
Each Daily Calm session is available for that day only, so you either listen to it or you don't. If you do come back to the app every day there's something fresh for you if that's what you'd like (you can of course to a regular session too). If you don't use the app on any particular day, no big deal, there's no backlog of content for you to stress about catching up with!
> Each Daily Calm session is available for that day only,
> so you either listen to it or you don't.
"Agh! Better listen quick or it's gone forever!"
I say this as the guy who wakes up in the morning with 500-800 overnight missed tweets, and then patiently reads through them.
I guess it's partly FOMO, partly habit, and partly the slightly positive aspect of following a routine. There are the odd days when I just skip them all, but it does leave me slightly irked.
All in all, it's not the worst thing in the world, although I wouldn't be upset to grow out of the habit.
I still have it, but mostly just use it to contact customer service departments - seems to be the most painless way these days.
2. It depends on how stressed you are. I felt an immediate difference in calmness at the end of each headspace session. This was almost immediately worth it for me to spend $70 on. All I need it to do is give me one extra hours work done from being calmer to make it worthwhile.
3. Also there's laziness of having everything setup for you. I wouldn't keep it up if I had to read my own way through and make my own path. Headspace makes it very easy just to follow a guided path but with some choice. A lot of it is using the same techniques in slightly different ways.
Calm's CTO's comment about having new content each day I don't find very important. I know this is a very long term thing (i.e. decades of learning), so I know each section requires a lot of practice and repetition. I'm happy to repeat sections and practice until I get the full benefit.
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.
You can do this with anything - works great with programming screencasts, for example. If it's the type of service that regularly updates, you can just resubscribe for a month once in a while to grab the new stuff.
Potentially copyright infringement, YMMV. If you only consumed the articles once then a time-shifting Fair Use or Fair Dealing (or similar) case might be made.
The fact that there are people that make enough money, or not care enough about money, to prefer the convenience on just clicking "subscribe" on an app they downloaded and like, over searching for meditations books with meditation tracks on CD, ripping it to your phone, etc.
For more pinching-penny types, they could also expect the app to offer more/different tracks over time too.
Also, best phrase from the article:
the meditation and mindfulness industry
Somehow absurd.
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/7215763613331...
[1] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/steve-martins-p...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Ausilium-27337-Orchidometer/dp/B00F37...
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.
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.
And also the fact that there is a billion dollar mindfulness industry.
"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."
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! :)
I don't think that was dumb at all :) .
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.
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.
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.
I don't know whether BBC Worldwide permit sponsored content, but they don't operate under the same rules as the "proper" BBC.
I gave up on my first.
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.
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.