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Comment by stevenj | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know of any examples of overnight success or close to it?

Edit: Maybe Hot or Not?

To me "the biggest overnight success award" goes to Andrey Ternovskiy for Chatroulette. The site climbed high in rankings fast, quickly started generating profits, hundreds of clones came to life (of none of course got any traction although everyone was making it better), you could buy the "roulette script" online and do your own site, and Andrey score a visa to US to work on some other startups, as far as I know. This, in any possible measures, especially with someone of 17 years old, I personally call "overnight success".

There was also a guy selling pixels, which was stunning to me how his out of box thinking got him a million bucks (he is working on a cool idea raising charity money for Africa now). Of course plenty other similar website popup, but none got traction.

The guy that sells pixels made 1M+ with http://milliondollarhomepage.com/

Basically he sells 1M "pixels" for $1 each to show advertisings. The pixels you buy have an expiration date so he probably sold more than 1M px. I read somewhere that it works pretty well and brings lots of users to advertisers, probably because of the press and the momentum generated around the service.

"The pixels you buy will be displayed on the homepage permanently. The homepage will not change."

fosk, I knew the website just didnt have time to finish my comment, actually. But no, the pixels never expire.

What I learnt with his project is what it means when your project goes viral. To me noone in sound mind would pay a dollar for pixel, boy, I was wrong.

Now Alex Tew designed this one and its actually pretty cool as well: http://www.waterforward.org/

"Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" (quickly renamed Yahoo) was the first commercial project of its grad-student co-founders, and was pretty big within the first year (big enough for Ziff-Davis to launch a companion Yahoo print magazine). IPO'd about two years after launch. Mostly good timing imo; they caught the internet wave with a decently organized web directory.

This isn't a start up or anything like that, but since you asked for overnight success, I think the Kony 2012 stuff is a good example of that.

Are you kidding me? Did you even watch the video? Correct me if I'm wrong, but they've been trying to get him forever, and they still don't have him, so I wouldnt call that a success. Eyeballs != success. Accomplishing a higher goal (ie catching kony, making huge profit, getting acquired) == success.

Also, invisible children has been hustling for years without a huge 'hit'.

Cheezburger took off in the first couple months.

Something like iFart perhaps? I guess facebook was also a very quick success.

Zuckerberg was already a great programmer before Facebook, and had a number of successful projects under his belt. Facebook also took years to build, its growth was not anything like what Pinterest has been experiencing.

whats kind of successful projects he got under his belt? And define success -- monetary, or huge userbase, or both or what?

Mark (along with D'Angelo) developed Synapse (a media player) in high-school that learned what you listened to and created a playlist. They were being offered $1million to $2million for it.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/6/10/mark-e-zuckerber...

Great, but one project would be considered "number of successful".

If we're talking zero to crazy scale: Formspring.

They went from zero to 70 million daily pageviews in 90 days.

The domain Formspring.me was registered Nov 12, 2009. They hit 69 million pageviews on February 11, 2010. They did 1.8 billion pageviews that February.

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