If 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.
Ha, 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, 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.
I stumbled across AutoTempest while doing some research to see whether or not auto search aggregators were popular here in the U.S. I was planning on creating a similar service for my home country, but grad school has started and I'm having less and less time :(
Anyways, keep up the awesome work, and I'm glad it has all worked out for you!
In case anyone else was curious, so far 766 people have clicked that link (over the past ~9 hours). (The AutoTempest one I buried at the end of my other reply has 106 so far.) Quite a bit more than I expected, given that this story only has 200 upvotes or so, and I'm sure only a small fraction of viewers would click the link. A lot of HN lurkers out there!
The more hostile the environment, the more lurkers there are. I read HN daily, but never comment because if you don't speak what the hivemind likes, they downvote you.
But 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.
I'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!
I'll tell you one way a lot of indie fashion brands, mobile apps, and bedroom music producers are doing it right now.
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(!) :)
It's mostly sarcasm, but Uber is one example of several companies whose business model was to disrupt an entrenched industry by providing more value than they were charging for, capture market share, then raise prices. Basically, initially it was cheaper to take an Uber than a Taxi. Currently that's no longer the case.
In many cities it is still cheaper to Uber than Taxi. Personally I know it is cheaper to Uber than taxi in San Francisco, Stockholm, Cluj (Romania), Prague, and Brussels.
> 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.
I live in Hungary where the taxis are pretty cheap but you have to call them, and there's not guarantee that you'll get someone who can speak English.
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.
While the lower price was nice, one of the biggest selling points for Uber with me was convenience and a guaranteed minimum level of quality. While Uber is as cheap and convenient as ever for me (in and around DC), the quality has seriously suffered. I've been in some pretty beat Uber cars, and one time the driver got out to pee behind the car.
A taxi driver has to rent a medallion and a car (because they can't just use the one they already own) and needs to charge extra for trips across city limits (because they're barred from picking up anyone in another city). It's not predatory pricing when your lower prices are due to lower costs.
A taxi driver in my state has to rent nothing, has to only get insurance and a drivers license allowing them to transport people (which is basically 50$), and there’s two dozen competing services.
Don’t assume your local shitty laws are an issue everywhere.
Predatory pricing is only illegal if you are a monopoly, or part of a price-fixing cartel. Simply selling something for less than cost is 100% legal, although as a business strategy it requires deep pockets, and if or when you raise prices you risk alienating your customers...
Clarification, having checked after being down-voted. It is also illegal if the below-cost pricing strategy can be shown to have been implemented with the express purpose of driving competitors out of business. This intent is the important thing, it would be fine to sell below cost to gain customers for a new market, or to encourage network effects, and if that had the unintended side effect of causing a competing company to fail this is fine.
My understanding is that these cases are usually very hard to prove, unless you have 'smoking gun' evidence of some kind.
I remember this at the time -- Tew invested the initial earnings he made (<£2,000 IIRC) from selling ad space to friends and family into buying media coverage, which kickstarted the whole thing.
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.
I seem to recall reading that Tew spent up to 20% of his targeted million dollars on PR[1]. Which would suggest that he had a very good understanding of page views being the important ingredient, a good story for traditional media being important (more so at the time) to get there, and more faith in what he was doing than anyone else that had the idea of creating a pure web page billboard.
[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."
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.
Thousands of people send their press releases out every day, and most of them are never seen again. I stand by my assertion that it was largely a matter of luck, and while Tew no doubt knew he needed publicity, he had no reliably repeatable way of getting it. He was very fortunate with a dumb idea that fit someone's need for a good story at the time. There are thousands, maybe millions, of other dumb ideas that would make equally good stories but are not picked up. Statistically, it would indeed have been a better move for Tew to take the money and sit on it, just as it is a better move for a lottery player to save their $2. But it's certainly a lot more fun to gamble it. And unlike a lottery winner, in business if you win with a dumb idea, you not only profit, you look like some kind of savant.
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.
Almost being the operative word here. Compared to the eventual payoff, yes, almost nothing. But I'll bet Tew actually spent quite a bit of time working on the idea, time he might've spent on something else with much better prospects for success. He's a classic case of survivor's bias: we only know about him because he was successful. We don't know about the thousands of others that pursued similarly dumb ideas (maybe even the same one) and failed.
"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.
I 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, 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.
Twitter is pretty strict when it comes to bots and apparently they didn't like Terence's behavior(automatic following, lots of similar replies) and his tweets were no longer showing up in peoples timelines (replies).
I saw that and smiled. Panicked for a second, since this is old code in a dead framework, but thankfully the framework creators were smarter enough to cover for me. =3
I 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."
There needs to be a shock value. And associated number. Imagine of: "Best 15 cents I've ever spent. So, anyone want to chat?" showed how many views/impressions/clicks. You're following the classic "Chalkboard in a Bar" where you can leave a message for a dollar -> users will do that, since they can see the 50 people that they are paying to reach.
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.
I 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.
Ironically, the completionist in me would be stressed out knowing there's new content waiting for me everyday. I'd feel compelled to listen to the day's new audio track before it has a chance to pile up over a week, which makes for good business, but would personally stress me out and ruin the whole point of Calm and similar mindfulness services. I'm probably just a weirdo edge case, though :]
You're definitely not a weirdo edge case, I think we all feel something like that around email, facebook notifications etc, and it's something we very consciously want to avoid in our product.
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!
It's a time-consuming but relatively harmless foible.
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 quite agree. I like the repetitive edge of Headspace. Although I have to say that I don't feel compelled to do all of it. I know it's not a test and if I push myself to do things then it lessens the benefit.
1. The thing that makes headspace worth it for me is Andy Puddicome. I'm British and listening to his vaguely northern accent is very calming. It's a fine balance whether you find listening to the same voice every day irritating or helpful.
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.
I'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.
I'm sure it's very popular in the west. Traditional mindfulness meditation requires only your body, that's it. Leave it to marketing to make you think you need to create a perfect environment (clothes, smells, sights, sounds, tools) in order to meditate.
You're missing just how easy it is to write a quick script that downloads all the content and stores it on your hard drive. Subscribe for a month, write the script in an hour or so, unsubscribe, and you're done. I did this for one of these services and the most annoying thing was correcting the inconsistent names they gave their audio files.
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.
Yeah, stealing. I downloaded HackerNews once and no one else could see it until they made a new one. /s
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.
You don't miss anything. The whole point of guided meditation is to get you in the habit to meditate and to tell you what to focus on (breath, body sensations, rising and vanishing of thoughts and emotions). New content on guided meditations? Sounds like the exact opposite of what one tries to achieve.
The 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!
I'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/7215763613331...
My 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!
The 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.
In 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"
Calm 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
I 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.
For 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."
"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! :)
Well, 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.
They 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.
Makes 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.
I 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.
There'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.
