
The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later - bartkappenburg
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160914-the-man-behind-the-million-dollar-homepage
======
tempestn
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.

~~~
DanHulton
That's amazing. What's the actual business?

~~~
keltex
It's in his profile:
[http://www.searchtempest.com/](http://www.searchtempest.com/)

~~~
tempestn
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](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.

~~~
point78
This is incredible, I've been using your site for 5 years and I've always
wondered "i wonder how much this site profits per month"

Any way I can get this half decade long question answered? :)

~~~
tempestn
Glad you like the site! It makes enough that I can keep investing in
improvements, while support my family comfortably and saving for a rainy day.

~~~
mysterydip
I've always wondered who created that site. I've used it to search for cars
and parts for years! Thanks! :)

------
vannevar
_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.

~~~
JohnHammersley
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.

~~~
notahacker
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

------
mtmail
"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
He comes from Wiltshire. SF is very different.

'bucolic' is the only word I've heard to describe the village I grew up in.

------
DanHulton
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](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.

~~~
vnglst
I had a similar "dumb" 1 million dollar idea, but with a emoji money and a
Twitter bot called Terence:
[https://twitter.com/helpterence](https://twitter.com/helpterence)

Sofar he has raised almost 8000, but I'm also looking for a way to get it out
there!

~~~
GuiA
Love silly twitter bots like that. This is adorable!

~~~
vnglst
Thanks, I appreciate it!! They're a lot of fun to create as well, you never
know how people are going to interact with them.

And I really hope that some day Terence's campaign really takes off without me
really noticing it.

~~~
taftster
What's the story behind the staying low from the "twitter police"?
[https://twitter.com/helpterence/status/774672966961561600](https://twitter.com/helpterence/status/774672966961561600)

~~~
vnglst
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).

------
seren
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.

Can someone shed light on what I am missing ?

~~~
coderholic
[Disclosure: I'm CTO at Calm]

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.

~~~
bitsoda
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 :]

~~~
coderholic
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!

~~~
OJFord

       > Each Daily Calm session is available for that day only,
       > so you either listen to it or you don't.
    

I'm really not in the target audience at all, but doesn't that make the
situation described by the parent commenter _worse_?

"Agh! Better listen quick or it's gone forever!"

~~~
manarth
At least there's no worry about the ever-increasing number (and increasing
time-investment) of missed episodes to catch up on.

I say this as the guy who wakes up in the morning with 500-800 overnight
missed tweets, and then patiently reads through them.

~~~
softawre
That sounds awful.

~~~
manarth
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.

~~~
OJFord
I used to do that; then I realised the way I was using Twitter wasn't
scalable, stopped, and realised Twitter wasn't for me.

I still have it, but mostly just use it to contact customer service
departments - seems to be the most painless way these days.

------
bsharitt
Only 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.

------
robbiemitchell
This is a great PR play -- leverage the founder's origin story as a hook for
the real point: promoting the app.

~~~
volatilitish
We need a more intelligent adblock that spots and blocks things like this :)

~~~
softawre
It would then block hacker news for promoting YC, right?

------
levelist_com
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!

------
fudged71
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...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/printtopeer/sets/72157636133314925/)

------
DonHopkins
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!

[1] [http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/steve-
martins-p...](http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/steve-martins-
penis-beauty-creme/n10590)

[2]
[https://www.amazon.com/Ausilium-27337-Orchidometer/dp/B00F37...](https://www.amazon.com/Ausilium-27337-Orchidometer/dp/B00F37FJA6)

------
whamlastxmas
BBC uses an iStock image in their article, complete with watermark? Seriously?

~~~
manarth
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.

~~~
whamlastxmas
My 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
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"

------
rconti
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

~~~
exadeci
You only use the screen to start a session and it's better with headphones

~~~
rconti
Ah, the pretty pictures shown as demonstrations of the app led me astray!

------
nyrulez
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.

------
edpichler
Lesson learned: it's not the complexity of an idea that will make it valuable.

------
Bakary
There'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.

------
sha256md5
So pretty much a long winded advertisement for his company.

~~~
mtmail
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."

~~~
estefan
If you win the lottery and think it was because of something you did, well...

~~~
coldtea
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.

------
sharemywin
I remember reading the blog and thought it was cool how the story progressed.

------
leejoramo
Wonder how many of the links on this page are still active.

~~~
kingofspain
At least one is still going strong (I worked there at the time they bought
in).

------
DonHopkins
I'm working on my second million.

I gave up on my first.

------
plg
is the "lifetime" subscription just a hail-mary money-grab?

~~~
celticninja
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.

~~~
manarth
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.

