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The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

bbc.com

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Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#11

Post by contingencies »

seren wrote: post #9

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 missin…

App has social/word of mouth buzz, is instant gratification, and is easy to pay for.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#12

Post by DigitalJack »

seren wrote: post #9

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 missin…

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.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#14

Post by PatentTroll »

seren wrote: post #9

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 missin…

Yup, I actually paid for two of these services before I realized they're just audio content. Great business for them, bad product for me.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#15

Post by brianbreslin »

seren wrote: post #9

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 missin…

Spotify has some tracks in there on guided meditation as well.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#16

Post by coderholic »

seren wrote: post #9

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 missin…

[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.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#17

Post by coldtea »

seren wrote: post #9

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 missin…

>Can someone shed light on what I am missing ?

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.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#18

Post by 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, 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.

Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later

#20

Post by scoot »

mtmail wrote: post #4
sha256md5 wrote: post #2

So pretty much a long winded advertisement for his company.

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! :)

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