This is a great PR play -- leverage the founder's origin story as a hook for the real point: promoting the app.
The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
51–60 of 133 posts
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#52I 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…
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.
Also, best phrase from the article:
the meditation and mindfulness industry
Somehow absurd.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#53I 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.
Whoever "Kev" is, I gotta say: I like your dedication. =3
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#54So pretty much a long winded advertisement for his company.
Sponsored content. http://www.hulu.com/watch/873050 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.
It's the BBC. Sponsored content isn't allowed.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#55But 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.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#56But 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…
Agreed, kind of like gambling.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome! (: https://web.archive.org/web/20140310144412/http://ipaidthemo...
You can actually link right to the individual entries from the site: http://www.ipaidthemost.com/history/32 (Go to history in the dropdown, then click on the entry in question.)
Cool, thanks.
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.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#58But 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…
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!
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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!"
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#60But 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…
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 Ol…
> Sell $1 bills for $0.90. That worked really well for Uber. It can work for you too!
Huh? What's the story there?