I'm working on my second million.
I gave up on my first.
The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
121–130 of 133 posts
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#122My 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...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Ausilium-27337-Orchidometer/dp/B00F37...
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Predatory Pricing. Something Uber did, which is illegal, but they will likely never get fined for it.
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.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds awful.
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 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.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Do you have any examples of this, or how to get in touch with someone who is doing this?
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#126Calm 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
You only use the screen to start a session and it's better with headphones
Ah, the pretty pictures shown as demonstrations of the app led me astray!
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#127But 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 remember this at the time -- Tew invested the initial earnings he made ( 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.
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.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#128But 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…
Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea An idea that costs almost nothing to do with almost nothing to lose.
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.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
>At least in Portland, I've never taken a taxi in my life, but have taken probably a dozen Ubers. Which is one reason why Uber is winning. You do not even bother to check taxi fares. I checked Uber rates to get to the airport. Not cheaper than taxi - about the same.
> 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.
Re: The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's in his profile: http://www.searchtempest.com/
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.