In 2005, Alex Tew, a student from the UK, was concerned about one goal: to earn enough money to pay for a three-year business management course at the University of Nottingham. Of course, he could have taken out a bank loan or got a part-time job, but decided to experiment with one idea that seemed promising to him. Little could Tew have imagined that instead of the amount of several thousand dollars he had hoped for, he would soon become a dollar millionaire.
Who is Alex Tew?
Alex Tew was born in 1984 in the south of England in the county of Wiltshire. In his picturesque provincial town, he has been trying to earn money for entertainment since childhood. Tew was good at drawing, and at the age of eight he began selling hand-drawn comics to his school friends for $5 apiece, offering a chocolate bar as a bonus. He also loved reading, was interested in psychology and self-development from an early age, and since adolescence he has read everything he could find on these topics, from improving memory to increasing concentration and creativity.
At the age of fourteen, Tew began to meditate. “Even then, I thought that all these practices should be available online; everyone should have the opportunity to go to some website and get the necessary knowledge,” Hugh said. Back then, he could not have imagined that, in a few years, the scale of Internet development would exceed all his expectations and his childhood dreams would become reality.Visit. A F R I N I K . C O M. For the full article.
After graduating from high school, Tew enrolled at the University of Nottingham and began a three-year business management course. Still, he was not particularly happy with the prospect of paying off his student loan for many years, and Tew did not want to work part-time in a bar somewhere, as his classmates did, because it would take up a lot of time, which, in his opinion, It would be wiser to spend on training. And then the idea came to his mind – to create a website that could make money. Tew didn’t know what would happen, but he hoped that he would be able to earn his own tuition.
What was the web page that brought you a million dollars?
Tew started experimenting with creating websites very early, ever since he got his first computer, and even launched the world’s first beatboxing forum, which brought together fans of this type of vocal art from all over the world. But when the development of the Internet began to take place at a rapid pace, and many other similar sites appeared, Tew sold this site and began to set larger goals for himself.
Late on a summer evening in 2005, Tew lay in bed with a notebook in his hands and considered various ways to earn money online. He came up with dozens of ideas, but none of them seemed good to him. Then he started thinking about cheap things that he could sell for one dollar to earn his tuition. And suddenly he had a brilliant idea: he decided to create a web page with lots of small pixels that he could sell for advertising for a dollar apiece. And then I thought, why only a few thousand pixels? You can make a million of them!
He paid $50 for hosting, and two days later, the Million Dollar Homepage website appeared online, consisting of just one page, on which Tew placed a web banner with the site’s name and a counter displaying the number of pixels sold, as well as an empty square grid of a million pixels divided into 10,000 blocks of 100 pixels.. Thus, customers could buy one pixel for a dollar or a whole block of 100 pixels and place an image or logo of their choice on it with a link to their resource. He promised clients that the site would remain online for five years, that is, at least until August 2010. How did the website that Tew created from nothing develop?
The first sale occurred three days after the website was launched. A friend of Tew’s, the owner of an online music website, purchased the advertising space. He immediately bought 400 pixels in a 20×20 block, then Tew’s relatives and other friends joined the purchases. Two weeks later, a total of 4,700 pixels were sold. Initially, the site was promoted only by word of mouth, but soon Tew posted a press release online, which was unexpectedly picked up by the BBC. After that, information about the site began to spread online like a virus. By the end of the first month, Alex Tew’s name was already well known; he received 250 thousand dollars, and his website took third place in the list of “Influential companies” on Alexa Internet, second only to the popular Britney Spears and Photo District News sites.
Two months after the launch of the Million Dollar Homepage, more than half of the pixels were sold to 1,400 advertisers, including major companies such as The Times, a chain of beer stores. Beer.com and Yahoo! – one of the largest brands of that time. By the new year, Tew reported that the site was visited by 25,000 unique users per hour, and they had already sold 999,000 out of a million pixels. After the New Year, Tew announced that due to the huge demand, he decided to put the last 1,000 pixels up for auction on eBay. The auction lasted ten days and received 99 real bids. Although many of them were withdrawn by the bidders or cancelled as hoaxes, the winning bid of the online store selling weight loss products was $ 38,100.
How did the life of the brilliant Alex Tew turn out?
So in less than five months, the Million Dollar Homepage project brought its creator a profit of $ 1,037,100, and from a poor student living with his parents, 21-year-old Tew turned into a millionaire. It was a get-rich-quick scheme that really worked, but after that there was a lull; the site was no longer making money. Then Tew dropped out of university, moved to London, and launched several new projects, counting on his popularity and former luck, but failed to repeat the success.
This affected his mental health; he became depressed and went to live with his friend in San Francisco, where he joined his business. Meditation, which he had been practicing since childhood, helped him get out of depression. And then Tew decided to build on this and release a functional meditation application that would take into account all human needs.
It was not easy for him to promote this project among people who work in the field of technology and, as a rule, are far from meditating, but he managed to attract attention to his product and earn 1.5 million dollars, which he invested in the creation of the Calm company. Founded in 2012 with his friend Michael Acton Smith and specializing in the development of digital products for maintaining health, this company has over time become one of the global market leaders in the field of wellness technologies.
