In 2005 Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, had an idea.
To help raise money for his university studies he would launch a website consisting of 1 million pixels organized into a 1,000 x 1,000 grid; and sell 10 x 10 blocks for $1 per pixel.
The Million Dollar Homepage went live on the 26th August 2005 and quickly became an internet phenomenon. By the 11th January 2006 the final 1,000 pixels were sold via an eBay auction for $38,100, bringing Alex’s total tally from the website to $1,037,100.
A few days ago a somewhat similar story went viral on X.
Jonathan Wilke, a German indie developer launched Outbid.lol, a simple leaderboard-style website where individuals or businesses could bid for placement on the leaderboard. If you wanted to be #1 on the leaderboard, you’d need to pay an amount higher than the amount paid by the current leader.
On the surface the idea sounds really silly. Why would a business spend money to be on a new website with no organic traffic, authority, backlinks, or brand awareness.
Well reader, the idea worked.
The website went viral and at the time of writing this post (less than 4 days since it went live) over 1.2 million people have visited the site.
Over 1,100 bids have been placed in the hope of capturing some of the traffic hitting the site. The highest bid so far, $15,000 😳.
As the screenshot above shows, Jonathan has earned $177,506 so far from his viral site, an incredible +-$45k a day from a website that took him about 3 hours to build.
Just like in the case of Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage, many developers have cloned Outbid trying their luck to make a quick buck. The vast majority will fail and none will get even close to the financial success Jonathan has seen.
I think when unique situations like Outbid.lol come around it’s useful to analyze the situation and learn what we can.
The rest of this post is going to do just that.
Why did Outbid.lol succeed?
Every day thousands, if not tens of thousands of developers launch new projects and the vast majority never make any money.
Apparently someone launched a version of Outbid back in 2024. It made a few thousand dollars but never went viral anywhere close to the level we’ve seen with Outbid.lol.
So what makes Outbid.lol special?
In my opinion it was a combination of factors, fortunate timing and some luck.
The success factors of Outbid.lol
In the New York Times best seller, The Tipping Point, it’s author, Malcolm Gladwell makes the argument that for ideas to go viral multiple factors need to be in place.
I believe that for special situations like Outbid to occur, there needs to be multiple factors working together to create outsized effects.
Some of these factors are directly influenced by the creator, while others are external.
Below are the success factors of Outbid as I see them.
Novelty
World-class execution
Simple concept that’s easy to share
Easy to use, low barrier to entry, and repeatable
Transparency and real-time reporting
Leveraging human psychology (inclusivity, ego, the game show effect)
Distribution desperation
Existing audience
Launching on X
“If he can do it, so can I”
Novelty
Unfortunately one of the outcomes of AI’s meteoric rise is more and more crap stealing our attention. When a new, interesting idea captures our attention it has an impact.
We are now living in a world of mass produced content and cloning. New ideas are rarer and will therefore stand out.
World-class execution
I think one of the most important factors in my list is Jonathan’s world-class execution.
Not only did the website look great, but everything from the color scheme, branding, domain name, layout and placement of elements was executed perfectly.
I must have visited the site more than 20 times and it was never down, slow to open, or bugging out in anyway.
As the site continued to get traffic Jonathan made minor improvements which added to the experience.
At one point the volume of traffic forced Jonathan to switch over to a different analytics provider. He made the switch quickly and did everything he could to prevent the viral flywheel from slowing down.
It’s one thing to “catch lightning in a bottle” but executing the idea at a world-class level makes a huge difference.
As you’ll read throughout the rest of this post, Jonathan’s decision making was spot on and his choices helped maximize the virality of Outbid.lol.
Simple concept that’s easy to share
Another important factor is that Outbid.lol is a simple idea that anyone can understand and explain to another in a sentence or two.
Complex ideas typically stay in their niches and get adopted very slowly, if ever. Consumer trends that go mega viral are almost always simple concepts.
Easy to use, low barrier to entry, and repeatable
One of the smart decisions Jonathan made was allowing anyone to make a purchase at Outbid.lol. Some buyers promoted their Substack newsletters, X profiles, or even sub-reddits.
Even though the main action was for the top 3 slots on the site, over 1,100 businesses and individuals bought placements on the leaderboard. For just $1 you could be part of the action.
The use of Stripe for easy payment processing was an obvious but powerful choice. Anyone with a credit card or Link account could make a purchase in just a few clicks.
To help maximize revenue, Jonathan allowed businesses to compete for placement over and over again. I saw some businesses spend over $10,000 multiple times trying to stay #1.
Not only was Outbid like a game but the players could play over and over again.
Transparency and real-time reporting
One of the under appreciated factors to Outbid’s success was the clever use of numbers throughout the site, and in Jonathan’s real-time reporting on X.
By being so transparent, passive observers like myself could quickly see that the site was legit and take part in the experience.
The 2 most important numbers on the site: Live count of visitors and the price to claim #1.
The first number, the live count, shows that the site went viral and was getting a ton of attention. By being one of hundreds of people looking at it, you felt you were looking at something special.
The second number, the price to claim #1 on the leaderboard, has a shock effect to most people, especially since it passed 5 figures.
Spending $50 for a listing isn’t a big deal, but $10k+? That’s remarkable.
Since going live, Jonathan has been posting frequent updates on X. Not only did this bring him a ton of new followers, but it was entertaining to occasionally visit his profile to read up on the latest with the site.
It was kind of like the experience of watching a news broadcaster sharing regular updates on a big news story.
Whenever changes were made to the site, Jonathan would post about them.
Leveraging human psychology
The most successful marketers in the world understand human behavior and psychology at a very high level.
I could write a thousand words just on how Outbid.lol taps into our lizard brains but here are just some ways the site achieves its goals through psychology.
Inclusivity - We all want to be part of trends. Our desire to be part of the crowd is biological and very powerful. Jonathan’s decision to allow people to continue buying slots even as the cost rose was very smart. Hundreds of people spent $1 - $50 each just to be on the board and part of the story.
Ego - We all know that those with money like to show off their money. Businesses buy billboards, have their own conferences and spend money in funny ways even when the ROI is clearly not there. Outbid provided the place for businesses with cash lying around to be #1 on a leaderboard in front of hundreds of thousands of other builders and tech operators. Tapping into our egos is a tactic used by marketers since the very start of commerce.
The “game show effect” - There is a reason game shows are popular. They are not only entertaining but if done well, allow the audience to compete for themselves in their own minds. Outbid was almost fully transparent and updating in near real-time. All around the world indie developers and digital entrepreneurs could watch the action from the comfort of their homes, see a fellow builder making tens of thousands of dollars and try and work out how the hell he did it.
Distribution desperation
The tech world is currently suffering from “distribution desperation”. There is a massive attention supply demand problem and it’s only getting worse.
Since building software has become relatively simple, even for non-technical people, the number of new SaaS, directories, landing pages, marketplaces and other types of websites is exploding.
Most of these new projects are being bootstrapped so there isn’t capital available for paid marketing. This leaves only a few viable growth channels namely social media, search engine optimization (SEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), product-led growth and cold outbound.
Most indie developers aren’t marketers and don’t enjoy it.
I don’t blame them, marketing is hard, takes a lot of consistent work with little to show for it, and most channels are tough to master.
Most tech businesses are desperate for distribution and looking for ways to get more eyeballs on their apps.
Outbid was a new shinny way to get some eyeballs to your app so many businesses jumped at the opportunity.
If you’re going to open a hotdog stand, the best place you can open it is close to a starving crowd.
Jonathan’s Outbid.lol offered increasingly more expensive hotdogs to a very hungry crowd.
I still haven’t seen a post on X showing the ROI of being listed on Outbid but that’s a point for a different newsletter.
Existing audience
For a trend to reach a tipping point it needs fuel to get started.
I believe Jonathan’s existing audience did help get the ball rolling but it’s in no way a critical factor. I think if his audience was 1/10th of its size Outbid would have still gone viral and performed more or less the same as it has.
If I’m not mistaken, Jonathan had around 12k followers on X when he launched outbid.lol which is a sizable audience and it definitely helped get things moving.
Launching on X
The fact that Jonathan launched on X made a big difference.
X is a platform built for virality and is also very popular among the target audience of Outbid. As I previously mentioned, Jonathan’s existing audience definitely helped get the word out and start the viral flywheel spinning on X.
if Jonathan had launched on LinkedIn, or Instagram, instead of X, I probably wouldn’t be writing this post.
“If he can do it, so can I”
Another psychological factor that needs to be listed on it’s own is the fact that Outbid is so simple that anyone with experience with Claude, Cursor, or has the patience to learn vibe-coding could build it.
I estimate the setup costs for the site to be under $30 (not including time to build it).
Within 48 hours of going live, over 100 clones of Outbid had been created and X was flooded by their creators trying their hardest to drive traffic to their leaderboard sites.
It was funny to see some of these cloners bidding on other clone sites trying to drive traffic from one bidding site to another.
I even saw founders running multi-million dollar ARR SaaS jumping on the bandwagon. This shows the powerful psychological need to be part of trends. The vast majority of these clone sites won’t recover their costs and be a waste of time.
My favorite clone? Warmap.
The fact that Outbid’s target audience were fellow builders and the site itself could be built by that audience in a few hours is a very unique situation.
The fact that Jonathan made over 6-figures in 3 days from a site he built in 3 hours is making a lot of builders question a lot of things.
Outbid.lol is not a business, it’s a special situation
I’m probably going to get some hate for this section of the post but bare with me and let me make my case.
Outbid.lol is one of those rare “flash in a pan” type situations that is entertaining to watch while its happening but will inevitably die. Remember Pokémon Go? Same thing. It worked when a large number of people were vested in it but it becomes just a memory once the hype dies down.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Jonathan was smart to try his luck and I’m happy for him that it worked. He not only made a lot of money in a short period of time, but boosted his personal brand to a level that you can’t easily quantify.
If he plays his cards right, the notoriety he has gained from Outbid.lol will bring him far more than the revenue the site will generate.
I think we are so lucky to be living in a world where someone with a laptop can publish a website in 3 hours and make 6-figures in 72 hours but it’s also important to accept these are special situations and not replicable.
The message I want to get across to my fellow builders is that Outbid is a special situation, not a business. If your goal is to build wealth, gain financial freedom, and have the financial resources to make a positive impact in the lives of others, for the love of god, don’t try and clone Outbid.
instead focus on building a scalable, sustainable business that can weather storms and provide value to a market over the long run. Those of you that already have one of those, wish Jonathan well and get back to work.
That’s it for this week, thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next one.
Justin
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