The very first crowd funding site! @tewy bankrolled his college education by selling 10x10 pixels of his webpage for $100 each. The Million Dollar Homepage became a viral hit and sold out in a little over 4 months! Now @tewy is the CEO of Calm.com. Would love for him to share his lessons learned and if any of those lessons helped with his new startup.
@BlendahTom I was actually working on an online relaxation site right before I created MDHP. This was early 2005. Even by that time, I had been thinking of bringing relaxation/meditation tools to the web for many years. I had been using progressive muscle relaxation CDs as a teenager and really enjoyed the experience and benefits.
So anyway in 2005 I built this prototype, but it was all text driven. Words would come up on the screen in sequence instructing you how to relax. There was nice (static) imagery, and some music. But I never launched it. It wasn't quite right and I ran out of cash to pay the flash developer who was helping me with it. So I shelved the idea.
Then I had a brainstorm one night that summer, and MDHP was born. I went on a very different path from that point onward. I created a bunch of projects, mostly about trying to follow up MDHP and prove I wasn't a one-hit wonder! (not the best motivator, it turns out). It was then in 2011 I launched a fun viral project called DoNothingfor2minutes.com that reached 2 million folks in its first week.
It really hit a nerve and got my thinking, maybe now it the right time to do this relaxation/meditation idea. Especially with the mobile revolution in full swing (the perfect venue for this type of product). So thus Calm was born. I came full circle. It feels like I was destined to create this company. And I'm really excited, because it is by far and away the most positive and meaningful thing I've worked on in my life.
@mattlanham that's awesome.. dare I ask which site it's pointing to?
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@BlendahTom I owned a web design company at the time, so I bought it to point to that, no additional sales came from it, but was good to get involved :)
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Calm
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Calm
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Calm
Zoey
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