The post below was originally published on the SaaS Decoded substack, if you enjoy this post, consider visiting the Substack and subscribing.
Enjoy.
-Justin Butlion
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.
UNFORTUNATELY I'VE HIT THE LIMIT ON IBUILDINPUBLIC, VISIT THE SUBSTACK TO READ THE REST.
Thanks for reading,
Justin
