Dr. Lemma@DoctorLemma
20 years ago, a student in England made a million dollars in five months. His setup cost was fifty dollars. His idea took two days to build. And it almost lost out to a pouch for used chewing gum.
Alex Tew was 21 years old, living at home in Wiltshire, England, and about to start a business degree at the University of Nottingham. One night he lay in bed with a notepad and tried to think of the cheapest thing he could sell a million of. He wrote down dozens of ideas. One of them was a small pouch for used chewing gum. He kept going.
Then he thought of pixels.
His idea was simple to the point of absurdity. Build a webpage with one million pixels arranged in a grid. Sell each pixel for one dollar. Buyers could place any image they wanted in their space and link it to their own website. The whole thing cost him fifty dollars to set up.
He asked his friends and family to buy the first blocks. That raised enough to hire a small press agency to send out a single press release. The press release was picked up by newspapers. The newspapers were picked up by media around the world. Within weeks companies and individuals from every corner of the internet were buying space on a page that was, by any conventional measure, completely absurd.
At its peak he was making a hundred thousand dollars in a single day.
By January 2006, one thousand pixels remained. He auctioned them on eBay. They sold for thirty-eight thousand dollars.
Total earnings: one million and thirty-seven thousand dollars. From a notepad. In five months. At age 21.
He never went back to finish his degree.
He later co-founded Calm, a meditation app now valued at over a billion dollars.
