Today I thought that I would be researching the a tiny bit of internet history, but stumbled upon one of the most interesting entrepreneurial stories I’ve ever heard.
Picture this – you are about to go to university but have absolutely no money in your bank account, what do you do? Alex Tew had one of the most creative and successful answers to that question ever. Instead of getting a job at a local restaurant or taking out student loans, Tew went to work brainstorming. Over the course of one night in 2005 he had an idea that would change his life forever.
Tew spent his last $100 on a webpage. With this webpage, Tew had decided to sell 10×10 (or larger) chunks of the homepage as advertising space. Tew named the webpage Million Dollar Homepage. He began reaching out to friends and family so the page would gain traction. Buzz about the page began in internet chatrooms but quickly spread to local media. It wasn’t long before international media companies began talking about the page, and within two weeks he made the amount of money three years at university would cost him.
Small businesses and individuals wanted to be a part of this so badly because of the sheer novelty and the chance to be a part of internet history. It’s difficult to find a contemporary equivalent to the popularity of the million dollar homepage, but think NFT/Cryptocurrency craze of 2021. To get an idea of how popular this page was, it got so much traffic that Tew had to hire two people to help him maintain it, PayPal shut his account down because of the excessive volume, he sold the last 10×10 chunk for nearly $40,000 on eBay, and he reached the million dollar goal within five months. And just like that, Alex Tew had gone from broke to millionaire.
You might think that’s the last we heard from the founder of the Million Dollar Homepage, but Alex Tew was far from finished.
Like any reasonable twenty year old who had just made a million dollars, Alex dropped out of school by December and began trying to repeat his success. His first few attempts at starting a company were essentially copies of the Million Dollar Homepage, but the novelty had worn off and people realized that they didn’t get their moneys worth out of the advertisement. It took about four recreations for Tew to understand that this was no longer a viable business model.
During this period, people close to Tew noticed that he was losing his way, with one friend saying that he started thinking in a “different way”. Alex understandably felt immense pressure to come up with an even more successful idea, but the repeated failures began to take a toll on his mental state. The stress of expectations to repeat his success caused Alex to lose sight of who he was, and drove him to stop doing the things that made him happy and healthy. One of those things was meditation. Meditation had been a part of Alex’s daily life for as long as he could remember, but he had replaced meditation with working on get rich quick schemes. The effects of this were not good for Alex, he continued to get more stressed and had more trouble sleeping. In 2011 he realized it was time for a change.
That big change came in the form of a move to San Francisco with his friend. Once in the Bay Area, Tew and his friend realized that millions of other people had issues that were similar to them. People were becoming stressed out and had no healthy outlet to release this stress. Tew recognized the need for information about meditation and guided meditations. A lot of people wanted to reduce stress and live more intentional lives, but didn’t really know how.
In 2013, Tew launched the app Calm, which provided information about meditation and prerecorded guided meditations. Calm was much unlike any of his other ventures, Alex believed in the mission of this one and there was a genuine need for it. Revenue began at $100,000 in the first year, and rose to $2 million within two years. In 2017 Calm won Apple’s “App of the Year”, which helped boost their already impressive user base. From that point Calm continued on its journey of becoming a household name. Today, Calm has over 4 million active users and is valued at $2 billion. I think it’s safe to say that everything worked out extremely well for Alex Tew, he just needed to follow what made him passionate.
Tew’s motto is “see what everyone else is doing and do the opposite”. When everyone else in the tech industry was focused on developing gimmicks and social media, Tew was creating a platform for meditation. People struggled to take him seriously at first, but he believed in his vision and persisted until it worked. When speaking about his other post-MDH businesses, Alex said “keep trying, you learn lessons with each business venture.” This iteration of Alex’s entrepreneurial process has shown the lessons that he has learned, how much he has matured as an entrepreneur, the importance of believing in yourself, and why entrepreneurs must persevere.
Alex Tew is a case of someone who has strong entrepreneurial instincts but needed to find the right focus and mindset.
1. Entrepreneur. “The Million-Dollar Homepage: A Case Study in Entrepreneurship.” Accessed on Mar 4th 2024. Available at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/starting-a-business/the-million-dollar-home-page-entrepreneurcom/82936
2. LinkedIn. “The Story of the Guy Who Made $1 Million at 21 and Created a $2 Billion App.” Accessed on [Mar 4th 2024]. Available at: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/story-guy-who-made-1-million-21-created-2-billion-app-rene-remsik/]
3. BBC Worklife. “The Man Behind the Million-Dollar Homepage.” Accessed on [Mar 4th 2024]. Available at: [https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20160914-the-man-behind-the-million-dollar-homepage]
4. OpenAI. “GPT-3: Language Models for Text Generation.” Available at: [https://chat.openai.com]