I’m sure many of you have heard of Alex Tew and his creation, the Million Dollar Homepage. Alex had a unique idea to create a website and sell advertising using a “per pixel” format to raise one million dollars. At a glance it seemed like a crazy idea but to Alex’s joy it was crazy enough to work. He managed to drum up enough publicity to gain traction, his idea exploded and he made his million dollars (and then sum!).
At my other blog, Entrepreneur’s Journey we took part by conducting a marketing experiment and purchased some pixel space back when the website was about half way to one million (look for the little “Y”, that’s us).
What I particularly like about Alex’s concept was not that he made one million dollars from a simple website – it was because he created a whole new ad format. Before his site the “pixel ad” was no where to be seen (at least I had never seen it) and after Alex you could find pixel ads all over the place.
Of course there were copycats and I wonder sometimes at the stupidity of some people thinking they could replicate his success with half baked ideas for “top lists” or special “once-in-a-life-time-be-part-of-internet-history” formats that were, well, not that remarkable and clearly hoping to cash in on the fad. If you had any business sense you would realize that it was never going to work directly copying the million dollar homepage – it was a once-in-a-lifetime website.
After Alex’s site I noticed some websites started testing using small blocks of pixels ads to sell advertising space in areas where they might otherwise have not made any money from. I stumbled across a few blogs using pixel ads too. Then there were the software makers who caught on with the fad by creating ready-to-go pixel ad website packages that instantly created a million dollar homepage lookalikes, which is a much better idea than actually trying to replicate the one million dollar homepage, in my opinion.
In most cases it’s better to piggy back off the success of the incumbent by creating a complimentary product, rather than trying to compete with them. Why try and beat eBay when you can create services to help eBay users (just as many people did – read the eBay book to learn more).
While it’s nice to create a new industry or new product it’s not easy. We all hope that one day we can be like Alex and enjoy the kind of success he has but let’s not forget there was a lot of luck involved too. You always hear the stories of success and not the hundreds of thousands of ideas online like Alex’s that never succeeded – his was a rare case.
If you have an innovative idea for a new business run with it. Give it your best shot and a real chance to succeed. If it doesn’t work out or you just can’t think of an innovative business idea consider using the success of someone else’s concept to start a new business offering support products or services to the customers of the original idea.
When the next truly massive new innovation kicks off – think Google, eBay, iPod – that’s the perfect time to start thinking about what the customers would need that is currently not provided. You don’t always have to be the original innovator to start a successful business.
