Alex Tew, is a 21 years entrepreneurial geneous. When faced with the fees associated with going to Uni in England, Alex thought he’d try and make some money – $1million to be exact. By the time you read this post Alex will have grown richer by almost $1,500.
And if that makes you feel a little jelous think about how his feelow uni students at Nottingham University will feel when they learn that each week Alex makes more than $150,000.
“The student’s rags-to-riches story begins on a balmy night in August at Alex’s parents’ home near Cirencester in Wiltshire. It was late and he was contemplating the consequences of finally agreeing to go to university after three years of hopping from lousy job to crazy idea and back again. Alex had been accepted on a business management course at Nottingham (he has nine GCSEs and three A-levels at good grades) but fees and accommodation for the first year alone came to $11,500.
‘To put it bluntly, I was broke and dreading the prospect of running up huge debts as a student’, he says. We are in the students’ union bar at the university and Alex is drinking a Coke. He is a fresh-faced, spiky-haired live wire — nothing like the geek I had expected, the kid whose simple idea has set the internet community alight.
‘I’ve always been an ideas sort of person and I like to brainstorm at night before I go to sleep — it’s my most productive time. So I wrote down ‘How can I become a millionaire before I go to university?’ It was a rather ambitious question, but I went with it.’
‘Then I wrote down the attributes that this idea would need: it had to be simple to understand and to set up; it had to attract a lot of media interest; and it needed a good name. After I wrote down those three things, the idea just popped into my head. I’d like to say it was more dramatic than that, but it wasn’t.’
His thought processes went something like this: what if he set up a website called the Million Dollar Homepage which contained exactly one million pixels (the tiny dots that make up an image on a screen)? What if he then used that page as, in effect, an advertising noticeboard where advertisers — mainly from the US — could buy space at $1 (60p) per pixel?
What if, when you clicked on the group of pixels bought by an advertiser, you were directed to that advertiser’s homepage? And what if you told potential buyers that this is the first page of its kind, that it’s going to become incredibly famous — and that a young British student will be able to go to university as a result of your generosity? ‘I went to sleep and when I woke up I still thought it was a good idea,’ Alex recalls. ‘So over the next few days I set up the website and off it went.
The Million Dollar Homepage captured the imagination of advertisers and has now spawned dozens of copycat sites that will undoubtedly do nowhere near as well as Alex’s. The reason for that is simple: the selling point of his page is that it was the first. In the first four weeks alone, Alex sold more than 300,000 pixels at $1 each.
He sold his first blocks of 100 pixels (the minimum number the eye can read) to his three brothers and some friends. Once sales had topped $1,000, he used the money to pay for a press release that was picked up by the BBC. This, is turn, “went viral” across the internet as person after person e-mailed it to friends around the world.
‘It is brilliant in its simplicity,’ says Professor Martin Binks, director of the Nottingham University Institute for Entrepreneurial Innovation. “I think advertisers have been attracted to it by its novelty and by the curiosity factor. Those that are buying space have realised that the site has become a phenomenon and people are flocking to have a look at it; that makes the advertising good value for money.’(The Times October 14, 2005)
The amount of press this Alex has received is astonishing. Check it his press role here.
