I spent $12,000 on a meme

Do not index

There's a website that made $200k in 4 days!

It’s called Outbid, where people bid real money for a spot on the homepage. Whoever bids highest gets featured.

Nothing else, it is that simple. Everyone's been mocking the people paying for it.

Screenshots going around of founders spending thousands just to sit on a homepage for a few hours.

Well…I did it too.

$12,000 for a single placement.

Dumbest ad spend of the year, or the smartest one I've made?

Here’s the math 👇🏼

This mechanic comes back every few years

Outbid.lol isn't a new idea.

The original version was the Million Dollar Homepage, sell pixels on a page, watch people pay absurd prices just because the page itself became the story.

Every few years someone rebuilds it, and a wave of clones follows immediately after.

But almost every clone still fails

Here's what people miss. These are two-sided marketplaces.

They need two things to work:

1 - Buyers willing to pay for placement 2 - Traffic that makes the placement worth paying for

Buyers are easy to find once there's hype. Traffic is nearly impossible to manufacture.

That's why thousands of clones show up every cycle and nearly all of them die within weeks.

They copy the bidding mechanic and completely ignore the traffic problem.

The outrage is the marketing

The public mockery of people spending money on Outbid is exactly what's generating the hype that makes spending money on it worth it.

Every "why would anyone pay for this" post is more free distribution for the platform.

There are currently more than 10,000 tweets about Outbid, and that's exactly why the current bid stands at $17,000 (and probably more by the time you read this)

I also built my own version of this

I love the idea of Outbid, I wanted people to get the same visibility without having to pay for it.

So I built Outlike. Outlike.lol runs on the same core idea, except it's free and uses likes instead of dollars.

750+ products listed

Over 4,000 likes

More than 5k visits, all under 18 hours

These are the basics, now to the juicy part:

So I bid $12,000 on Outbid

There was 1 solid reason we did this:

Because Outbid's visitors are the exact Outrank's actual buyers.

People with a product, actively looking for a way to promote it.

The math (did I even make money?)

Outrank's LTV runs $1,000 to $2,000 depending on how you calculate it.

To justify a $12,000 spend, we needed only 6-12 customers.

Here's how we checked it:

Pulled our baseline for every Friday and Saturday over the previous 8 weeks

Compared that baseline to the two days right after the bid went live

Counted what showed up beyond the normal pattern

50+ new free trials directly attributable to those two days.

At our usual trial-to-paid conversion rate, that's roughly 25 new subscriptions. Even using the conservative end of our LTV range, that is more than the $12k we spent.

This is a win in my books.

What this is actually about

This isn't really a story about Outbid. But we can learn something from it:

When you look past the "this is stupid" reaction everyone else is having, you might just find a way to use it to your advantage.

Reply and tell me 👇🏼

What is the most ridiculous way you have marketed your products?

I read every single email, and often write back :)

Life of an Indie Maker -

Not a new episode, but the rundown of everything crazy that happened in the past week:

Tweet of the week

Really good list, great value here:

Until next week,

Keep building

Tibo 💻

P.S. Outlike.lol is live! Go list your website and create a launch post. Reply to this email with the link, and I will give you a small boost 👇🏼