How Alex Tew went from a viral pixel creator to a $2B mindfulness app mogul

• Alex Tew, the guy behind the Million Dollar Homepage craze, went on to co-found Calm, now a $2B mindfulness app.

• He’s been nailing viral marketing with quirky side hustles like “DoNothingFor2Minutes” to pull in traffic for his projects.

• Even with his $2B mindfulness empire, Alex is still rocking the same viral playbook to take his businesses to the next level.

The "new year, new me" season started. I've found myself scrolling through a bunch of mindfulness and meditation apps on my phone. It felt like a bottomless rabbit hole. The self-care app space is huge! Then I came across a name that was very close to my viral marketing heart — Alex Tew.

If you’ve been around the internet long enough, you might remember him as the guy behind the famous Million Dollar Homepage — a website that sold tiny blocks of pixels as ads for a whooping million dollars. But these days, Alex is best known as the co-founder of Calm, a leading meditation and mental wellness app now worth approximately $2B.

Curious, I gathered everything I had already written on him, and more to explore how he became a mental wellness mogul.

From the beatboxing kid to viral marketing whiz

As a kid in England, Tew was an oddball entrepreneur. At 8, he sold hand-drawn comics for $5, sweetening the deal with chocolate bars.

After high school in 2002, Tew skipped college to dive into beatboxing. Touring as "A-Plus," he started HumanBeatbox.com, the first big online hub for beatboxers. But growth stalled and Tew sold the site.

Tew’s rise to internet stardom began in 2005. At the time, he just become a 21-year-old student at the University of Nottingham. He worried about his student loans and was looking for ways to earn a quick buck. He asked himself "How do I make a million dollars?”.

Tew’s answer to that question dropped on August 26, 2005 — the Million Dollar Homepage. He figured he could sell a 1,000,000-pixel grid on a webpage, divided into 10K blocks of 100 pixels each. Each pixel sold for $1, with a minimum purchase of $100.

In the beginning, Tew marketed it only by word of mouth, relying on friends and family to buy the first 4,700 pixels. But once he made $1K, he reached out to the media. That's how Alex ended up featured in BBC Online, The Daily Telegraph, and others.

By the end of September 2005, Tew had $250K in sales. Thanks to media coverage, he was doing 20-30 interviews a day. By October 26, he’d sold 500,900 pixels to 1,400 customers.

To offload the last 1,000 pixels, Alex put them on eBay. The auction ended on January 11, 2006, with a winning bid of $38,100, pushing total revenue to $1,037,100. In just 138 days, Tew became a 21-year-old internet millionaire.

The post-fame phase of Alex's life

Taxes reduced his million-dollar earnings to around $700K. Alex suddenly got “internet famous,” which he wasn’t ready for. He dropped out after one college quarter and moved to London. What started as a confidence boost turned into chasing attention instead of real value.

“Success can actually be bad, and can teach you the wrong things. I was thinking about ideas that would get attention instead of provide value.”

Between 2006 and 2010, Tew launched a few bigger projects like Pixelotto and OneMillionPeople (both direct copy-paste versions of the Million Dollar Homepage), trying to replicate its success — but failed.

But there was at least one little success in the meantime. On December 14, 2008, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoe at George W. Bush during a press conference — instantly becoming global headline news. Tew spotted the “purple cow”: a moment so bizarre that it begged for a meme.

Within three hours of the broadcast, Tew created the viral flash game ‘Sock and Awe.

On December 15, he registered sockandawe.com and uploaded the game. It asked players to throw a virtual shoe at a caricature of George W. Bush, showing the total number of shoes thrown worldwide.

Media went wild about it. By December 17, the game had been played 1.4M times. Two days later, Tew sold Sock and Awe for £5,215 (about $8,000) to a company called Fubra. By December 20, the site had racked up 9 million unique visitors and collected 120K email addresses. That email list later helped launch PopJam (social media meme sharing site) with 100K users in its first week.

Unfortunately for Alex, nothing caught on like before. Stress caught up with him — he wasn’t sleeping or eating well, and he later admitted his mental health had tanked. This pushed him back to meditation, a practice he’d picked up at 14.

In January 2011, Alex struck again with a playful concept: DoNothingFor2Minutes.com. A single-page site featured a peaceful sunset, wave sounds, and a countdown timer for two minutes. If you moved your mouse or touched your keyboard, you “failed.” Over the next 10 days, traffic soared to 2 million visits.

This site was the precursor to Calm. It tapped into Tew’s fascination with mindfulness, simplicity, and relaxation. Interestingly, in mid-2020 DoNothingFor2Minutes still got over 120k monthly visitors. Since Calm launched, the DoNothingFor2Minutes site has been driving a ton of traffic to the app every month.

While Alex’s smaller projects proved the power of small, viral side projects, his biggest impact (and arguably his legacy) is Calm, the meditation app launched in 2012 with $1.5M in initial funding. Originally just a website, Tew and co-founder Michael Acton Smith recognized the potential of mobile apps and quickly pivoted.

In 2014, Tew struck another viral hit during a marketing hackathon at Calm, where they brainstormed ways to get new users. The result? Checky, an app that tracked how many times you checked your phone each day. Launched in July 2014, it got over 650K downloads in the first month, funneling 50K new Calm downloads.

Today, Calm is valued at $2B, has tens of millions of users, multiple brand partnerships, and a reputation for being one of the top mindfulness apps worldwide. On top of that, Alex is still using his real-time marketing viral framework to make people talk about the app. Have a look at how they used the election day to strategically place their ads.

Alex's recipe for his MVP (Minimum Viral Product)

1. Jump on current trends, memes, and zeitgeist.

2. Get creative. Start tossing around wild ideas and ask yourself some crazy questions. The Million Dollar Homepage idea came from a simple question: ‘How can I become a millionaire in two weeks?"

3. Build something more viral than your actual product. Keep it related, but add an out-of-the-box, absurd twist — it’s the best way to go viral.

4. Don’t spend more than two days building it.

5. Promote it on social media, reach out to journalists, and leverage influencer marketing.

6. Redirect people to your main product or gather their emails for later.

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