I’m Pushing 60 and Building a Billion Dollar Homepage

I’m pushing 60, I’m a sole founder, and apparently I still haven’t learnt to leave ridiculous internet ideas alone.

That’s pretty much how Billion Dollar Homepage started.

I remember the original Million Dollar Homepage from 2005. Alex Tew had an absurdly simple idea: create a 1,000 x 1,000 pixel homepage and sell the pixels for $1 each.

It shouldn’t have worked.

It did.

Twenty years later, I started wondering what that idea might look like if it were built for today’s internet.

I didn’t want to just recreate it. The interesting bit wasn’t really the pixels. It was the underlying mechanics: scarcity, curiosity, social proof, competition and attention.

So I changed one important thing.

You can lose your pixels.

Billion Dollar Homepage is a 1,000 x 1,000 pixel canvas divided into 10 x 10 blocks.

Pixels start at $1 each, so the minimum 10 x 10 block costs $100.

You choose your space, upload your creative, add your URL and your advert goes live.

Then the fun starts.

Someone else can take your space by paying 5% more than its current value.

Want it back?

Outbid them.

That turns a static advertising page into a live marketplace where the homepage can continually change.

Every transaction adds to the story.

Why would anyone buy pixels in 2026?

For the same reason brands spend fortunes sponsoring odd things, putting logos on racing cars or buying billboards in Times Square.

Attention.

Not every bit of marketing needs to fit neatly inside a spreadsheet.

Sometimes being somewhere unusual, early or slightly ridiculous is exactly why people notice you.

And unlike an impression that disappears in half a second, you’re buying an actual piece of internet real estate that sits there until somebody wants it badly enough to take it from you.

There’s another experiment happening behind the scenes too.

I’ve been building businesses on the internet for a long time, but the tools available to a solo founder today are extraordinary.

AI helps me research, code, troubleshoot, write and think. Supabase handles infrastructure. Stripe handles payments. Resend handles email. Hendrix, my Hermes AI agent, helps me keep the wheels turning.

There isn’t a big team behind Billion Dollar Homepage.

It’s basically me, a collection of very good tools and probably too many cups of tea.

That’s part of what I want to explore with this project.

How far can one person go now?

Can a bloke pushing 60 take a 21-year-old internet idea, change one mechanic and turn it into something people want to play with again?

I genuinely don’t know.

That’s why I built it.

Worst case, it becomes a wonderfully strange corner of the internet.

Best case?

Well...

There are a billion dollars in the name for a reason.